Measured Gains & Losses, and Even More Gains to Come…

Endurance athletes must go through various periods within a year in order to achieve peak fitness at specific times for the most important races. It is impossible, inefficient and just plain silly to attempt to maintain peak levels of fitness throughout the entire year. It’s also important that athletes don’t lose so much fitness that they spend all pre-season just trying to get back to ‘normal’ or base levels of metabolic fitness. You want the levels to go up & down but in the long-term you should finish each season with some measurable growth.

I decided this year to cut my training volume in the fall as that is my busy season coaching high school football. Also, our new baby boy would be arriving around this time and I was very much expecting the excitement and realities of having a new baby. I planned to stay fit but allow the peak from last season to diminish. All this would happen just in time to start marathon & 70.3 triathlon specific training in December. I wanted to stay relatively fit, not gain a bunch of weight and still have a solid base on which to build up for the 2014 race season.

The key to properly understanding specific fitness levels is through accurate fitness testing, and nothing is more accurate than laboratory blood-lactate testing (like the testing I do with Coach Gareth at the TRIO Lab in West Los Angeles. I have been doing testing there regularly for 2+ years now, so I have lots of past data to compare with current test results. My most recent test (this week) showed that I am very close to where I was just before peak fitness last season. I’m only about 5-10% off last season’s peak, which was my fastest running period ever. All this tells me I can reach new heights in the next 3 months if I play my cards (training) right. Coach Gareth will build a training program for me over the next few weeks that will start to incorporate the training my current physiology and fitness tests dictate. We have a bunch of different energy systems and they all need to be trained, and this testing allows me to specifically differentiate and train each system with purpose. There is no wasting time with guess work or trial-and-error, which is essential for a competitive amateur with aspirations of racing with a full life of family, friends and work.

Below is a little video of me cooling down at the end of my last run test at TRIO:

This post was written by ANTI-Mike