This Saturday: Spring is coming!

I have been getting on the nerves of my family, friends and colleagues by saying that “Spring starts on Saturday”. By now, all I get is a resigned rolling of the eyes – almost everyone knows that tomorrow (Saturday) I’m going to fly to Majorca to my first ever training camp.

Photo by jmaclynn

In the past, I just didn’t have enough vacation time to justify taking a whole week of that for some decent training. Now that I’m self employed, this  decision is a bit easier, and I still get to spend my long summer vacation with my wife.

So this year I’ve decided that I’ll try a bike focused camp. The way the winter weather has been so far, this was a pretty smart plan. I’ve complained enough about the harsh winter weather on this blog, so I’ll just mention that running on protected trails in the forest is still pretty much impossible. I don’t think I’ve ridden outside since December – because we’ve had solid snow cover since then. So the camp is coming at the right time to jump-start my biking and training in general.

Goals

As this is my first time in a camp, I’m not sure what to expect, but since I’ve decided to go with an established company, I’m sure they’ll be able to offer a great environment for training.

Both Saturdays will be travel days and I probably won’t be able to get much done besides that, so I basically have 6 full days on the island. In order not to kill myself, I’m probably going to have at least one day that I’ll take completely off or just do some very light volume – that leaves me five days for training.

As I haven’t had a very solid base training (biggest weeks have been in the 7 hour range), I don’t think that anything more than maybe 20 hours is prudent. (It’ll be interesting to see how soon I get swept up in training monster volume.) Most of this should be focused on riding the bike and getting a solid base for my IM focus after the camp. So here’s my breakdown of the 20 hours and the distances I think I can do:

• Bike: 16 hours (5 days), about 400-450 km in group riding with at least one ride of more than 150 km
• Swim: 2 hours (2-3 days), just easy
• Run: 2 hours (3-4 days), again just easy

Running and swimming will be strictly for maintenance, and if I feel shattered, I’m more than willing to scale that back. If I’m feeling good however, I’ll add some more bike volume – it would be great if I could get more than 500km in.

Apart from training a lot, I’d really like to enjoy the atmosphere and relax a bit. I know there’ll be some stressful weeks ahead before the big summer vacation.

Actually, there is one more goal: Don’t do anything that’ll jeopardize the rest of my season. In order to scare myself a bit, I’ve already scheduled my next race: a local 10k a week after I’ve come back. That still gives me some time to recover, but hopefully keeps me from doing something too stupid.

Any suggestions on nice tours on Majorca or places I should visit? Are you going to be there as well and would like to get together? Let me know in the comments – thanks!