The week in review

I'm finally getting to the schedule and volume I feel is appropriate for me at this time of the year.
Last week I got in a solid week of swimming at 4:20 and 12200 yards. Mixed up quite well and keeping the intensity higher than normal. My short sets are getting more comfortable and that's something I've struggled with in the past. Our state meet is comming up in 4 weeks and I need to get my 1650 ready to go. I will be swimming at least 1 other meet and it will probably be in Milford 2 to 3 weeks prior to the state meet. I'll be swimming the 50, 100, 200, 400, 800 (SCM) plus relays.

On the bike I was 30 min short of my goal of 5 hours but 4:30 on trainers is nothing to sneeze at. I was chasing numbers late in the fall, particulary TSS points (see note at bottom about TSS points), while I think that was a mistake, the quality of work was not. I got much more quality time on the bike than I had in the previous years and am further ahead this season than I have ever been. I will credit Endurance Nation's Out Season Program for that. Now I'm getting in a longer bike ride a week and the TSS points don't seem proportional to the fatigue I feel from it. So comparing shorter harder rides to longer easier paced rides with TSS points doesn't really work. It seems to me that rides of nearly the same duration can be compared with TSS to distinguish intensity.

I ran 4:30 for 32.5 miles with a considerable amount of intensity added that I'm getting very comfortable with. Again Endurance Nation has helped me with run speed but I feel that there is not enough run volume in their Out Season plans. Another day or two of easy running would make running better. If you go that route, make sure that you can complete the workouts in the plan for the first 4 weeks before you add anything. They are very tough and remind me a lot of Daniels Marathon A plan.

I would like to hold these volumes untill it gets warmer outside where I can put in more bike time. One of my goals this year is to be so much stronger on the bike that running afterwards seems easy. Obviously I would like to improve my swimming and running but I feel that the most bang-for-the-buck will come from cycling right now.

Lastly, I have been paying close attention to the amount of sleep I have been getting. I got sick during the last week of January and noticed that I was averaging less than 7 hours of sleep a night. To get more and better quality of sleep I've stopped drinking pop (soda pop for those of you that don't live in SE Michigan) after 4pm, started logging my sleep time and made a good effort to be in bed before 10pm.

TSS points is a way of quantifing a training session. It takes into account the duration and intensity of a workout to produce a number that is related to the amount of training stress that is put on a person.

In detail, here is an explaination:

http://home.trainingpeaks.com/articles/cycling/normalized-power-intensity-factor-training-stress-score.aspx

From Velonews:
Training Stress Score (TSS)- The TSS represents a calculated number that takes into account the duration and intensity of a workout to arrive at a single score of the overall training load and physiological stress created by that session. One hour of functional threshold (as hard as you can go for one hour) = 100 Training Stress Score points.