Plan it and log it

I haven't gotten to blog for a few days, because I've been trying to get ready to move. Monday, I had a day off. Yesterday, I did 4 miles on the treadmill, and today, I did another 4 miles on the treadmill. I have a very light week with my training this week, which is good, because my knee is bothering me a little. Also good, because I am starting to feel the time crunch to get ready for our upcoming move on March 27th.

As a coach, one of my duties is creating training plans for my clients. I know a lot of people out there train without a coach (myself being one of them). I have two big pieces of advice for my fellow self-coached athletes out there. First, have a plan and second, log your workouts.

Any plan is better then no plan! Training without having a plan is one of the biggest errors a person can make when training for endurance sports. If you don't feel comfortable designing your own plan. There are a lot of great training plans for all disciplines available online. For beginner triatheletes, beginnertriathelete.com has some great free plans available. Also, don't be afraid to ask your more experienced friends for help when designing your plan. They may also be able to give you some of their old plans to follow.

Log your workouts! This can be done on a fancy online training log, in a spreadsheet, or simply in a notebook, but the bottom line is that you need to keep a log of what you've done. This is important, because it will allow you to go back and see the things in your training that helped to make you better and the things that might have made you slower, caused an injury, or resulted in over training. Also, it's fun to see how many miles you logged during the course of your training segment. I use Training Peaks with all of my clients. They have a nice version of their program that is available to anyone for free. Beginnertriathlete.com also offers a free online log. In additional to logging your workouts, it's also a good idea to log which running shoes you wore for your workout (they typically last 300-500 miles) and which tires you had on your bike (they typically last 1500-2000 miles).

Have fun planning and logging!