A nutrition question and a training question (running)

Your running is your priority, so focus on that. It sounds like your fit enough to do the Tri, assuming you’re a decent swimmer and cyclist. If you don’t know how to swim, you’ll need to take lessons and practice a fair bit, Do enough tri training to adjust to open water swim, assuming that’s the case. You will want to do some bricks , bike to run back to back, to get your legs used to the odd transition between sports. Have fun!
PS If you’re female, check out Women for Tri FB page.

This is when a good coach is worth the money. You're plans is too customized for normal plans.

summpear wrote: »

Hey folks, I'm looking at doing a heavier race schedule over the next 6-ish months than I've ever done, and I'm looking for whether you have good resources for nutrition athe race stacking.

Tentative races -
*half marathon early June. (Goal: kill my PR)
* sprint or Olympic tri early September (Goal: fun completion with friends)
* full marathon - early November (Goal: maybe a BQ?! Depends a bit of how the half goes.)

I have a great fitness base, I'm running low moderate mileage consistently (think 50 miles a month; I'll be a little higher this month because I've had some longer runs). I strength train and cycle regularly and have just this month put swimming back in the rotation.

My question is about training resources. There are training plans, but they all focus on single event plans and run 10-16 weeks. I won't have time between races to 'reset' training plans (specifically between the tri and the marathon). Any good resources or advice? I'm a more intuitive athlete and I've stayed injury free for 2 years because of my varied routines, but I *think* running a BQ time is in my grasp for the first time in my life.

Nutrition question - super simple - I want to be intentional about upping my game to being more holistic (I'm actually lousy at eating my veggies!) Do you have blogs or cookbooks or IGs or anyone that you like that I should check out? If I do these races, I'll look forward to eating very well...

Couple thoughts come to mind:

As mentioned by @dewd2, you might consider engaging a coach to help you with managing your training load.

Your planned race schedule is very doable and is a typical season for many multisport athletes. If a coach isn't in the cards, you could certainly manage this yourself depending on both your goals and your level of comfort with managing the cumulative fatigue that comes with a prolonged training build.

From your post, it sounds like your current activities include cycling and will include swimming soon, so there's plenty of time to build fitness in these areas to tackle a sprint or Olympic distance event. You mentioned that your triathlon goal is simply to have fun and complete it with friends, so I wouldn't be too worried if you are comfortable in the water and put in some consistent bike/swim time.

As far as the "big picture", a few thoughts come to mind. Many athletes who are planning to participate in multiple events over an entire season use a software tool (or their coach does) to help track and manage both fitness and fatigue. The one I use is Training Peaks. It is a paid service. Workouts can be loaded into TP in advance as part of a training schedule. Each workout is assigned an expected "training stress score" based on the level of intensity and duration of each particular session. TP then captures data from various devices such as watches, HR monitors, power meters, etc when the user syncs their device to TP following a workout. The result of this tracking is that over time, an athlete sees a graph of increasing fitness as well as increasing fatigue, based on the training stress that accumulates over time. TP calculates both acute training load (the stress of today's workout) and cumulative training load(the stress built up over the last xx days) and displays this as a graph. This allows athletes to see the impact of each days workout, whether swim, bike, run, and how those workouts drive both fitness and build fatigue. This is also very helpful as a tool for understanding how a recovery week allows you to shed fatigue while maintaining fitness. Finally, TP can be linked to MFP, so that an athlete can see the relationship between calorie intake and performance.

Since you are thinking about training from a longer term perspective, you might also want to read a bit about how you can manage your nutrition to align with the various phases of your training. One book that could help is Bob Seebohar's "Nutrition Periodization for Athletes". There are also a bunch of good online resources, including links to Training Peaks articles on the topic.

Hope this helps. Sounds like a fun season!

There’s a recipe book by Runners World “Meals on the Run”. “150 energy packed recipes in 30 minutes or less.”

There’s some nice recipes & pictures and each includes a good breakdown of the nutrition information so it’s easy to use alongside MFP. Recipes are also highlighted in certain categories eg vegetarian, low calorie, gluten free, ‘pre-run’, ‘recovery’ etc.

I like it (PS I’m training mostly for half-iron distance triathlon races this season)