Which Way Will Your Season Go?
photo credit: piermario

Every January is a special time inside the world of Endurance Nation, as we release the next version of our Ironman® and Half Iron training plans. While the members of Team EN always get the latest and greatest versions as part of their membership, each new generation of public training plans is also updated. 2011 is no exception, as we’ll be pushing out version 8.0 of our long-course plans, with revised workouts, online support in the “living library” that is the EN Training Plan Support Wiki, and our latest addition: Season Planning Guidance — we have captured our season planning methodology, in written guidance, spreadsheets, and screencasts, so you have the tools you need to adapt your EN training plan(s) to YOUR race schedule.

Why Include Additional Guidance?

EN athlete is essentially a self-coached athlete. In our world, we have found that the most successful age group athletes, across the entire spectrum of age, experience, etc., all share one common thread: self-sufficiency. Among other things, these athletes understand how to adapt their plan to their racing schedule.

Putting our season-planning methodology on paper not only forces us to be crystal clear (no magic coaching wands here!), it also empowers the other 1,000 members and training plan customers to do a better job of helping themselves and each other. Now that we are all on the same page, we can begin to truly connect and move forward as a community. The Season Planning Guidance is simply the next installment of this commitment to advancing the self-coached athlete.

Stacking EN Training Plans Across Your Season

A full season inside EN consists of four (4) parts: the OutSeason, Transition, General Prep and Race Prep. You can read about each in more detail in the FREE Online EN Training Manual, but we rank them in order of importance:

1. OutSeason — 20 weeks — The biggest bang for your buck. The OS is our best tool for making you much, much faster than your former self. With no volume goals, we can hit you with lots of intervals and redefine what you consider “work” to be. Best part? You get it all done in 6-8 hours a week, leaving you plenty of time to be a rockstar at home, on the job, and elsewhere.
2. Race Prep — 12 weeks — This is where we take that Fast you built in the OS and add race-specific fitness and execution skills on top of it.
3. Transition — 1-2 wks — Somewhere during your season, you will need to stand down to be able to ramp up to maximal race fitness. We recommend after the OS, as it’s 5 months long. This is a period of relatively light, unstructured training. More here.
4. General Prep — 4-8 wks — As the weather begins to warm up, you have more hours of daylight, and we begin to build Far on top of Fast. This option fits in between the OS and your Race Prep should your season and A race give you enough room.

Please read this post that Rich wrote a few months ago about how to stack the plans above across your season. The Season Planning Guidance, now included with all of our training plans, captures this guidance in a suite of tools, allowing you to do our season-planning-smart-guy thing yourself.

No other Half and Full Ironman® training plans in the triathlon coaching space include such a comprehensive suite of tools to help you adapt your training plan to any combination of races. Period.

And the Season Planning Guidance is parked within our Training Plan Support Wiki, a growing library of resources to support your training plan, yet another EN training plan exclusive that sets us apart from the competition.

Ready to start training and planning the EN way?
Go here to purchase an Endurance Nation training plan, on sale for 30% off Jan 3-9th, 2010.

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