Week 6: Review

The back is pretty much recovered at this point, so I'm building my mileage back carefully to try and get my fitness to the level it needs to be. My heart rate is working it's way back into the range it was before the injuries, but it's still got a good ways to go. Naturally, between the time off and the reduced mileage during recovery I've lost some fitness, so it's just a matter of fighting to get it back ;)

If I'm going to use Pfitzinger's 12 week program, I'm going to need to start at the beginning of next week and I'm not sure that's realistic. I should have no problem doing the mileage itself, however due to the lost fitness my speed isn't where it should be. The Triathlon events are really my focus this year, so part of me is debating whether to simply drop the attempt to do another marathon this spring and simply focus on them. The objective of doing the marathon was to get my time down to 3:20, so if I can't do that then there really isn't a lot of point in putting in all of that training.

It would be easy enough to register for the half marathon rather than the full, as beating my PB in that distance wouldn't be hard and it would likely be better preparation for the half Ironman distance (if I choose to go down that route). Further, as I'd be entering the Triathlon season with fresh legs (rather than having to take a few weeks to recover from the Marathon), it may be beneficial to those races.

Either way, I'll have to see how things go this week and make a call based on that. The 12-week program is pretty aggressive, and between it and base training for the other two sports I don't want to risk re-injuring anything else at this point. I'm a bit concerned about overtraining at this juncture, as trying to squeeze in both a full-fledged marathon program and the other two sports is a lot of volume. Even looking at full ironman training programs, they prescribe doing a lot less running mileage than I've been doing in my base period (never mind the peaks).

Week 6 Totals:
Running: 37.9km (23.5mi)
Walking: 2.0km (1.2mi)
Cycling: 75.0km (46.6mi)
Swimming: 7.2km (4.5mi)
Total: 122.1km (75.9mi)

Year to Date:
Running: 200.9km (124.8mi)
Walking: 22.2km (13.8mi)
Cycling: 85.0km (52.8mi)
Swimming: 26.2km (16.3mi)
Total: 334.3km (207.7mi)

I'm still going to be playing it by ear this week to rebuild back to normal levels. Cycling has progressed well so far, and despite a long time off I don't appear to have lost too much fitness on that side. With the Olympics on television, it's been psychologically easier to do the rides as there's something on television pretty much any time of day. I'm planning on progressively increasing distance over the week, and taking full advantage of that ;)

PS I'm currently trying to find a decent formal training program for building up to the half iron distances, so if anyone has any suggestions on that front I'd be quite appreciative! Pfitzinger's program has been a big help with my running, but I've been doing the cycling and swimming on an ad-hoc basis up until now and figure that I should be adding some structure into those sports as well.