The Anatomy of a Big Week

Over the past seven days, I've been doing nothing but training. Not a bad life. Here is the Anatomy of a Big Week.

1st: Take off work. I am an 8am-5pm employee of a large home builder (not a good industry right now, I know), so the first thing I did was to take off from work the entire week. This meant turning off the phone, setting the 'out of office' message on the email etc. I needed plenty of time to train, recover and focus.

2nd: Round up training buddies. Fortunately Trevor Glavin was able to join me for the majority of the week and Tom Obrien and James Walsh hooked up with us for a number of workouts. The motivation of this crew was a critical piece of meeting the week's demands.

3rd: Find a great home base. It's February and cold in most places, but not here in Arizona. With plenty of sunshine, mountain biking, road biking, trail running and lakes to swim in, AZ is the ideal spot for an early season triathlon training camp.

4th: Train. The week started off with 24hrs of Old Pueblo where we started out blazing, but fell victim to a tough crash that left one our teammates needing stitches. Fortunately, our team mate was OK and we were better off in the long run as we were super under-prepared for the cold, snowy conditions...yes....snow in Tucson, AZ. After pulling the plug on the race, thawing out our bodies and washing up our wet, muddy gear, we headed out for a long road ride through Cave Creek, AZ and down to Bartlett Lake. We wrapped up the 5hr ride with a 1hr transition run through McDowell Mountains the last 25mins of which was pretty close to race pace and left me way tired, but excited that I could push myself that hard after a long day. Only by getting lots of food and rest, the big week will officially and successfully end for me tomorrow with the Desert Classic Duathlon.

5th: Savor and Carry the Momentum. I am satisfied with the 32+hrs of training (17+hrs of road biking, 6+hrs of mountain biking, 6+hrs of trail running and 2hrs of swimming). Now, my plan is to recover appropriately and carry this fitness and mental "high" through the upcoming weeks of training.