Ready for the Islands

Part of being a Playtri Coach is coaching at the annual Playtri Hawaii Training Camp on the Kona Ironman World Championship course.  It's a full week of beautiful scenery and serious hurt.

I leave with Read (he's my boyfriend, so you'll be hearing this name often) on Friday for 10 days away from the mainland - Read does the camp as an athlete while I coach. Our awesome bike mechanics have my bike all packed up and ready to go, so now I just have two more days of chilly temps before 82-83 degrees and 100% humidity!

While I'm looking forward to warmer weather and no snow, coaching a camp can be tricky when it comes to planning your own training.  During training camps, we essentially forfeit our own training for the duration of the camp, because we spend a good deal of time swimming, biking and running with the campers as we coach them, and it would be unfair to them for us to exhaust ourselves with our own training ahead of time.  That's just part of the job, but it's still a week's worth of junk miles when you look at it from the coach-as-athlete's perspective.  So how do we manage this?

This best you can usually do is follow the "do no harm" mantra and UN-do as little work as possible.  Accept the fact that you won't be making gains and try not to regress.  This is done through a few means: lots of sleep, good hydration, good nutrition, and a lot of compression apparel. The better I recover DURING camp, the better I'll be able to pick up training once I return.

So, there are a lot of compression tights in my suitcase.

Today I'm getting in the pool (again...), and probably hitting the weights.  We've got our youth and junior teams running and swimming at the "J" tonight, so I'll be headed that way once I get through workouts and private lessons this afternoon.

One more day until we board the plane to paradise - one more day to get some good load in before I get to focus on our amazing athlete clients for a week!  It's hard to be sad about missing load when you're doing it to coach athletes on the most famous triathlon course of all time.

Happy Wednesday everybody!