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Mitchell's 2017 Report Card...

Wednesday, 04 April 2018 23:10

ED. The MTN Guys are big fans of Mitchell Clayton, a fine young man from an awesome family who also happened to win the Minnesota Junior of the Year award in 2015. We are also big fans of his tri blog. Over the next few weeks we'll be sharing three of his posts, starting with his reflections on his 2017 season. Enjoy.

By Mitchell Clayton (mitchellclaytontriblog.wordpress.com)

(Posted October 14, 2017)

It’s about time I evaluate this past season, it’s mid-October for Pete’s sake! The 2017 multisport season was different than all of my other past seasons, in both positive and negative ways. So, I think I will just give some holistic and general reflections and then give race-specific reflections…

I started training A LOT later than I would have liked to. School was very busy for me all last year, and this took away nearly all the time that I would have liked to devote to swimming, biking, and running. I started my planned, structured, and actually legitimate training on June 4th.
Because I started training late, I didn’t start racing until July 8th. In a typical season, I would have had 4 races or so under my belt heading into July....
July consisted of 4 races, once each weekend from the 8th through the 30th.
I took nearly all of August to prepare correctly for my first Half Ironman distance race on August 27. This training was longer higher volume and less intensity than I do to prepare for sprint races. As it was in June, it was weird not racing in August.
I raced 7 times including a duathlon in May, and 2 of these races ended up as DNFs.
Swim: I started my swim training for the season on June 13. This year I swam for North Suburban Aquatics club, the same club that I’d swim at in preparation for high school swim season. It was GREAT to be given sets and to have OTHER PEOPLE to push me in practices. It was also nice that Chris Tatton swam at the same club. Once the training actually started, I did between 6000 and 10,000 yards/week consistently. The results of this great training started to show towards the end of the season. So, for the season in general, I’d call my swimming a success. READ MORE