Sprint 2 weeks after Olympic....training plan ideas?

Well I did a Olympic this past sunday and have a Sprint this coming sunday.  I would have liked to take a day or two off, but i don't have that luxury.  Here is what i am doing this week:

 Tuesday - 5 mile run 1.5 Min a mile above race
Wed - Open water swim
Thursday - Bike ride - 30-35 miles fast
Friday- recovery ride - 21 miles easy (maybe and easy 1 mile run after)
Saturday - Light 1-2mile run (very very easy)

Looking at your logs and depending how you feel, just listen to your body, if you are sore or feel fatigued now then scale back another day or so.   But at the very minimum I would try to get in the same amount of workouts you did the week of 8/31 completed with in the next two weeks at a minimum, of course more if you feel good.

Depending on how badly you abused your body, which will be largely a factor of

a) how hard you went relative to your fitness, and

b) how much of a fitness base you had...

You will need to

1) recover from the oly fully, and

2) "taper" to show up with fresh legs to the sprint.

You won't make fitness gains between now and the sprint that will show up in the race.  The physiological adaptation to training stress/recovery takes longer than that.  So if your primary goal is to have the best sprint possible, your strategy now should not involve trying to make any fitness gains, but rather to try to stay fast and fresh for the race.

In my opinion that involves a healthy dose of shorter and faster workouts.  Fast enough that you feel awesomely fast when doing them, but short enough that you don't get all that fatigued by doing the workouts.  And when I say fast I don't mean all out sprint repeats on the track... I mean race pace or just slightly faster, but at a volume of about 50% of where you've been training.

It would also be a good time to practice free speed techniques based on any mental lessons you took away from your olympic race.  Could you make your transitions more efficient somehow?  Is there something wrong with your swim technique (not fitness) that an expert could identify and help you fix with immediate results?  Can you develop a more efficient pacing strategy for the race (lots of folks give too much on the bike and then have not enough on the run... whereas if you hold back on the bike you'll usually more than make up that time on the run).

Hope that helps.

Josh

You just completed an Oly - you are already there for a sprint.  The first week should be about recovery (this depends on what you need), spinning and slow z1/z2 runs in moderatiuon just to get blood circulating in your legs and work out the stiffness.  Week 2 shoud really be a taper week, again with spinning and slower runs.  I would think, if your body is up to it (only you can say), you could do some short intense rides/runs in some combination on Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Monday. 

Looking at you last race results, something you might want to think about is practicing your transitions.  You had almosy 6 minutes in the transition area.  Doesn't make a huge difference in an Oly, but that is forever in a sprint.  I know it feels kind of weird to practice transition in the open (as the people that can see you say - what is *that* freak doing), but you don't get the opportunity to do transitions often and the practice will get you "free speed".  Consider this.  You spent 5:48 in transition for your Oly.  If you trim 1 minute of of each split - you gain 2 minutes.  On a 3 mile run course - that gets you 40 seconds per mile.  Do you think any workout you are going to do in a two week time period is going to give you a 40 second per mile run improvement?  Prolly not. 

Looking at last years results, those two minutes would increase your age group standing by 5 places.  Just a thought for you to consider.