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The In-Season starts when the weather and your life says it should. That said, it's very important that you choose early-season races commensurate with your training time available during the Out-Season. In other words, don’t choose to race an IM in April or May if you live in climate that keeps you on the trainer November through March.
It’s helpful to break the In-Season into two phases:
Quality Trumps Quantity!
You will get to ride longer as your season progresses, but we still demand hard work and keep the sessions shorter than your local tri-geeks will like. Don't do volume for the sake of volume—why waste the time? Time efficiency and ROI, always.
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General Preparation
Here we continue to build “fast” while integrating “far” in a manner that is manageable and sustainable week after week. The volume of your long bike and run sessions is determined by answering the question “What can I do, week after week, and continue to enjoy myself and keep my family/wife/boss happy?” This is important, as we want to conserve those as you don’t want to burn up all the Spousal Approval Units (SAUs) for later in the season you’ll most definitely need later! Continue to address body composition, flexibility and core strength—your goal is to do all your homework now so you can enter the race preparation phase ready to rock and roll.
Race Preparation
We'd like you to think of race prep as beginning with the "It’s On!” day. This is the day on the calendar that marks the Transition from training to train to training to race. It’s time to awaken from your mental relaxation about training and get serious. You've finished all of your homework: you're at your goal training weight, you've had your bike fit addressed, you've taken care of any nagging injuries, etc. You've prepared your family for the shift in your focus, which we only ask you to keep for 7-11 weeks. Hopefully you’ve placed some epic training weekends on the family schedule for June or July and have been diligently racking up the SAUs for months and months. Time to cash them in.
But wait—there's no need to go crazy. On a week-to-week basis, you're only going to ask for about an additional two hours of training—manifested as an extra hour tacked on to the weekend rides. Everything else stays the same and we use the epic training weekends to really boost your fitness in small but effective and time-efficient chunks. Some points to consider:
| • | Positional and nutritional fitness. What you consider to be "race-specific" fitness, we prefer to think of as positional and nutritional fitness. That is, the ability to ride at your race pace and fuel yourself in the position you'll use on race day. This is a must for a successful race day and so, in race prep, the road bike gets put away and we lock ourselves into the aerobars as much as we can on every ride. Rich likes to purposely strain his neck and lower back by forcing himself to look far up the road, even using training sunglasses with a thick frame that he has to look over or under. |
| • | Big weekend/week training. We're not 100% against big miles, low-intensity work. There is a time and a place for it. However, how you use this focused volume is largely a function of your race day goals. We offer some basic guidelines on how to implement this work into your season. |
| • | Race rehearsals. These are critical parts of your race prep, as the work you have been doing during the year has made you into a lean, mean, racing machine. And that's not who you need to be on race day. These rides are the only time of your season that you want to emulate Waiting Walt; steady, smooth, and well-paced as you ride well and prep for the run. You can learn more about our Race Rehearsal Protocol in the EN Library.
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A Word About Recovery...
Why so few days off? Why recovery days instead of weeks? Remember, at EN we believe that the "need" for days off is a function of poor scheduling. With an effective training plan, you should be able to recover within each week rather than a long recovery week—thereby maximizing your training time. See The Five Keys of Long-Course Training for more details on this philosophy.
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