What’s in store for 2013

Wow, 2012 seemed to come to an end very quickly. So fast that I didn’t really have much time to reflect and plan out much for 2013.

For 2013 I am going to try some new things.  For triathlon I will focus on speed, with some sprint and olympic distance races.  We have planned a family trip for the summer, so most of my races will either be early or late season.  I may sign-up for a 70.3 distance later in the year.

For the last 2 years I have set some big goals, starting with a 70.3 in 2011, and full Ironman in 2012.  This year I am going to change things a bit and aim for my first xterra off-road triathlon in June.  I am hoping to mix in a fair amount of mountain bike riding into my training, and since my kids are now starting to ride on the trails too – it will be a great opportunity to have some family fun.

Possible races:-

• January – Ragnar Florida Keys
  The basic premise is that you have a team of 12 people run 36 legs in a relay totaling 199 miles from Miami to Key West.  Each competitor has 3 legs.  Mine total around 19 miles.  I have no real expectations, other than to go out and have fun, and run hard
• March – possible rock n roll half marathon
• March – Rev3 Trail/MTB series – leg 1
  rev3 announced a new series of 5k/10k trail run and 18mile MTB, separate races on the same day.  I would like to do both the 10k trail run and MTB races
• April – Rev3 Trail/MTB series leg 2
• April – Richmond Sprint Triathlon (possible)
• May – Kinetic Sprint or 70.3  (sprint is on mothers day, so may do the 70.3)
• June – xterra Richmond
• June – rev3 olympic, Williamsburg (may try the 70.3 distance)
• July – family vacation
• August – Luray sprint (possible)
• September – Nation’s Tri – 4th year in a row
• October/November – might try a marathon

These are the races on the radar, it is likely that I will not do all of them.

2012 Recap

Here is a summary of the races I competed in for 2012.

January – Frozen 5k.  New 5k PR – 18:50
March – Mollys 5k – 20:31, solid run on a course that was long
May – ITU Olympic distance Triathlon, San Diego – 2:25:22 – best race of the year
June – EagleMan 70.3 – 5:55:33  20 min PR from 2011, but had nutrition problems that lead to a difficult run
July – IronMan Lake Placid – 11:24:44 – good race, exceeded my goals/expectations
August – not a lot of structured training
September – Nations Triathlon – 2:24:39  solid race, good performance
October – Giant Acorn sprint, calf issues on the run, but still a decent performance
November – Zombie 5k obstacle race for fun with the family

After a great off-season, I started off strong with a great performance in San Diego, which ended up being my best race of the year.  The highlight was my first full IronMan at Lake Placid.  I found that preparing for an IronMan really takes a toll both mentally, physically and on family life.  I tried my best to get by with a minimum of training, averaging <12 hours per week for the 3 months leading up to the race.  Given that, and some calf issues leading up to the race I was very happy with a sub 11:30 finish time.

Here is how my year looked according to WKO+.  The blue line is CTL – chronic training load, a measure of overall fitness.  The Pink line is ATL, Acute Training load, a short term measurement indicating how hard you are training and how tired you are.  The yellow line is TSB, roughly CTL-ATL – it can be used to tell how race ready you are.

You can clearly see that I successfully built my fitness leading in the middle of the year, with a pretty steep drop off after IMLP.  The CTL (blue line) started increasing again in November when I got back to a decent schedule with my off-season routine.

Comparisons to 2011

• Run miles – 989 – (790 in 2011)- 182 hrs
• Bike miles – 3,751 – (2300 in 2011) – 141hrs
• Swim yards – 162,600 – (147,000 in 2011) – 52hrs

I think this chart shows pretty well how my year of training went, it shows the time distribution for swim (blue), bike (red) and run (green) for each week across the year and the big drop off in training volume after the IronMan.

I will write up a post with details on what is in store for 2013.  I don’t have a big A race planned yet, there will be no full IronMan in 2013.  I am hoping to complete an XTerra (off-road triathlon) and spend more time on the mountain bike, and competing in the shorter triathlon races, mostly sprint and Olympic distances.

My first adventure is running the Ragnar Florida Keys relay on January 4th-5th.