I designed my simple workout-tracking spreadsheet way back in 2017 to help track triathlon training. I'd overtrained and given myself athletic-induced pnemonia that year, and in the aftermath, I realized that I'd done a ruinously bad job managing the three phases of triathlon training holistically.
I got exhausted, and then I got sick. That was stupid.
The problem is that I don't necessarily get sore when I switch sports a lot. So if I'm not careful, my total work load can sneak up on me from week to week. Most of the time when I get sick or injured, I can trace the cause to overwork the previous week or to stringing together too many heavy weeks in a row without a break. That was the case back in 2017, and it damn-near landed me in the hospital.
After a little research, I started using the following equivalence, which I built into my spreasheet as it foundation piece:
Triathlon Training Equation
100 yards swimming = 1 mile cycling = 1/4 mile running
I won't say that I haven't made any more training mistakes since 2017, but I will say that this equivalence has helped me a lot in terms of managing my overall work load. This in turn has helped me stay consistent as I've gotten older. I mean, they say, "No pain, no gain," but the reality that availability is, in fact, the most important statistic in sports.
Can't nobody beat Navy if they're stuck on the sidelines with an injury.
Anyway, you can find my spreadsheet here.
I'm only going to give you Viewer access, so if you want to use this thing yourself, you'll have to make a copy. For that matter, though I have no idea why anyone would want to go back through my training history all the way to 2017, I've left it all in there, so have at it if you're so inclined.
Notes + Lessons Learned
1. I train on a four-week cycle -- three working weeks then one rest week.
But because of Real Life, this sometimes gets messed up. I try to go by the way I feel, but hard experience suggests that skipping or delaying Rest Weeks is almost always a bad idea.
Unfortunately, exhaustion can be kind of a lagging indicator. Usually, I don't realize that I'm in trouble until after I already feel like dog meat. For this reason, I try to trust what the spreadsheet is telling me and rest on schedule, even if I feel good on a given day.
2. I retired from competition several years ago for a couple of reasons.
The first was that I felt like my knees were just shot. I didn't feel like I could run effectively enough to compete as a triathlete. Which sucks because I really like running. But it hurts, so what can you do?
The other reason I retired was because I just didn't want to focus enough in training to try to hit peak performance on specific race days. That's a whole science, and at the point that it started to feel stressful because I was trying to qualify for nationals or whatever... I decided let it go.
I don't need it. However many trophies I'm supposed to have as a 51-year-old man, I hit that number at least a decade ago.
But I do still miss running.
Anyway. I mention all of this because newer iterations of this spreadsheet have added hiking in lieu of running. This is why.
3. Leaving triathlon allowed me to get back into the weight room, which then created a different kind of workload, which is even harder to quantify alongside swimming and cycling.
Again, I try to go by how I feel. As a matter of reality, however, I tend to lean more into swimming and less into the weight room, both by natural inclination and because it's much easier to regain form in the gym than it is to regain it in the water.
At the end of the day, swimming well forgives a lot of sins in the weight room. Unfortunately, though, the reverse of that is much less true.
I've settled on two to three weight room sessions per week, depending on what time of year it is and how I feel. As I've gotten older, I've started doing four sets per movement, and that has helped a lot in terms of actual results. But that also means fewer movements. Oddly, I find that going a little heavier and doing fewer total reps also helps with recovery.
So my basic set looks like this:
-- 10 reps at basic weight
-- 8 reps at heavier weight
-- 6 reps at heavy weight
-- 12 reps at starting weight
That's very much still an endurance weight training methodology, but it does at least allow for some legit strength training.
I also superset everything, so I'll do, like, 4 sets of Bench Press, Forward Lunges, and Sit-Ups as a set-piece mini-circuit. Then move on to three different, related movements. I'll go through that for between three and five total circuits, depending on a given day's goals and emphasis.
I superset everything as a method of keeping my heart rate up at the gym. Because at the end of the day, we're training to swim across Long Island Sound and/or snowboard for an entire afternoon. These are endurance activities. And they are a very different proposition than training to rush the passer at max power repeatedly for ten to fifteen second increments.
4. I track skiing days for the same I track gym days. They put a very real load on the body.
Again, hard experience suggests that whatever else I might've been planning to do on a given day -- swim, lift, whatever -- just count a day on the slopes as equivalent to that planned training event, and you'll be reasonably close to equivalizing its overall impact on your body.
To put that another way, swimming extra in a given week to try to make up for lost time on the mountain has proven to be a mistake.
5. I was seeing a dietician up until recently. She suggested adding about 25-30 grams of lean protein within an hour of finishing a workout to help with recovery while avoiding all fats for that same hour. Apparently, eating fats shortly after working out can inhibit your body's ability to process protein. Anyway, I've added this into my routine via simple protein powder shakes, and it has worked like a magic trick.
Stupid thing to realize at 51, for sure, but this remains my best lesson-learned from the past year.
I think that's about all I've got for now, but if you've got questions, I'll be happy to answer them to the best of my ability. I mean, I don't know everything, but I've been training pretty seriously for a really, really long time, so I've learned a few things.
Good luck out there.
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