Manatees Roar into the 20s! CLOSED (Page 34)

I'm really sorry to hear this. I'm glad that you at least got to the bottom of things.

I think that I've mentioned that my mom has been on chemo.  Her doctor has her on Flinstones brand children's vitamins with iron. Apparently this type is very well tolerated. Just something to keep in mind.

Not "nuclear" here either.

Take care Anne and Karen and any other Manatees that are under the weather.

I've used various training calendar systems. 

• For many years, I worked with a coach who emailed me a two week plan and after two weeks, she'd send me another plan. I put the plan into Google Calendar to see it.
• Then I worked with someone who used Training Peaks. She'd put the workouts on the Training Peaks calendar and when I did them, they'd sync up.
• Now I work with Endurance Nation and you load your won plan onto a Final Surge calendar.  You do the workout and they sync up.

I still keep a Google Calendar because in those early days, I had trained my husband to look at it.  Also, that's the easiest way for me to see how my training life matches up with the rest of my life.

Also, don't forget that The Sufferfest has it's own calendar. If you decided to use one of their training plans, that would be a solution.

My anecdotal observation is this has been a worse-than-usual flu year.  Sorry to hear your family got hit, hoping you are all recovered or on the road to recovery.  Take care.

I'm old school I suppose and make my training plans in Excel. Then I can graph my volume to make sure everything adds up how I want it to. Here's a few screen shots:

Well...I got my first taste of Trail Running/Ultra Running this weekend.  I had two running friends in the Ultra race in addition to my brother.  I felt bad hitting up all out friends to Pace my brother because I figured that would leave no one to pace either of them.  My brother banged up his knee at about mile 30 and then pulled out of the race at mile 53.  So...the three pacers that we had lined up for my brother took over pacing for my other two friends that were in the race.  Two guys jumped in with Dusty who didn't have any pacers.  I jumped in with Marcus, who I didn't think had any pacers.  He said that he was going to run another loop (20 miles) with another guy.  I assumed the other guy was another racer who was at about his speed but figured out pretty soon that he was a pacer who was doing 40 miles with Marcus.  I only paced with them for 2-1/2 hours but learned a lot from pacing with a premiere pacer.  When I left them at 4:30 AM they had about a 3-1/3 to 4-hour segment ahead of them and they were going to try to get back by 8:00 AM so that John, the pacer, could do the half marathon at 8:00 AM the next morning.  Marcs was the course record hold going into the event.  He was in second place when I left them.  I saw his finish time but didn't look up the race results to see how everyone did.  So...back to Triathlon training now.  :-)  I only ran about 2 miles a day last week. 

Jason, here's a link to my training plan calendar.  I use the training plan calendar in BT because it is there and it is easy to figure out.  It is in the Training Log drop-down menu, 3rd one down, right under My Training Log.  I have the BT app on my phone, so I can access it ahead of time and pack my gym bag accordingly.  As I have said before, it is very important for me to have a plan ahead of time.  I cannot trust myself to simply show up and do whatever comes to mind.

I create my own plan each month based on what I hope to be able to do.  The fact that I am retired, with very few responsibilities, means that I can pretty much schedule whatever/whenever I want.  So I set myself up on a Mon-Fri schedule at the YMCA.  As you can see, I set up my schedule with at least 48 hrs between similar workouts, to allow my body to recover from this punishment.

I know that I am going against the accepted wisdom by training my favorite discipline 3x a week while everything else is only 2x.  My brother, Jack,  just reminded me this week that I am the one who told him to emphasize his greatest weakness, not his greatest strength.  And I will place more emphasis on the bike and run legs once I can train outside.  But initially I felt it was important for me to emphasize the swim so the success there would provide enthusiasm for the others.

I felt the most important thing for me to do, since I have been so sedentary for so long, was to establish a consistent workout ethic and build a basic aerobic base.  If you scroll back and look at my December and January planning calendars you will see that I started with 30m & 45m workouts and only increased them by 5m each week.  Thus it took me 10 weeks to work up to the 60m workouts I complete.  Now my times will stay the same (at least thru March) as I focus on increasing my intensity and the distances accomplished in those times.  After March, I would like to design a plan with that nice progressive curve you see in Lisa's post.

As for breaking the 2:30 barrier, may I suggest that you stop trying?  Switch it up and focus on shorter speed sets instead.  If you are early in your swim training (and it sounds like you are) try doing something like 10(or 20)x25 on 45s, the quicker you get to the other end the more rest you have.  Slower means less rest, but be strict about that 45s limit.  You can also do 5(or 10)x50 on 1:15.  If you opt for the 10x50 do them on 1:30.  Those will give you either a 250yd or 500 yd workout, perfect for a short lunch-time swim.  And don't be in any hurry to get rid of speed sets.  When you can do the 10x25 all under 45s, then step up to the 20x25 in 45s.  Keep working these speed sets until you can do the 20x25's on 35s or even 30s flat.  For the 10x50 set work toward 1:10, or even 1:00

Wow!  That is a beautifully progressive curve.  I hope to make my plan look like that after March, except mine will only be 2:1.  I have to see if I can teach myself how to do that spreadsheet.  I'm going to assume that the left axis is HOURS.  It doesn't look like it would work for minutes.  Do you input your plan in even-hour  increments or do you input in decimals?  For instance, Week 1, is that an even 2 hours of running or is it something like 2.1 or 2.2?

Yes left axis is hours , right axis is weeks.

Everything is decimals for time. For my workouts that aren't time based, I have formulas to calculate my time in minutes based on my sport averages (bike = mph, run = minutes per mile, swim = minutes per 100 yd), then I divide the minutes by 60 to get the number in hours. In the other screenshot you can see the numbers in hours that the formula spit out - that's what I used to make the pretty graph.

I will admit it took more math than I'm comfortable with, but I've been tweaking this sort of spreadsheet for 3 or 4 years and now have it how I want it. 

Dropped the bikes off at my LBS this morning for their spring tune-ups.  They should be ready by March 1st, and I SHOULD be able to start riding outside about then.

My Not-So-Frozen Foot 5K went pretty well yesterday, I beat my own personal record for the course (although take that with a grain of salt, they change the route like most people change underwear, not sure why they keep mucking with it).  My goal for next race is to get below the number I was ohsoclose to.  My husband snagged 1st AG, although oddly there were only 4 in his group, one would expect a lot more.  I managed 4/17 AG, 15 seconds off 3rd place.  I think this is the highest I've ever ranked in this race.  Looking forward to March and race #3 in the series!

">HERE is Marcus' Facebook Post.  I made the feed as a Pacer.  Wahoo!  When I do my Ultra I am going to be contacting John to be my pacer though.  He was the real deal.  I was just the Rookie in Training.