Reset Button

For the last few months I've just been farting around, training wise.  Doing something almost every day, but not a lot of anything.  Funny how that proverbial change of the calendar year causes a change, and now I'm pushing the reset button and getting on with things.

Doing a mid-November Ironman means I have a looooong time until race day.  Too long to start "Ironman training" now, but as far as I'm concerned training for the season is now underway.  It's a challenge to make sure I'm doing enough to improve my fitness, but not too much to burn out before the next ten and a half months go by.

Figuring out what to do is of course partly designated to my coach, but I feel like I need to take some personal responsibility as well.  My goals are all mine, and thinking back to IMAZ 2010, it was pretty easy to come up with some.  Maintain swim.  Improve bike a bit - although I was pretty happy with my time that day, especially given the windy conditions.  Improve run A LOT.

I am pretty disappointed that I didn't improve my run that much over the past year.  I don't really feel like I'm running much faster, but I feel like there's improvement bubbling just under the surface.  Hopefully it will well upwards by spring - especially since I've signed up for the Oak Bay half marathon in May.

A portion of the Ironman marathon I was actually running ok.
Working towards more of that for 2012.

Given that, my training for the next little while will focus on the run.  I need to tell myself - and you have to picture this in Dory's voice from Finding Nemo: "Just keep running, just keep running...".  If I keep running, I know improvement will come.

For the next six weeks, I have a general training framework that I hope will reset me from the goofing-around stage to base-building.  It involves running 4x/week up to 90 mins for my "long" run, power walking 1x/week on the treadmill - coach Kiki wants me to get my walking speed up for those inevitable walk breaks during the IM marathon (hopefully fewer this time), plus riding, swimming, and weights/core only twice a week right now.  I am reminding myself that there's lots of time to build for the bike, and while it's rain rain rain outside is not the time.

Tonight's agenda has a conversation with coach Kiki... I know she'll have some ideas to challenge me, and others to reassure me.  That's basically what she does in a nutshell.

For now - just keep running, just keep running...