You’re supposed to do something every day that scares you, right?
Every day from now to May 5, I’m going to scare the crap out of myself by training for the inaugural Rocketman 70.3 with absolutely no training plan. When I feel like I need to train hard, I will. And when I feel like I need to rest, I will. I’m training purely on feel.
The genesis of this was that every plan I’ve looked at (the free ones anyway) have much lower volumes for swim and run than I’m looking to do in training. I want to show up on race day thinking those distances are short. I don’t want to use the plan as an excuse to be lazy, either. I think I have a tendency to do that, sometimes rationalizing it by thinking, “well, that’s what the training plan says to do.”
So I started off the first couple of weeks of training just throwing my own workouts together, and I kind of like it. In fact, I’ve stopped looking for a program.
I also like being able to stir the pot and mix things up. For instance, last night I just Googled “3000 yard swim workout” and used the first one that came up with a little bit of variation. I like not necessarily knowing what’s coming next.
We’ll see how it goes. I wanted to really shake things up from the past year, starting with a different marathon plan in the fall. Having no plan at all is definitely different. But my run and swim volumes are up from last year, and I’m not bored or exhausted yet.
Having some swim coaching has definitely helped the motivation there because the stroke is changing and I know I’ll need a lot more yards than I’ve every done previously to be able to put that on auto-pilot.
I’m still looking for some gold star non-training plan workouts to throw myself as surprises here and there. Suggestions are welcomed!