Planning and Goal Setting Part 1

My scheduled workout for today was a 6 mile easy run. I completed it on the treadmill with no problems and felt pretty good. I'm not looking forward to my 14 mile long run in the slush tomorrow. I wish I had some waterproof running shoes!

I'm also happy to say that I've finally gotten my website up. It's not done yet, and I still have some formatting issues to resolve, but I'm pretty happy with how's coming together. You can check it out at Custom Coaching.

Starting my own business has been a fun and educational experience. I'm learning to do a lot of things I didn't know how to do before like blogging! My next endeavor will be designing a business card.

Now onto our training discussion for today. Planning and goal setting are, in my opinion, one of the most important parts of training. Every year, I like to start my season by selecting the events I want to participate in. The way I typically go about this is to first select one or two races that will be my "big" races for the year. These will be races that I want to peak for, or in other words will be the key races in which my training plan will be built around and that I want to be in tip top shape for. Triatheletes like to call these their "A" races. So for this year, I have selected two races as my "A" races, the Go! St. Louis Marathon and Ironman Louisville. For me all of my training will be centered around preparing for these two races. It doesn't necessarily have to work like that, but that is how I've chosen to plan my year this year. Next, I decided it might be a good idea to do a half-ironman race as part of my Ironman training, so I selected a half-iron distance race that fits into my training plan nicely, meaning that it would provide me with the right amount of mileage for that particular weekend. I won't peak for this race, instead it will be more like a nice long workout that I can use as a measure of my fitness at that point.

After selecting your races for the year, I would next move toward setting your goals. More on this tomorrow!