Last phase

Not so tired tonight, am not actually falling asleep on to my keyboard like I was yesterday. Small victory perhaps, but I will take it.

Today was an all around less hectic day than yesterday. As I hoped it was made up of:

• a bit of training;
• a bit of work around the house;
• a whole bunch of program writing. 

The program writing part of the day went pretty okay, despite taking up the bulk of the day. I got them all done with time to spare, which is always a nice and low stress way of doing it. For a number of my athletes they are coming to the pointy end of the first part of their season, Busso 70.3 in December, so these programs are important ones. In fact, like I mentioned last night, the programs I wrote today included the final phase of their build and then their tapers. Pointy end indeed.

With all my Busso athletes I am quite happy with how the build has gone. Obviously you write your programs around getting an athlete to a certain point for race day, but you never quite know if it will come together that way. There are just so many variables that can play a part leading to race day, an athlete's compliance to the program and their execution of the sessions just to name a few. It is very easy for an athlete to go harder than the program or take it too easy, miss sessions, do extra sessions etc. In fact many athletes do all those things and more. Obviously you keep track of the programs and adjust as necessary, but all the same it would be much easier if an athlete just did what they were told.

Assuming an athlete trains as planned, you can be pretty sure they will end up at the point that you had been hoping for, software like TrainingPeaks is remarkably accurate when it comes to that sort of thing, however, even then it is still not guaranteed. That is why when you get to this point in the last few weeks of training it is so great to see athletes exactly where they are supposed to be. Not all my athletes have been nailing their training in the last couple of months, but generally the Busso folks are on target.

Happy to claim that. Just a few weeks to go.