Planning a year

It's time to lay out my training plan for the upcoming season, and I've been trying to combine Rich Strauss and Gordo Byrne's ideas on training. Both of these coaches suggest a lot of time in or under AeT as a way to build base endurance. This means the majority of your training time is long and slow, in Zones 1 & 2. This should do a couple things for me, first it gives me the ability to simply complete the Ironman distance race, at heart a test of endurance. Secondly, exercise in that zone is also ideal for bodyfat reduction another area I need to work on. I have a goal of losing another 20 lbs to get under 200 lbs for the race in July.

I'll post more as it comes together, but I'm aiming for minimums of 3 days per week in each sport starting in November. Then, every other week I'll add either an additional bike or an additional run. The second bike week should fall on a recovery week, and this additional ride would be very easy.

The end goal of the plan will be to have minimum 4 rides of 6 hours plus, 4 runs of close to 3 hours and 4 swims of 1.5 hours. I'm hoping the swims will be in Crystal Lake in the spring since spending that kind of time in the pool isn't a lot of fun. In addition, I will be doing the Mooseman 1/2 Ironman distance the first weekend in June.

I have a spreadsheet where I track most of this data, and will publish it as I fill it out.