It’s time to get serious about training for St. George 70.3.

Training Plan & Endurance Nation

I bought a training plan from my friends at Endurance Nation. Thanks, Rich! You rock. Endurance Nation is a great online community for endurance athletes across the country. Coach Rich is local to SoCal. He’s the founder for the Pasadena Triathlon Club. I met him years ago through PTC. I remember the first PTC meeting was at Maranatha High School, upstairs on the Ambassador Campus. The first event I remember with him, I went to a swim clinic which he hosted at the El Monte Aquatic Center.  It was great. But, I was not in shape at the time. I was suffering to make it a few hundred yards. Now, I can do laps in my sleep.

So, when I asked Rich which plan I should get and he recommended the Intermediate plan, I bought the Intermediate 12 week plan. Kinda stoked I’m not a beginner anymore. Last time I bought a plan was a newbie.

Training Peaks

Then, I started copying and pasting the workouts into Training Peaks. I hadn’t been on trainingpeaks.com for years. It was so ugly last time. Thankfully, it looks so much better now. So what, I’m a little design snobby on website design. I was actually impressed that they moved ahead in their design.

As I copied the workouts from EN Plan into TP workouts, I thought to myself, “How in the heck am I going to fit all these hours into my real life? Yikes!” The answer lies in priorities and streamlining.

Coach Rich has a great mantra that you have to fit triathlon into the box, which is your real life, which is constrained by wife, kids, job, commute, and eating and sleep, then training. He says strip out the Warm Ups and Cool Downs, focus on the Main Sets. Fortunately, I’m at 16 weeks until SG70.3. So, I have a couple weeks to settle into the program. For now, I’m planning on putting every workout into the calendar in TP, which can sync with my calendar.

The EN plan is great because it gives a Main Set as the meat of the workout. There’s Warm ups and Cool downs, but who’s got time for that? I also like the coaching notes. During the first week there is a threshold test on the bike, a TT test in the pool and a 5k test for the run. Benchmarks to start from. That’s what I like about training peaks it carries over more data than Strava, (I still think you’re prettier, Strava.) Training peaks also handles planned versus actual on the workouts. Talk about serious accountability.

What was really cool was that I could import all my old data from Garmin Connect. I could at the same data as I did through Strava in whole new eyes. Actually TP carries over more data from the Garmin so I’m actually seeing more than before, especially on the swim.

I’m not sure I’ll be uploading to both Strava and TP all the time. I have decided to commit to TP for now and get the training plan rolling. The next big task is to adjust the workout in the EN Plan to real life days and times. I’m working getting the TP calendar to show up on my regular iPhone calendar. Now that would be hot.

All my friends that have real life coaches use TP to get their workouts and report back. Their coaches can see the data and give feedback and incorporate the future workouts. So, that’s where I’m headed to put the workouts into TP, adjust the days to real life, execute workouts, then analyze and adjust and see improvements.