How to plan your best season yet

Structure and Plan Your Season

OK, now that you have your big goal that motivates you and your process and performance goals to get you there, how do you plan out your season?

“It depends on what an athlete is training and racing for,” said Chychota.

For short-course athletes: “Work their season backwards from that A race,” she said. In essence, you create a pyramid of training: 12 weeks worth of base work, 8 weeks or so of focused training mixed with C races, and then a small break, a block to sharpen, taper and peak.

In that schedule, C racing is really important for short-course athletes, she said. “You need to race a lot to get good at racing. You need to be race hardened and race sharp.”

However, because there’s an element of losing some overall fitness as you race (because you need to recover and can’t put in as much training!), then it’s good to take a small break and reset. In this scenario, you’d do base training and come into the start of the year with some fitness but not targeting A races yet, you’d race B and C races and train, take a small break from racing, do a smaller training block and focus on peaking for your big goal. You’d also, likely, want to split the season in two: For example, build up to nationals, have a couple of weeks of a mid-season break, and then re-build the pyramid for Worlds. Of course, in that scenario, ask yourself: Is qualifying for xxx thing, for example, the big A goal and then you just want to experience the championship when you get there? Or is the goal to perform your best at the championship and qualification is simply a step towards that?

For long-course IRONMAN athletes, however: It’s less about racing throughout the year and more about “big training blocks to accumulate massive amounts of fitness,” said Chychota—and then a little bit of race sharpening with one or two Olympic-distance or half-IRONMAN races, but not closer than 4-8 weeks out from your target IRONMAN.

“Most people are only going to do one IRONMAN really well in a year,” she said, so even if you plan to do two, you’ll need to recover in between. “You can’t be too tired from racing too much.”

Half-distance “kind of falls somewhere in the middle,” she said. You need an endurance base, but the intensity is higher and the races start faster, so you may want to work on bumping up your threshold with some shorter faster 5Ks, for example.

What are A, B, and C races?

A races: “This is the one where it’s most important,” said Chychota. “You’re going to give it everything you’ve got.”

B races: “There’s an understanding your peak fitness might not be there at that point,” she said. While you’re fit for these and rested and ready to give it your best, you might not be fully tapered and peaked — so be clear about your expectations.

C races: Are the ones you mix in with training for specific reasons (i.e. to test a nutrition strategy, to get in a hard 5K effort, to support friends) and that’s OK!

“Not every race has to be a peak,” said Ricci. “Think about realistically how can you space out your races.”

You can probably peak, at most, twice in a year, he said, and you can do maybe six or seven races, depending on the distance and intensity — so he also recommends building the first half of your season and then taking a break (especially a mental break), evaluating, and then planning the second half.

Whatever you think you want to do right now, remember: “A lot can change for people in a year,” said Chychota.

The biggest mistakes athletes make? Being too rigid, doing too much volume too quickly this time of year at the state of the season, and trying to squeeze in too many things. It’s all a process.

Tips for Creating New Habits

As you evaluate what you need to get to your big goals this year, you’re probably also considering how you can create better habits and a healthier structure to make it easier to perform your best.

Things like: going to bed earlier, drinking less alcohol, eating more healthy meals. There’s a reason New Year’s resolutions are popular and it’s not just because of the hype — there’s evidence that starting new goals and routines at landmark times or the start of a week, month, year can create a kind of launching pad and make it easier to stick to.

But Nir Eyal, a behavioral scientist and author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, warns that “you can’t turn every behavior into a habit.”

A habit is a behavior you do “with little of no conscious thought,” he said. That starts as turning something into a regular routine — but not every routine can become a habit.

And that’s OK!

In fact, sometimes we’re just using the lure of making something a habit as shorthand for the fact that the thing is hard or difficult or uncomfortable. And, he warns that if we expect everything to become easy, then we can be disappointed when it’s not and that can lead to quitting.

In reality, triathlon will never get easy, but you can build smaller habits along the way

The four steps Eyal uses—which you have to work through, you can’t just skip ahead—are:

• Dealing with the internal triggers. Take Dry January, for example. Why do you want a beer after work? Do you have a drink just because it’s something social to do? Because you feel awkward at an event? Because you associate it with relaxing after work? You don’t have to go cold turkey, but understanding why you do or don’t do the behavior you’re trying to change is key to making a change.

• Make time for what he calls “traction.” That means plan out in advance what you’re going to do to achieve the behavioral change: Going somewhere else with friends or knowing what other drink you’ll order instead. Or, take for example, wanting to go to the gym more often. Know and plan when specifically in your day you’re going to do that, have all your clothes and gear already packed.

• Then work backwards to get rid of external triggers. That could be getting rid of the beer in your house, in our Dry January example. Or, if you know you always run out of time to go to the gym after work, then try getting up in the morning instead.

• And the very last step, which he warns you can’t skip right to, is to: Make pacts. That can be with friends or with yourself. For example, when he was trying to get in shape he hung up a calendar on the side of his closet with a $100 bill taped next to it, and every day he could either do something for 100 calories or burn the $100. (He called it burn or burn.) “I never had to burn the $100,” he said.

But, he said, the most important thing is to work through those steps and to understand that not everything can be a habit. And, to treat yourself with some compassion, because then if you slip up one day you’re not going to give up, “you’re much more likely to reach long-term goals.”

“Don’t act like a drill sergeant. Act like a scientist,” he said.