Am I Ready?

As I taper for my next A-race this weekend I'm asking question that many athletes face in the final days before the big event. Am I ready for this race? Last night I was reading the RSS feeds and came across this article from Joe Friel discussing the consistency of training. As I use the WKO+ software to track my progress it took me only few clicks to prepare the graphs that Joe reviewed on his website. So let's see how consistent was I this season.

Let's start with an overview of the training time / distance per week - not really on the list off what Joe discusses, but it gives a good view of how many hours each week I trained. The graph includes all swim, bike, run and strength sessions as well as races.

You can see few things from this graph - my training schedule follows the 3 weeks on one week recovery periodization. My top week does not exceed 10 hours of training - this was conscious decision on my part. I did not feel I can squeeze the 10+ weeks into my already busy schedule. I was not 100% consistent mostly due to illness and business travel. But overall it does look fairly consistent even with the crazy B-Fit-B-Day thing I did in May.

Now the time and distance is all nice, but it does not really tell us much about the training stress this put on my body. So next up is the Training Stress Score by week.

The few dips in the training stress are related to two times I felt bad and came down with flu and one is related to business travel and office workload. Now let's see how this translates to the fitness progression.

Compared to the graphs shown on Joe's website my graphs are showing fairly consistent training and build-up to the race. What I do not know is whether should have perhaps gave myself little more rest after A-race half marathon at the end of April. It looks like my fitness build-up slowed at that point. Oh well I definitely put the training in the bank and we will see on Sunday whether I can cash it.

If you wonder which race I'm doing - it is one of the best organized races in my area - the legendary Steelman in the Nockamixon State Park.