Monday: open

Tuesday: Masters swim morning /Strength and core training, evening

Wednesday: yoga, evening

Thursday: same as Tuesday

Friday: open

Saturday: swim drilling -or- climbing

Sunday: whichever activity wasn't done Saturday

Thanks, Dave

Dave, there are many ways to set up a week – I like to swim T/TH with weights. I like to run long on TH or FR and then ride long on Sunday. I can give you a 1,000,000 different variations of this week. Mostly you need to see how you can fit it all into your schedule – are you making two trips to the gym on T/TH for weights/swim? If yes, try to consolidate it if you can. Swim Masters – get out – hit the weights for 45 minutes, and then get to work. This will give you the chance to run or bike 60 minutes at night vs. 30. Frequency is another important aspect of training. Instead of 2x45 minutes of running during the week and one long run on the weekend, try to run 3-4-5 days of shorter duration. The more your body does something the better adapted it becomes. Just like getting in the pool right?
The big thing right now is to prep your body to be ready to train after the 8 week prep period. So essentially you are training your body to train. Once you have that prep done then you can get into specific cycles – I like to do big run weeks, followed by big swim weeks, followed by big cycling weeks. From mid-Oct and mid-April this is what I am doing. Once May comes around, my schedule gets more balanced and I am ready to race. I hope this helps!
Train Smart,
Mike Ricci

Born to Suffer
By Coach Erik Cagnina

The official D3 Sufferfest – Ohio style – Part II

The Players: Coach Mike Ricci and Coach Erik Cagnina

The Objective: Part 1 - Complete a _ IM on Saturday and an Olympic on Sunday

The Objective: Part 2 - Complete Ironman distance over the 3 day weekend: 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of biking, and 26.2 miles of running.

Coach, Iona and I got back to the house and Coach and I had about 40 minutes to relax before starting the drive up to Cleveland for the Indians game that night. The Tribe started 10 rookies that night – every positional player and the pitcher – and went down in defeat to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (yes, we DO know how to pick the juicy matchups!). After Coach handled the now infamous cell phone incident (details to be divulged ONLY in-person), we took off for my in-laws, who fortunately lived only a few minutes from next morning’s event, The Mosquito Creek Triathlon. After wandering around the back roads of eastern Ohio for a while (I am admittedly directionally retarded and had never driven to their new house from downtown Cleveland), we pulled into a gas station two minutes before it closed with not much more than a fart of gas in the tank. We filled up, found the house a few minutes later and settled down for a full five hours of sleep.
We pulled up to the race site the next morning and were some of the first people to arrive. D3 Athlete Howard Bernstein from Pennsylvania arrived a short time later and would be suiting up for this race in place of Iona to complete the D3 racing team. Now, as I mentioned in Part 1, this race was kind of cool in that I felt like I had traveled back in time to triathlon, circa 1978. And don’t get me wrong, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I enjoy a large, wellorganized race as much as the next guy, but this was something different and the atmosphere was somewhat unique to the current state of Triathlon.

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