Turkey Trot 10k

My girlfriend and I ran the 35th Annual Turkey Trot in Virginia Beach last week.  It's hosted by our local running club the  Tidewater Striders and they had a record number of participants this year.  Getting in a run with my girlfriend before stuffing my face with all the Thanksgiving food was a great way to start the holiday! 

Here are some pics from the event:



Kerry kicking my butt coming down the finishing area!

Setting goals

It's that time again...to begin laying the groundwork for next season by setting your goals.   

To get you started I have stolen borrowed some talking points from a past Joe Friel blog post.  He suggest answering the following questions:

Did I meet my 2012 goals?

Did I follow my training plan (you had one, didn’t you)?

Did I address my limiters?

Was I able to stick to my training schedule?

Was I satisfied with my race results?

Be open and honest in your self-evaluation so that you can begin formulating a foundation for improvement. 

While you may know right offhand which areas your want to work on, there are some other ways to pinpoint them.  Often your race results will give you lots of insight into your limiters and areas that need special focus.  If you track your splits in a race, they can show you whether you went out too fast and faded and how close you were to that coveted negative split.   

In triathlon you can even compare your times across each discipline to age group, gender and overall results.  Seeing how you stack up against the field can go a long way in showing you the areas that need improvement.  Personally, I know from reviewing my results that my run has been a definite limiter and is something I plan to spend a lot of time improving this upcoming year. 

Once you get an idea of what you need to work on start developing a plan of action and be as specific as possible in how you can achieve that goal.  Using my weakness (the run) as an example - I'm not merely planning to run more to get better results.  I've started working on a plan that includes SPECIFIC markers.  In a future post I will discuss some of the specific areas that I plan to focus on for next year....stayed tuned.   

As we approach the new year, I'd love to hear your feedback on this process.

Top 3 High Performance Lessons I Learned in 2012

Here is a link to a good article written by top age-group triathlete Ben Greenfield on the Training Peaks Blog:

http://blog.trainingpeaks.com/posts/2012/11/19/top-3-high-performance-lessons-i-learned-in-2012.html

#1 - Workout of the Week

As promised here is the first installment of my Workout of the Week.

It's a workout that I found on the Runner's World website.  Here you go:

The Even Steven Workout

Start with your usual pre-workout warm-up. Then run the following in order:

• Run 10 minutes at marathon effort
• Jog 2 minutes at your easy-run effort
• Run 8 minutes at half marathon effort
• Jog 4 minutes
• Run 6 minutes at 10K effort
• Jog 6 minutes
• Run 4 minutes at 5K effort
• Jog 8 minutes
• Run 2 minutes at slightly faster than 5K effort
• Jog 10 minutes as your cool-down

The Short Steven Workout

This is a shorter version of the above, great for when you are time crunched or are focusing on shorter runs.

• Run 5 minutes at marathon effort
• Jog 2 minutes at your easy-run effort
• Run 4 minutes at half marathon effort
• Jog 3 minutes
• Run 3 minutes at 10K effort
• Jog 4 minutes
• Run 2 minutes at 5K effort
• Jog 5 minutes
• Run 1 minute at slightly faster than 5K effort
• Jog 10 minutes as your cool-down

I would love to hear feedback from those of you that try it out. 

Happy training!

Workout of the Week...to come

Avoid turning into this...

With this in mind, I've decided to start a "Workout of the Week" post for this blog.  Each week (I'm thinking Sundays) I plan to post a swim/bike/run/strength&core workout that you can incorporate into your weekly training.     

Hopefully, they can add a change of pace to your normal training schedule and help improve your overall fitness.  If anyone has suggestions for these workouts, please send them to me and I'll make sure to post them for others. 

I plan to post the first workout this coming Sunday so stayed tuned.

Happy training!!