LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

Welcome to the start of another year. This is the time of year when many people look back on the past year, reflect upon how things have gone, and make resolutions to try and improve different aspects of their lives. I've never been much of a resolution person. It seems most people tend to make resolutions that are a bit unrealistic, and pretty tough to stick to. I am, however, a goal oriented person. I think everybody should have goals in their life. Whether it's for cycling, work, or just life in general, having something to strive for is important. Setting goals is one of the first steps in designing a season training plan. Goals should be specific, challenging, realistic, and something you REALLY want to achieve. Winning the Tour de France, at least for anyone who might be reading this, is probably not a realistic goal. Now, that said, it's great to have dream goals, as well. Something that is borderline crazy, but if everything fell into place and you worked your hardest, it just might someday, somehow be possible. In that case, winning the Tour might be a dream goal for some of you out there. My son is five years old and plays termite hockey. He has already said that one day his name WILL be on the Stanley Cup. Hey, I'm not gonna squish that goal. In fact, I'll do whatever it takes to help him get there. The odds are obviously against him, but it's great to dream. Your season goals, the things you base your training on, should be much closer to the realm of possibility. They have to be important to YOU, not to anyone else. Having the support of other people in reaching your goals is great, but you gotta wanna do it, otherwise it's just to darn hard. So, set some goals. Decide what you want to accomplish with all this training you plan on doing, otherwise, you might just wake up one day and decide it's a lot easier to not train. Set some goals, and don't give up on them.

Here's where the looking back comes into play. You've set some goals, you're excited to train and have a successful racing year, now what? You need a plan. One of the first things you should do while planning for the upcoming season is look back at last few seasons and ask yourself a few simple questions. Did you meet your goals? Did you have a plan? Did you follow through with your plan? What went well with your training? What went wrong with your training? Did you give it your all? Can you, or are you willing to, give more to meet your goals? How can you use these experiences to improve your training and racing this year? So, crack, or click, open your training journal/log and start checking things out. Did you spend adequate time building your base? Was your training load unrealistic, and you missed/skipped many sessions? Did you allow for adequate recovery? Did you feel consistently tired, or perhaps never tired? These questions and many, many more can be answered by going through previous years training journals. You did keep a training journal, right? If you didn't, you're missing out on one of the most valuable training tools you have at your disposal. With no training journal to look at, you will have a hard time answering some of those questions. If you don't know when you were doing what, for how long, and if it worked, your basically starting from scratch. Even if you've been doing this a few years, and think you have a good idea of what you did, you don't really now what to change to get the improvement your hoping for. Keeping a journal can seem like a chore, but it doesn't have to be. Make it part of your routine. Once it becomes a habit, it's not that big of a deal, and later on when you need some info, it'll be there.

Those are the first basic steps to getting your season started. Set some goals, come up with a training plan that will get you there, and use your past seasons training journals to help you decide which route to take to get there. Of course, there will be many obstacles and decision to make along the way. Hopefully, I'll be around to update the blog more than once a year, and I will post a little more advice on many things related to training. If you've got specific questions, or anything you would like me to write about, leave a comment or send an e-mail. Otherwise, I'll see you on the roads. I am really looking forward to this season, and have already started my little training journey. I've picked up a couple new clients for coaching this season, and I'm stoked to help them achieve there goals and rip some legs off of the rest of you Montana racers as well. I only have room for one or two more full time clients, depending on the level of coaching involvement desired. Contact me if you're interested. Here's to a great 2010, for me, at least, it's gotta be better than my injury and illness filled '09.