New Year check-in

So I said I wouldn’t drop off the face of the earth, but was reminded by some loving relatives over Christmas that they had no idea what I was up to since I hadn’t written for a while. J So below I will outline some of the changes I have made to my training and the shenanigans I have been up to for the past couple of months.

A couple of the big changes that I have made with my training are that I am using a power meter, and I am logging my training. These are two things that I have been told over and over to do but for one reason or another did not. I cannot say I am in love with the power meter, mostly because when it fails to calibrate (which happens at least once a week) I tell myself how useless technology is and get frustrated with it. However, I am persisting and will see how this benefits (or doesn’t benefit) my training in the long run. It is interesting to note that even when I don’t look at my watch I am very accurate with gauging what watts I am at. Logging my training is something that I have generally been on/off with, because I never found a place that was a)free and b)easy to use, in order to log my training (and found that it took too much time- I have little patience). However, with some searching I did find a site called triblogs.com that is fantastic, and using the basic version is free. It allows me to put in a variety of different types of training (actually a very extensive list), totals things up (time, distance) by sport and overall, and can produce graphs and such. I am finding it very useful and it gives a good eye-opener as to how much training I can handle and is easier to put some structure to what I am doing.

I was at a training camp (at our pool in Waterloo, nothing too exciting) with the varsity swim team over the Christmas break and it was a ton of fun. Although only a week long it has been great to put an extra focus on swimming for a bit and be with such an amazing group. I am working on changing my stroke at the moment to have a deeper catch (so the opposite of the ‘high-elbow catch’ –which is what a lot of people tout as the best way to swim). It takes more effort (likely because it is not natural to me), but when done properly is definitely faster. So i’m having fun working on that J

deep catch

high elbow catch

And I am (once again) on the slow progression to getting back into running. I started last week and will be trying a slightly different approach than before, since I will not be racing for a while. The plan is to only do easy running for 6-8 weeks to build up leg strength before adding in any interval work. This is in addition to adding a lower-body strength program to my training so as to hopefully have the muscles absorb the impact of my running rather than it being transferred to the bones.

The plan for racing in 2015 is to focus on the Olympic distance (non-drafting races) for at least the first half of the season, hopefully getting my legs used to the idea of running hard without breaking on me. Ultimately I want to be racing at the half-ironman distance, and with the developments in the Challenge series it looks like it is going to provide some great opportunities.

So I just have four months left of university before I get the most expensive sheet of paper ever, and then it’s full-time triathlete life!!!!!!!!!!! :D