First off is that I have migrated over to a new WordPress host this week. I kept running into things that I wanted to do that I could not with the free WordPress.com hosting, so I moved over to a custom hosting site. Migration was pretty seamless. I just have to tweak a few things.
This past week was a recovery week, which when following a periodization training schedule is every 3rd or 4th week you decrease your training volume by about 10% in order to let your body recover a bit. Well after the training camp last weekend which topped me out at 17 hours of training, I really needed it. The most weekly volume I do in an entire half-Ironman training season is around 13 hours, so 17 is more typical of a full Ironman distance training week. Despite the decreased volume, the week felt very tough. Every thing I did seemed to be a bit of a struggle. My coach said that that is typical and is my body trying to recuperate a bit. My fear was that my plant-based diet was a factor, so we shall see how next week is. My wife was having a good time posting the picture to the left of me “recovering” on the sofa on Sunday afternoon while watching the tour, so I thought I would share the fun here. She posted it on Facebook and didn’t tell me about it. Everyone seemed to get a kick out of it. I had gotten out early for my long run on Sunday to beat the heat, but it was still hot.
The graph above shows my weekly training volumes for the year. You can see the large spike of the training volume compared to my other weeks. Hopefully this will payoff a bit later on, with proper recovery. The graph below shows the Training Impulse or TRIMP, which uses your heart rate and duration of training to indicate the effects of your training. The area in blue is the CTL or Chronic Training Load, which indicates the level of fitness based on your workouts. The goal is to gradually increase your CTL over your training season so that you are peaked for your ‘”A” race that season. The red line indicates ATL or Acute Training Load, which indicates the amount of fatigue you are incurring through your training. Overextending yourself too much will cause this to spike and recovery time brings this down. The idea here is to minimize the ATL while gradually increasing your CTL. TSS or Training Stress Balance is the difference between CTL and ATL and is a bit redundant here. For a detailed explanation of TRIMP and its calculations you can check out this article over on Training Peaks.
The TRIMP graph above shows how the monster week really pushed the fatigue levels(ATL) sky high. It has started to come down a bit while the CTL(fitness) levels are holding fairly steady. Hopefully I can build on this while bringing the ATL back. The next 3 weeks will build up to the Ironman Lake Placid weekend and then another recovery week the week after that. I hope to get in some good long workouts in Lake Placid on Ironman weekend.
One of the features I could not do on the old WordPress hosting was embedding my Garmin workouts from Garmin Connect. So I thought I would give that a shot here.
