A little promo about Endurance Nation. I wrote this in their forum, when requested by the coaches to talk about what we found to be of benefit in the training approach.
Before EN [Endurance Nation – my virtual tri team and coaching service], I didn’t have an OutSeason [off-season]. Meaning, no triathlon focus to my physical activities. Usually, I would try a few winter running races, go skiing when I could, and start up a 24 week IM training plan for IM CDA [Ironman Coeur d’Alene] just after the first of the year. I began to realise that approach was just making me anxious in Jan, Feb and early March, and getting in the way of my skiing! There was no training specificity to the first 9-12 weeks in that approach, and trying to build long runs and rides that early, in the rainy Pac NW winter was just frustrating. I did just as well, if not better, the one year I didn’t start focused IM training until 7 weeks before my first IM!
While I was attracted to EN by their race execution philosophy, I’ve since learned that the emphasis on “minimize time, maximize value” of each workout has value not just for the time-crunched athlete, but also for someone like me, who is both a veteran trainer and an older athlete (two different concepts; veteran is someone with at least 5-7 years of consistent long-course training under his/her belt; older is whatever age you want to use, probably somewhere north of 50-55).
For the vet who still wants to improve, and probably has years, if not decades of “base” in biking and running, doing more volume will probably not help very much. EN’s focus on more intensive, shorter efforts, especially in the Out Season, offers a route to faster times on the race course.
And for the older athlete, who probably has significantly more need for recovery, doing less volume provides that opportunity. While top end speed is probably less in the older athlete, we still have opportunities to maximize our potential through judicious use of short, intense intervals. The EN program, designed for the time-crunched athlete, fits the bill nicely for different reasons for the older athlete, who might not necessarily be time-crunched, but whose ability to fit in massive amounts of training is restricted by other factors, such as injury, slower healing times, and reduced hormone levels (e.g., HGH, testosterone.)
I haven’t yet gone through a full season on the program, but I do have one OS and one IM result so far. No question, as a life-long swimmer, I was anxious about de-emphasizing that aspect of my training life. I saw NO drop off in my swim race [IM – shorter races seem to have suffered] times, however. And, my IM result was quite satisfying – on a very warm day (temps up to low 80s), I bettered my time from the year before by six minutes, when the temps had been in the 50s, and could have gone even faster if I’d had a reason to – I won my AG by 10 minutes, and just cruised my run home! At my age, keeping my times the same from year to year I regard as a big accomplishment, to say nothing of getting better.
Like you say, you want to slow down as slow as possible!