As things have
turned out, the main goal for the winter season training will be for Boston
Marathon, taking place April 16th 2018. That is 20 weeks from today,
and that makes today the day when my official training program starts for the
winter. I do have the intent to also do some triathlon competitions as well in
2018 – most importantly the 2018 Iron Man 70.3 World Championships in South
Africa in September. This means that I will keep up in some form or shape the
training in swimming and biking during the winter to not loose too much
capacity in these areas. Last year I used winter to mainly build up my biking
strength and work on my swimming, while maintaining a steady run program. As I
will have a slightly different focus for the early season with the marathon
being clearly an A-race, I will make some adjustments in the set-up.
Training program and new shoes to start off good!
Last winter
my base week training had nine sessions – three runs, three swimming and three
bike sessions. The program I will follow requires more running, so the overall
plan right now is to do four or five runs per week, and keep two bike and swim
sessions, keeping overall volume the same as last year (ten to twelve hours per
week during high volume weeks). The good thing is that the Boston Marathon is
fairly early in the season, which means that I can already early April start
tapering down the running volumes and start increasing the bike training. It
will be interesting to see how this shift will play out in my strengths and
weaknesses in triathlon, I have so far been fairly equal in all three
disciplies. In the end, I do believe that running is the key strength you need
in triathlon – be a good and strong runner and you can make up tremendous
amount of time and placements as other competitors fade late in the triathlon
runs, especially on the longer distances. With that in mind, I think that the
tough marathon program will help out in my triathlon development later during
the season.
