An overview of the plan
The plan will incorporate an early base-building period this fall, designed to increase your aerobic capacity and increase your body’s ability to produce power later. This is perhaps the most important phase in training. This is the foundation you’ll build on later. These training sessions are easy to moderate paced only—it’s very important to keep them this way to gain the proper training objective.
Then, sometime around Christmas, we’ll begin to build power and speed on this foundation. In this phase, we will do harder, powerful workouts. The overall volume will be less, but believe me, you’ll still be tired. In this phase, the recovery, or easy workout between the hard ones really needs to be easy. We will include more bricks, or combined bike-run workouts. The biggest mistake you can make here is to go too hard on the easy days and too easy on the hard days.
Lastly, we’ll get into the racing season in March and April. This is when you can easily overdo the training and get chronically fatigued. I can’t stress enough rest here. The workouts will include shorter, race paced bricks and shorter, harder efforts nearing race pace. Race hard, but rest harder.
