Season in Review

Back in May last year (2012) I wrote a Performance Goals blog entry listing my target times for the swim, bike and run. When writing down those times I thought I was being overly ambitious, but decided it was worth aiming high. Publishing the figures to the world can often help with motivation, especially during the closing stages of a race when you are fighting your inner demons that are screaming at you slow down.

This season I raced 2 Duathlons, 4 Sprint Triathlons, 1 Half Ironman and a 5km Fun Run. Still recovering from Ironman and not training much over Winter, I was far from peak fitness for the Duathlons, although I still snuck in for an age group podium at Kew. However I was in good form by Summer and in the Triathlons I smashed nearly all my goal times for every discipline. My one failure was the 1h35m Half Ironman run split that I missed by 3 minutes. This leads into my only other goal failure of not running 5km in under 18m30s - I missed by 15 seconds in a very windy Fun Run at Albert Park Lake.

Elaine raced 4 Duathlons, 1 Mini Triathlon, 4 Sprint Triathlons, 1 Olympic Distance Triathlon and a hilly 7km Fun Run. She won the series in her age group for both the Brooks Duathlon and XOSIZE Triathlon series, only missing the podium once in these 8 races. Her result at the Olympic Distance in Geelong was only a few minutes off her personal best time at Canberra in 2008, but Geelong is a much harder course and I would rate it as her best ever race. Elaine also ran a personal best at the Portsea Twilight Fun Run.

My old Triathlon Club (Taylormade) merged with Bayside at the start of the season. The new amalgamation now had 4 swim sessions a week in the beautiful outdoor 50m pool at the newly constructed GESAC (Glen Eira Sports & Aquatic Centre). I think this had the biggest influence on our good results this year. Moving from an Indoor 25m to an outdoor 50m pool helped both mentally and physically, plus having 2 morning sessions a week was much better than trying find energy and enthusiasm after a hard day at work. Last season I upped my swim mileage for Ironman, but this season I managed to swim an additional 75 kilometres (30% more).

Despite head coach Clint organising lots of great rides, my bike mileage was down by 1,400km (25% less). The quality of these rides must have been good, because my Triathlon bike splits were better than ever. However I believe most of this improvement was from the season before (when I had my biggest bike mileage). I was never able to demonstrate this improvement last season because I was injured (patella tendinitis) and only completed one Triathlon (Ironman Melbourne).

Finally to running. I managed an extra 100km (8% more) over my previous biggest run mileage 2 seasons ago (I was injured most of last season). The biggest difference was that I did a lot more slow running and far less speed work which ironically made me faster. I also suffered a lot less injuries, which translated to more consistency, which is the key to good training.

Below are my actual training figures for the last 52 weeks:

  Swim  251km  (avg 5km/week)
  Bike  4265km  (avg 81km/week)
  Run  1259km  (avg 24km/week)

While the above data looks on the low side (relatively speaking), I started the season off slowly and built up my training as the season progressed (and weather got better). Below are the figures for the 12 weeks leading into my target race at Geelong (a Half Ironman)

  Swim  85km  (avg 7km/week)
  Bike  1634km  (avg 136km/week)
  Run  296km  (avg 33km/week)