Off season

When I first started all of this triathlon training madness, I didn’t understand those athletes who didn’t want to stop training/take some time off. I loved the off-season and embraced it whole-heartedly. Lay on the couch instead of training in cold/wet weather? You betcha! I’m your girl. Eventually, I learned to not stop training altogether in the off season, as starting from scratch in the spring was a real pain in the ass (and the legs and the arms… ) so I would just scale it way back, but I still had no problem with that. This year, I finally understand my Type-A brethren, as I’m now totally paranoid about losing all of the hard-won fitness I’ve gained this year and feeling lost without having training that I should be doing.

So now I’m trying to come up with an off-season plan. Something that’s unstructured enough to avoid burning out (a very big possibility for me) but still can yield some results. I really need to improve my run, so that’s first on the list. I’m thinking that I’ll casually train for the Seattle half marathon at the end of November and then do a February Marathon with M (and possibly T, if he can stay uninjured.) I’m very much looking forward to marathon training with M & T – it will be a nice change of pace from all of the solo long run training I did for Ironman. Plus, it will help me build a humongous run base, which will help me greatly when I do start up tri-training later in the spring.

Thrown into the mix will be some swimming, some Pilates/Yoga classes and going back to weights/the gym, once the weather starts getting crappy again, (pretty much any day now… ) The biggest challenge of course will be to stop eating like I’m training for Ironman, which is going to be tough. So, you can look forward to lots of blogging about running with some dog stories thrown in here and there to spice things up. Viva la off-season!