Make a plan and stick with it

This morning I did seven laps of the strength circuit and paddled my boat for 80 minutes.

Through last week, I had been working out three days per week.  This week, I'm bumping it up to four.

Having competed at a rather high level in a couple of different sports since I was a teenager, I find it sometimes takes as much discipline to work out "only" three days a week as it does to get in over a dozen workouts in a week.  I think it's fairly common for somebody training for athletic competition to ask himself or herself, "Am I doing enough?"

It's a valid question, inasmuch as there's some minimum level of preparation necessary for almost any endurance-oriented competition.  But there's a danger of going overboard with it, too.  The worst thing you can do is start worrying about your volume of training as it compares to other people's volumes of training.

Having trained for slalom races all by my lonesome in a whitewater-poor part of the country, I rarely saw other slalom racers except on the race days themselves.  In my first couple of seasons, I would get to a race and watch a competitor's warmup drills, and I would think, "Oh no, I'd better do that, too!"  It was a silly reaction that led to some pretty silly race performances.

Fortunately, as my experience grew, so did my confidence in my own routines, and that self-assurance has carried over into the open water/marathon racing I'm doing now.  But I'm still not entirely immune to the impulse of comparing myself to others.  I watch the blog of a kid who made his first U.S. national team in flatwater sprint last year, and when he describes the workouts he and his fellow Olympic hopefuls are doing, my knee-jerk reaction is usually "Oh my God... I'm not doing anything even close to what they're doing!"

It takes a few minutes to start hearing that more rational voice that says "Just relax.  They're trying to make the Olympic team.  You're not.  Your training is perfectly commensurate with your goals."

And that's really the point I'm trying to make.  As your competitive season approaches, take a look at the events you'll be entering and define some reasonable goals for yourself.  Consider your age, and your physical ability to withstand training, and your schedule of commitments.  Draw up a training plan for yourself that fits within all the constraints, and stick to that plan.

Don't worry if you don't have the time or ability for a lot of workouts.  Greg Barton said as much in a Face Book post at the end of this past year:

I paddled 2310 km in 2011 - about half of what I did per year in my prime. I still had some decent results. Training is a game of diminishing returns. If you can consistently get on the water 3-4 times per week, you'll see good benefits from it.

So far I've stuck to my plan, which was to train three days a week until this week.  For the next little while I'll be doing four.  The most intense few weeks of training, leading up to my biggest races, will see me in the boat for five and possibly six sessions a week, but for the majority of this season I'll be at four.  And that's fine with me.  After all, while paddling is important to me, it's not all I do.