With our A race now nicely chosen (panic!), we can next go about looking for some challenging B and fun C races. We’ll also start working on setting up a more structured training plan in the next few days. However, for now lets just start training. It’s Base Building time. Yippee! We love base building as it gives us an excuse to go slowly, I mean really slowly. We only want to focus on technique and on building up distance.
Below is the link to an article I found about base training. In a nutshell, we are after training at aerobic heart rate. A rough formula to determine your aerobic maximum heart rate is apparently 180 minus your age. Personally, I don’t use my gadget heart rate monitor much and instead rely on my build-in heart rate monitor called Nose Breathing. If you can still just breathe through your nose, as opposed to having to revert to mouth breathing, you are working out aerobically at 75 to 80% of your maximum heart rate. That’s the upper limit of your aerobic training.
Our base building phase now means 6 to 8 weeks of training a minimum of one workout per sport per week. In addition we try to also get a bit of strength training in. The swim training can be completely focused on technique with no intense sets or intervals. Great!
And don’t forget to log all your workouts in your training log. This will help your motivation and you will be less likely to come up with dodgy excuses for skipping sessions.
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