Training Philosophy Evolution

I've recently had the opportunity to go through my earlier posts and I found it interesting to see how my training philosophy has evolved over the years. It seems like I've been slowly accumulating pieces of a complex jigsaw puzzle and trying to put together a picture of how training comes together to result in peak performance.

My first year of training I was heavily influenced by Joe Friel's "The Triathlete's Bible". From that book I learnt the basic principles of periodization and how to approach training with a grander goal in mind (microcycles, macrocycles and seasonal cycles, etc). My swim training, however, was the byproduct of Terry Laughlin's "Total Immersion" program. I totally bought into the idea of imprinting good technique into your swim stroke, while aiming for efficiency. Being used to the old college swim team suffer fest, this approach felt like heaven. The pool was no longer a torture chamber- hallelujah!

My first year results were mixed. I wasn't able to periodize as well as I had hoped due to race schedules and my inability to control the need for anaerobic workouts. Another important factor was that my overall fitness was really too low to have any semblance of a varied routine. In the end, I think most of my improvement can be attributed to the fact that I actually swam, biked and ran. At the level I was, any amount of training would've helped.

Heading into my second year of training I started reading a book by Brad Kearns, an ex-pro triathlete, called "Breakthrough Performance". The book promoted the concept of training intuitively and designing your training around key "breakthrough workouts". That sounded simple enough, and it would allow me to be less beholden to a schedule. I figured that since I couldn't stick to Joe Friel's heavily structured training, something more flexible like this might work better.

At this same time, my swimming was hitting a plateau and I started searching around for something outside of TI to take me to the next level. At that time Team TBB was destroying everyone in races around the world, so I hopped on the bandwagon and started looking into Brett Sutton's swim philosohpy. Unfortunately it led me back to where I dreaded most- hammering in the water. The thing with swimming is that you can build up incredible amounts of lactic acid in your muscles without risking much injury. For the most part, coaches take advantage of this fact and use it to destroy a psyche of a swimmer (while elevating pool specific LT tolerance to sky high levels, of course). It works in theory, but I was swimming solo and there was no way in hell I could've pushed myself to that level.

Heading into my third year, I've discovered Arthur Lydiard. I have to say that he is reason for a great deal of optimism. Unlike Hal Higdon (who's training I followed for my first marathon), Arthur Lydiard's teachings wasn't focused around specific races for amateur runners with specific amounts of time to train. Arthur's philosophies lay a foundation on how to train in general. The great thing about it is that it is based on very fundamental physiology, so the learnings apply to cycling as well (not as much to swimming, but thats a whole different post).

In a way, I feel that he has provided some critical missing pieces to my jigsaw puzzle. Now let's put it to work and see how it goes. As they say, race results are the ultimate barometer of a training philosophy.