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Super Simple Half IM Training Plan...

Thursday, 18 January 2018 23:10

ED. Minnesota has several great half IMs--Liberty, Chisago, Superior Tri and the resurrected Square Lake Half. You don't have to leave the state to get your long course fix. We hope that your 2018 schedule includes at least one of the aforemention races.

Matt Fitzgerald provides a simple-to-follow 16 week training plan for the half Ironman distance.

By Matt Fitzgerald (triathlete.com)

Variety is overrated in triathlon training. It’s certainly important, but coaches often make it out to be more important than repetition when the opposite is true. There are only a handful of workout types that you need to include in your training program. You can practice these basic types of workouts in all kinds of different ways, and doing so may make the training process more interesting for you, but there is no particular physiological advantage of complex training compared to basic training....

I favor simple training plans for a few reasons. First, I find them to be less mentally stressful than complex training plans. Why make your training so complex that it is unnecessarily mentally taxing in addition to being necessarily physically taxing? Second, the results of a very basic, and highly repetitive, training plan are predictable, and predictability of effects is a major virtue in a training plan. You want to know exactly what you’re going to get out of it. When your workouts are always familiar, there’s little mystery about what they will do for you. Finally, it’s easier to measure and monitor progress in a training plan with lots of repetition. You can make apples-to-apples comparisons of your performance in difference instances of the same workout, whereas such comparisons are more difficult when you never do the same workout twice. This is important, because seeing progress inspires future progress. READ MORE