Have you done what you NEED to do so you can do what you WANT to do?

This time of year it can be a wonder if how you feel in training is actually going to translate to better results this season. Most people train in doors through the winter months and do not get a chance to test themselves against their competition, or the clock in a race like situation.

I remember going into most of my early season races. I would be constantly searching for objective feedback to make sure I had done what I needed to do in order to do what I wanted to do. Until you can get out there and race, or do a hard training session with your friends, you won’t REALLY know. However, there are some pretty cool things you and your coaches can look at to make sure the training you did this season has had positive changes. If it hasn’t, that’s OK! It’s still MARCH and plenty of time to course correct for this season.

A lot of winter months I will try new workouts with my clients, or new programs such as Trainerroad, or Zwift. It is based in science and experience, but at the end of the day there needs to be a leap of faith to see if the new changes are working.

I also like to use testing but like to test my athletes at times when then don’t even know it. J These charts give us an ongoing look at what things look like at any given duration. They take your best effort no matter what the date, what the workout, etc. It looks through all your efforts and takes your best results and charts it.

One of the things I do is look at how we are doing relative to the entire last season. In March, that means we are normally off on a lot of the duration's. This is the case because we are measuring your current winter fitness against all your races from the previous year. Not a fair comparison. So we do another look to see how we are doing relative to the same date range a year prior.