The Road to 2012

So the training’s been heating up here, unlike the weather which has been teasing us with warm, humid days in between icy days that are starting to drive me crazy out on the bike. I’m about to start my longest week of training before the big Lone Star Triathlon down in Texas (March 30th!). This has me out on the bike for about 11 hours total, swimming about 5 and running for 4 hours, with 2 hours of weights packed in there around the edges. My cycle moves back to rest next week, and then I ramp up for a couple more before my peak week before the race. This will be my first Half Ironman, but the training’s been feeling really good and with luck I’ll be able to nail all the little details leading up to the race and knock out a really good time.

In other news, David and I are both new members of POWERBAR Team Elite! We got the news a few days ago, and want to thank Powerbar for supporting our Olympic dreams. The toughest part about training so hard as a full-time athlete is that it’s often tough to fit proper nutrition in around Engineering classes and Dave and my duties as Residential College Advisors. Basically, we’ll be subsisting on meals in bar form from here on out.

For future posts I want to start including some of the raw details of our training, and laying out exactly what we’re doing to try and make it to the highest level. One of the biggest things that separates us from the other guys is the amount of reading and research we do on exercise physiology and kayaking in general. We don’t have the free time that some of the other kayakers do, but we do distinguish ourselves by training SMART. An update I really want on the site is the Training Library we use, to direct anyone interested to some of the best books out there on all of the many aspects of training at the Olympic level. There’s so much junk out there–I’ve spent tens of hours combing over different training guides and exercise physiology textbooks, and I think I’ve done a pretty good job boiling the list down to a select few from really knowledgeable sources. That said, tens of hours isn’t that long a time–if anyone has any suggestions for us to take a look at, shoot us an e-mail or comment on the post!