Kelly the Culinarian: Training Tuesday: Planning and Plotting for 2013

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Training Tuesday: Planning and Plotting for 2013

I'm a planner.  I like lists, calendars, appointments and goals. I mean, I create strategies and schedules for a living, so it's only natural that part of this spills over into my off time.  Even though I've accomplished roughly 3/4 of what I set out to do in 2012, I'm already plotting 2013.  The thing is, I don't like to race unless I'm completely prepared and trained up to perform my best. I'm not a race-every-weekend kind of athlete because my body just can't take it.  Instead, I'm very deliberate and meticulous about my racing. It's not that I don't have fun; on the contrary, I have a lot more fun at a race knowing that I've done everything I can to prepare for the race.

So I printed out a calendar and started adding races and counting weeks. I wanted to make sure I had enough time in between weeks to rest and then train up to the next thing. Tentatively, here's what I have on tap:

March 30 - Egg Shell Shuffle Half Marathon, Schaumburg
June 7-8 - Ragnar Relay, Madison to Chicago
July 21 - Ironman 70.3, Racine, Wis.
Sept. 22 - Fox Valley Marathon (distance TBD, probably the half), St. Charles
Nov. 23 - Route 66 Marathon, Tulsa, Okla.

Also, I'll be participating the Fort2Base Race again next year, with the date pending there.

So tell me, is this too ambitious?

6 comments:

Xaarlin said...

I think your schedule looks perfect. You can always add races to it if you feel like it. And a half IM... Badass. I hope to do one sometime :)

Pete B said...

Ironman? Wow! I've always been interested in that Ragnar Relay. I don't race as much as some people either. Any race I run before a marathon is a "tune-up" race to help me determine my marathon pace.

Maggie W said...

After doing a lot of racing this year, I'm definitely starting to approach races like you do - with enough time to train properly for each one. I think your schedule will allow you to accomplish that, and I assume you would use the Fox Valley half as a training run for the Route 66 Marathon. I did that a couple times during my marathon training. Two months out from the race, you are probably still OK to somewhat "race" a half, but any closer, and and at least for me, I had that nagging voice in the back of my head telling me to just use it as a training run, and not push at my usual half marathon effort. And races at training pace are not as fun, unless you are pacing someone else to a PR or something.

Losing Lindy said...

yay, then I can see you again at the FVM!

Unknown said...

Too ambitious? No way, it's better to be too ambitious than not enough :)

Kim said...

It doesn't seem too ambitious to me at all. Now that you have done two fulls it's a lot easier to keep up the endurance the second time around, and 70.3 training will help with that.