a more traditional aproach to triathlon training

I apoligize for not posting more triathlon related material lately, my oldest son Cody has started wrestling and is practicing 4 days a week and is dancing 1 day a week. My daughter is also doing dance. With all the new activities my babies are now doing I was struggling to find time to blog. By the way, I've started a blog about my son wrestling, it's http://juniorwrestler.blogspot.com/ I've mostly posted videos and pictures so far. I'm sure proud of him. He's doing AMAZING for being only 3 years old. Check it out.

The last couple months of training has been going great. I've been concentrating on building my base fitness and dropping my off season weight since January. So far I've dropped 29 pounds & only have 20 pounds more to lose to be at my ultimate race weight of 185! So far this year anytime I felt tired or unmotivated I took the day off of training. This is an approach I've never attempted before. I'd always been told I should have an off season, then a season of slowly building endurance and base fitness, then have some hard training at the end of the year. I knew this was the way triathlon training was supposed to be done, but I never did it. My approach has always been to train hard all season long. My approach to training never worked out for a long productive season. I'd start off training really hard in the early winter when everyone else was ramping down their training. I would log at least 550 bike miles and 100 run miles a month with lots of speed work all winter long. Every year without fail I'd be really fast until the summer, then I'd start to feel ran down and fatigued. I never allowed myself rest and recovery, much less an off season so when I felt ran down I'd chalk it up to weakness and force myself to train even harder. Eventually my body couldn't handle the amount & intensity of my training anymore so I'd get burned out and I'd stop training, start eating more, I'd gain back all the weight I'd lost, and I'd end up having a poor performance at my years end my A race.

Every year that was what I did. This year I'm learning from my mistakes & breaking the pattern. This year I'm starting off easy, ramping up my training slowly. I'm feeling confident in my new training methods & am hoping this more traditional approach to training will help me achieve my seasons ultimate goal of a sub 13 hour Ironman in November, and succeed at my 2nd most important goal of beating my best friend Jimmy at my tune up race, The Elephantman half Iron in September.