Tired

When I say each day I mean some days or, perhaps, each day I feel like writing. I do have actual work that comes first. I only get to the blog when I have time or find a news tidbit that I want to post right away. I did see something today about environmental conditions in China that was rather alarming but that's too depressing, so I'll yammer on a bit about training. And, as I'm very tired tonight, it will be a wee bit.

A three week training cycle is mainly a fine-tune cycle. You can't create any real body composition changes in such a short time. You can train one energy system to exhaustion but that won't get you ready for a competition. So a three week cycle to prepare for competition consists of two weeks of hard training and one week of tapering.

And, converse to how you normally train, your highest volume training should be early so that you have plenty of time to recover. My first week consisted on long climbing sessions that were often coupled with bike rides or easy runs, and on the other days generally long hard rides with easy runs. These are also tests to see where you body is at so you can pick which areas that need to most fine tuning.

During week two the volume decreases. It takes your fastest-twitch muscle fibers about 2 weeks to fully recover. So while you can't totally rest them because you need to ready your body and mind for the rigors of the upcoming event, you can consider this and not go too deep or too intense. How to actually do this is tricky; everything in such a short cycle with a peak at the end is a compromise. You kind of take each day and evaluate how you feel and base your training solely on this. You can't just plug in a workout program and do whatever you think you should. This is asking for trouble because this close to event one bad day can do irreversable harm. One skin flapper, major overtraining session, or getting dehydrated can set your perform back to where you won't fully recover in time. So it's always better to slightly under do it than to even barely do too much.

With a week to go I'm on the verge of the latter, however this may have to do with my friend's party last night as well. Whatever the cause, I need to catch up on some rest, which will be difficult because I've got a very busy week ahead. At least I don't have any more high volume training days. Well, tomorrow may be slightly high volume. After which it's less and less til Sat.

Oh, and I always forget to WOWY on Sat. This is my biggest volume day each week. Two weeks ago I did 21 long routes outside, which took about 9 hours. The next two I went climbng all day. I guess because I left early I forgot to log on. My calendar my not be Xed off but, I assure you, I was training.