The Road to a Better Year

Hey guys,

Sorry I haven't written a blog recently. I've been really busy lately, going around working and biking and training, you know, the typical triathlete lifestyle. Over the past few days, I've been experiencing some pain and have been really thinking about my current race season. I had an OK race a few weekends ago, but my run really made me suffer and I've been looking into new ways to train the run and stay injury free. For me, right now, staying injury free is the number one priority. With my long list of injuries finally starting to show progress, I need to keep those areas and all other areas strong and well-equipped to stay in contention for next year. So to avoid overuse injuries from running, I'm going to go from longer distance running weeks to smaller long runs and more speedwork. I've had a good amount of people tell me that a way to success in the run is to do less mileage but more speed training. I'm going to do my best to adapt to this new type of training for my running, due to my run being the weakest sport in the triathlon. So, what I'm thinking is to do 2 days per week on hard speedwork sets, usually on a track and doing repeated hard intervals. Another 2 days of that same week will involve tempo runs that are typically run coming off of a bike ride for a brick workout that just give me some speed off the ride. The one day remaining that won't be a rest day will be my "long" run day, probably just around 45 or 50 minutes. So that's my new plan for the run, but I need to get back in the water somewhat soon. My scapula is still under repair so to say, and so I haven't been able to swim in quite a long time, around 3 months, and I can tell that my swim strength is really nothing right now. Regardless, the bike is definitely becoming my strength. I'm getting a lot of good, quality miles in and I'm getting pretty consistent. All this I'm taking into account to build into next year.

Deep down, I'm a pretty fat kid. I love to eat hot dogs, burgers, cake, cookies, really anything fattening with a lot of sugar in it. So as a new initiative, I'm implementing a nutrition plan for the next year and a half. To build through to be better next year, I'm hoping to lean up and lose about twenty pounds from my current body frame right now. To get that lean I'm going to focus on a almost completely organic/vegetarian type diet, consuming mostly fruits, vegetables, and lean meal options. This is definitely going to be presented on this blog a lot more in the future, as I gain experience with the whole diet thing. Today I've started the nutrition quest, and I'll do my best to describe how this whole thing goes. So I'll keep you updated, and I'll do my best to stay dedicated to this whole thing. Let me know if you have any suggestions for my nutrition or run plan to help improve them, and I'll reply to you all. Thanks guys!

Happy training!