baselines

Yesterday was my first race since Marine Corps in October. Before that it was a sprint triathlon in early September. It was soooo nice to be racing again!

For me this race was two fold though. 1st it was to see where I am at in a almost all out effort race at this point in the year and in recovery from knee surgery and 2nd, to get the racing engine going and have some fun. I have only been able to get a couple of time trial tests in since I started running again this spring, so I needed to know where I fall right now.

Creating a baseline when you start training is important. I should say, it is important if you want to make sure that the plan you are using is helping you improve. Here is a fairly easy way to create baseline tests that are repeatable from month to month to track your progress:

Swim - (depending how far along you are in swimming) a 500meter or yard swim, or a 1000 meter/yard time trial for time

Bike - 10 mile time trials are good on the bike. Its enough to really tax you but is short enough to be repeatable without breaking you down too much at a all out effort and needing prolonged recovery time

Run - 20 minute time trial, see how much distance you cover and what pace you held during the TT.

(good warm up and cool downs should accompany the tests)

Ideally these tests (especially the bike and run) should be done in a repeatable spot so that terrain is the same each test. The goal is to monitor improvement or lack of improvement. Is what you are doing month to month in training helping you become better? worse? the same? And then you can adjust accordingly.

If you dont want to go for time and mileage, another easy way to track your progress is to pick a particular ride, or run course that you use frequently that you can do a all out effort when you want to test and retest yourself.

Testing is a important, and often overlooked piece of the puzzle in figuring out how to get from point A to B. Say you are aiming for a particular time goal this year, example, currently at 8:30 pace on the run, and your goal is to be at 7:30's by the end of the season. A good way to make sure you get there is to do a time trial every few weeks to make sure that you are improving enough with your current training plan to hit that goal come end of season.

For those focusing on one sport or the other, while trying to maintain in the other 1 or 2 disciplines, TT's can also be valuable in making sure that while focusing on say, the run, you are not losing speed on the bike or swim.