2 January 2007
2007 Season Underway
Posted by Brad Hefta-Gaub under: Cycle; Diet; Family; Fitness; Ironman; Living Seattle; Marathons; Run; Swim; Weightloss; triathlon.
Ok, so I’m two days into my 2007 season and plan, and so far things are going just fine. 
Isn’t that why we all like the new year, is because it’s (hopefully) easy to get momentum out of the gate?
So far, so good. My three big “process goals” for the year are: do some strength training every day of the week, do some flexibility work every day of the week, and swim at least 3 times a week. I also plan to add a process oriented goal for running, once I’ve got my new orthotics and I am cleared to run after my stress fracture.
I’ve settled on all my “planned” races. This includes my ‘A’ and ‘B’ races and a handful of ‘C’ races that I know of today. However, I reserve the right to add more ‘C’ races throughout the year. My ‘A’ Races this year are: Seattle To Portland; Grand Columbian Ironman; Philadelphia Marathon; and Seattle Marathon.
STP is an ‘A’ race where I hope to complete the 200+ mile course in less than 10 hours of wall clock. This will be my third year riding this ride as a One-day ride. Last year, my goal was to complete the course in 9:30 of ride time and a 10:00 wall clock, but my crew took too many breaks for too long and it took us about 10:50 of wall clock time. But we did complete in 9:27 of ride time. I hope to ride with the same crew, but Mike and I will need to get Ray and Mark out on the road a little earlier this season so they are up to it… or maybe Mike and I will just ride as the two of us. Ray and Mark are good guys, but I think they actually slowed us down a little.
Grand Columbian Ironman would be the center piece of the season. This will be my second year competing in Triathlon and my second running of GCIM. Last year I came in 13th place overall and 4th in my age group with a time of 12:17:03. This year I want to take 1:32:03 off of my time and come in under 10:45:00. Last year I raced exactly to my the plan. And this year, I think I can take 1 hour off my Ironman run-split, and pick up the other 32 minutes in my swim (maybe 10 mins) and on the bike (22+ minutes). I large part of my season will be focused on running, while continuing to keep my solid 5,000 mile a year bike pace up.
In addition to taking up Triathlon last year, I also (kinda had to) take up running. I completed my first Marathon in November. That run was actually supposed to be a “test run” for trying to run a 3:30 marathon. I almost made it, if it hadn’t been for my stress fracture. So, this year, I will focus on run training at a 3:15 marathon pace, with the hope of qualifying for Boston. This is a stretch goal, but I love a challenge, so this seems fitting. Philadelphia is my target marathon to achieve this goal. And Seattle is a week later, so I’ll use it as a backup race.
For me ‘B’ and ‘C’ races are freebies and I always treat them like training sessions. That doesn’t mean I won’t get caught up in the competition of the moment, but I don’t worry about place and I don’t taper and I don’t change my recovery plan for the race. If the next day is not a rest day, then I workout. I try to stay much less competitive for ‘C’ races, but that mostly depends on the race and how I feel on that day.
After selecting my races, and designing my “periods” around that race schedule. I use Joe Friel’s technique for developing an annual plan. I chose a target of 600 hours for the year. This is based on the fact that last year I did 490 hours, but that included some down time, and I want to take on two big challenges this year, that will require some additional training hours. These total hours then boil down to period based weekly hours. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. Since I’m officially in the “prep” period I can still be a little casual about what workouts I’m doing during the week. Right now I am trying to focus on discipline around doing strength, flexibility, and swim training… so regularity and process are more important that substance. In the next couple weeks I’ll flesh out my weekly plans for the Base and Build periods.
4 Comments so far...
themiddlemanager Says:
Good luck on your goals - I look forward to following your progress!
rayk Says:
I’ve got no grand-dios plans for this year but I’m tossing around the idea of doing STP again this year. I definitely slowed the gravy train last year. That said, I’m more committed to actually training for a long ride. I was a bit jet lagged and not in 10hr endurance mode.
This year, it’s on. If you want some additional help, the guys I will be riding with are thinking of doing the STP this year…they are capable of putting the hurt on the pedals and should have no problems keeping up!
It’s on Zappo-Man!
zappoman Says:
Sounds great Ray. I think Mike and I would love to give it another go with you “at full steam”… Of course, I thought it was great that you rode with us last year, I didn’t mean to call you out in the public blogosphere.
It wasn’t really fair of me to goad you into riding after your trip back from Eastern Europe, and then expect you to crank out a 21mph 200+ mile pace line. But you pulled through, and we made it!
Would love to ride with your Zoo buddies, they sound even more hard core than me!
it’s on this year!
