W is for Winter... & WORK... and eventually, Winning!

A lot of triathletes take the winter months off to recuperate from the previous season and prepare for the coming months of training & racing. The terms off-season and pre-season may sound familiar. My personal favorite is "hibernation".

NOT US!

We swim. HARD. Then we enter swim meets and show down with the real swimmers. The benefits of this are two-fold.

• 1. We compete against people who are former swim studs. Collegiate swimmers, regional champs, national champs, whatever. It's quite humbling to get lapped. It's also humbling to exit the water hyperventilating but pleased with your 1:05 best time for 100 free, then watch the next heat & the guy swimming a 100 fly swims 10 seconds faster. "Hey, just in case you forgot, 'pretty fast for a triathlete' is actually not all that fast". HUMILITY.
• 2. In order to swim fast for the long stuff, you have to swim fast for the short stuff. My priority for swim meets is to swim a distance event and get a time. We work harder and perform better in race situations, but we also have people to swim against. If there's someone moderately close in speed, it's a race. COMPETITION.

At the University of New Orleans Short Course Meters Southeastern Championship. I'm in lane 5; first in the water! Not bad for a newbie swimmer. Teammate Elizabeth is next to me in lane 4. Apparently coach Kyle does a nice job of teaching Hub Fins Masters to have quick reaction times!

We don't swim hard everyday in training. But we are in the water 5 days a week and each day is focused on some important aspect of training. Stroke technique; long aerobic sets; fast, hard threshold training. Swimming is by far the most technical sport in triathlon, and it takes YEARS to master it, so we don't take any rest time & our fitness carries over & improves between race seasons.

We bike. Outside as much as possible, but we're sometimes forced to the misery of trainer sessions. We have our weekend long rides, our weekday short rides, and our interval days depending on what training phase we're in. Some days it's cold, some days it's pleasant (we're in MISSISSIPPI, so there are the occasional 70' sunny afternoons in January), but we always get the work done. Winter is the PERFECT time to build up the base phase and prepare for fine-tuning the speed and power once the weather is more consistently cheery before the early season races.

We run. The volume and intensity would be unimpressive to the elite runner. Again, this is a base building period to prepare the body for the speed it will be going through in the coming months. The long runs feel less agonizing, the 'moderate' pace begins to feel easier, the once 5K race pace feels like it could endure twice the distance. Quite simply, running feels less miserable, and I love it!


Tri season is approaching. QUICKLY. I am only 11 weeks out from my season opener, the Nautica South Beach Tri. 11 weeks seems like a long time... heck, that's almost 3 months! Well, it's not! I have full confidence that I could go out and complete an Olympic Distance with a halfway decent time right now, probably even on par with last season. BUT I don't want to be on par with last season, I want to be faster than last season. The huge gains I'm chasing need to happen now (in the winter). There's just not enough time to use the race season to get faster. Why? Because we're racing! Summer is a time for sharpening. There's no better feeling than having a successful summer and knowing that the winter work you put in on those cold days and nights paid off. Work now, race with the big girls (or boys) later.