A Note From Coach Dave

Build Phase II - Happy New Year - Congratulations!


Greetings Ironteam,

Happy New Year and thank you for your awesome commitment to the cause and to your health. It always amazes us as coaches when we get to see each of you grow as an athlete and a person throughout the season!

Attached you will find the next phase of the training schedule. Here are a few notes to go along with it:

Ø Brick Workouts – We will begin to start doing OYO and some mentor/captain led brick workouts from time to time. You will always see the work “brick” after the date if that workout is intended to be done as a brick. What’s a brick? Glad you asked. A brick is a workout where more than one sport is involved and the transition between each activity is rather fast. No long shower, big meal or baseball game on the boob tube between sports. In a Bike/Run brick you will get off the bike, slip out of your bike shoes and into your running shoes, grab a little run hydration and hit the road.

Ø Two-a-day Workouts – Often you will see two workouts on the same day. If it does not say “brick” then it is intended that you rest and recover for at least 40 minutes between activities. The best way to split these days up is pick one for the evening and one for the morning. There is no set rule that says you have to do the one listed first in that order, just try to get both in during the day sometime.

Ø Color coded calendar. Some people are visual people and like pretty colors. If you are one of those people, you are in luck. Bike workouts are Purple. Run workouts are Red, Swim workouts are Green and strength/core workouts are Blue. With one glance you can see what your week looks like in Technicolor.

Ø Periodization Hours – Another visual guide is now provided on the far left side of every week. In the colored box you will see totals for each sports and a weekly tally of total training hours. These are estimates, not set in stone. They are a way to show you the progression you will be having in your training as we go through the process of three week builds with one week rest in between. Sometimes the hours will look a little funky because the calendar is running Sunday to Saturday and we have long workouts on the weekends. If there is a race included in that week there are very generic estimates for time in each sport. These are not benchmarks you must hit, simply estimates to help understand how we coaches designed your training loads that week. Keep in mind that our totals include the time you are doing strength and core work so you really are not swim/bike/run-ing for all of those total hours at the end of the week. If this representation of the training load works for you, great. If not, you can ignore it and still train just as well.

Ø The schedule is now represented as one month per page, not a mixture of months on the same page.

Ø The schedule document will have other useful tabs on it too like marker set route sheets, run workout reminders and other handy notes to help answer questions about the schedule.

Ø There is a tab on the schedule document that has some important dates you will want to mark on your calendar. As the season progresses, there may be a change or two to those dates but for now they are accurate. Half-way to Iron weekend works best if you take a vacation day on Friday so you might need to get that on your employers radar now. (Friday 3/20).

If you have further questions about the training schedule please check with your mentor first, then contact Dave if you need further clarification.

Once again, thanks for your re-commitment. Ironman here we come!

Your Coaches, Wayne, Dave, Nancy & Alex.