Back, sort of

I'm back, sort of... It's ironic that my last post was about training setbacks and having to miss long periods of training considering that's what I have been going through this month. I've had to miss several weeks of training due to sickness, work, school, and then a back injury.

The sickness was just a seasonal bug that took me out for a week or so. The work and school come as no surprise as we near the end of Q1 when traditionally we launch major projects at work and the quarter comes to an end at school. This quarter my school classes have large final projects so the workload steadily picked up in February. Then I tweaked my back a couple weeks ago while I was throwing away the trash. I was in pain for a day or two and then I wasn't able to move around too much for a week or so (bending at the waist hurt). I'm finally getting back into it now but now I need to try to assess where I should be at in my training plan.

As for not blogging, well, the school and work thing kept me busy, but what's also been keeping me busy has been a new site I've gotten involved with called TriCrowd.com. It's a triathlon community site that some triathlete friends and I put together last year for fun and now we're trying to build it up. We basically built a website that we would want to visit ourselves. We started out by taking the blogger feeds and twitter feeds that we were already reading and bringing them together in one site. From there we added on a race finder app, recruited coaches to write original training articles for the site, and now we're working on triathlon deals for our readers. I've been pleasantly surprised at the response so far; we thought we would be the only ones visiting our site and we were just doing it for fun but the response from the community has been so overwhelmingly positive that we're now really working hard to deliver great content for everyone. You should head over to the site and take a look around, if you like it be sure to 'Like' us on Facebook and follow our Twitter account.

That's it for now, more to come soon! I'll try not to let a whole month go by without posting next time.

Video with Robbie Ventura: Training Setbacks with Joe Friel

Over on the 'Coaches Corner on Versus', Robbie Ventura and Joe Friel (expert endurance coach and founder of Training Peaks) talk about an issue common with all amateur triathletes: How do you deal with training setbacks? What happens if you have to miss a couple of workouts during the week? What happens if you have to miss a lot of workouts due to work, travel, or family?

Joe recommends that if you miss less than 3 days of training, just continue on as if nothing happened. You shouldn't try to come back and have an epic training day in an effort to "catch up" on your missed training. Your body has a hard time adapting to this sort of heavy sudden stress and you can end up setting yourself back further with injury, burnout or other over-training problems. You just have to accept the fact that these workouts were lost, and it's best for you to just move forward.

For longer periods of time you may have to make adjustments in your overall training plan. If it's more than 3 days, like a week, you may need to take a step back and repeat the week that you missed. If it's more than a week then you may need to step back a full cycle, and if its more than 3 weeks of training you may need to go back to your base period to re-establish your basic elements of fitness.

I've had to miss 2-3 days of training at times due to travel or other work/school commitments, and generally if I know I'll have to miss workouts what I try to do is load up a little bit more on the front and back end of that missed period to make up for it. It seems like that may not be the best idea. How about you guys, how do you handle missed workouts?