The Offseason... Is it Over yet?

We spend hours, days, weeks and months training our butts off, we are tired, sore and cranky but we love the feeling and wouldn’t change it for the world. For me that is usually true from January to September, or October in this year’s case, basically goes from the time we start training for our first race til the end of the season.

Somewhere in the middle of the season I start ‘dreaming’ about the off season, thinking how it will be SO nice to get a break; run, swim and bike without a Garmin or a watch and enjoy the fall (which by the way is my favorite time of the year down here in Georgia). As I get closer to the end of the season I find myself dreaming about the ‘off season’ more often, this usually fades out two or three weeks before my last race, at that point I start getting ‘depressed’ that my season is going to end and I don’t know what I am going to do for the next three months.

My coach likes to give us 2-3 weeks off, that is the time to do whatever we want, no structure, no plan just do whatever you feel like doing and take a break from the crazy world of triathlon. Well, I am not a very flexible person, if you keep track of my blogs you will soon realize that I am a planner, I like to know when and where I am doing whatever it is that I am doing and last min. planning or change of plans are not welcome in my lifestyle. That doesn’t mean that I wont adjust, we are all adults and have learn that life sometimes throws you through a curve, as much as I dislike it I will adjust, but my perfect world is surprise free.

So you can imagine how crazy I go during that time, which coincidentally is where I am right now, no plan, no purpose. I use these weeks to get back into my pilates/core training, it just sets me up for a good routine once I get into fall training (some people like to call it offseason, others base season, I don’t really like the term since that would imply I am off and that doesn’t work well for me for obvious reasons).

This is also the perfect time of the year to spend quality time with the kids, there is always a Fall Fest somewhere close by, not having to worry about a weekend schedule makes it even better for me and the family to visit as many of those as we can. Our weekends jump start with a soccer game on Saturday morning and from there we just head to wherever the day might take us, there is always something fun to do in this great weather.

Everybody gets a pumpkin

I also use that time to eat whatever I want, I am very good at eating the right things once I am in season, some might call me a bit anal, but I have been around in this body long enough to know that I don’t do well if I drink a lot the night before, which means I basically waste the next day training and possibly a couple more since that is how long it takes me nowadays to recover from a crazy night. Same applies to sweets, I can have a sweet hear and there while I am in season, but I try to stay away from those. So for 2-3 weeks I eat everything and anything I have craved during training. Sami thinks I am crazy, but this works well for me, at the end of that period (aka TODAY), I am so sick of eating this stuff that I have no issues walking away from it for a while. I feel tired and lazy, although there should be no reason for me to be tired since I don’t do much, but whenever I feel like eating some of this ‘bad stuff’ during the season I think back on how I felt, how that is just not functional for my training and for the most part I can walk away without Oreo cookies (just to name one of my weaknesses). 

That period is almost over (thank GOD!), my body is already craving structure, some training and a healthy diet. The next three months (or fall training as I called it earlier) are going to include a lot of core strengthening, I like to take 2 core/pilates classes a week and I am looking forward to getting into TRX.

I will also do a lot of running, I will have a separate post about this in the near future, but my biggest area of opportunity in this IM (and any triathlon) is running. If I want to have a solid race and stay competitive I need to improve my running. So I will be freezing my butt off (hopefully I can add ‘little’ right before butt at some point in the near future after logging all those miles) but I will be out there. Last year I improve my running a lot and it was part of it due to the running volume I did during this time of the year, we are going for the next level which means more days than none you will see me running around the Windward/Webb Bridge rd area… if you see me please honk and wave, I am sure I will appreciate the distraction.

Nobody said it would look pretty