Hitting a Peak – The Secret of Racing Success

You may remember me posting about my PMC Chart earlier in the year, saying that all was going well as I built towards a peak ready for my first race.

The data from this gives me an overview of my training and charts my levels of ‘Fitness’, ‘Freshness’ and ‘Training Stress’. The plan for any race is to enter it as fit as possible but also well rested and therefore fresh. If you don’t train enough or don’t train consistently then you won’t be as fit as you could be, but if you train too much or pile on the pressure too much just before a race you will be fatigued and won’t perform as well as you should. I think I hit it just about right this year, so here’s my PMC chart to prove it.

2013 PMC Chart

The green line show short-term training load so I tend to ignore that for the most part when looking at the big picture.

The blue line shows longer-term training load, the higher it is, the more training I have been doing and the idea as far as I am concerned is to gradually increase this as a race approaches. I don’t want it increasing too fast as that would mean that I’m ramping things up too quickly which will likely lead to an injury or burn out. The higher it is though, the fitter I should be.

The Red line shows my Training Stress and is a measure of how well rested I am. The higher it is the less fatigued I’ll be.

The little yellow stars indicate where races were during the season.

As you can see I gradually increased my training load throughout January, February and March to hit a peak just before the first race of the season. As it happens I was actually ill for this race and missed it so was forced to have quite a big rest after it anyway. I then ramped up gradually until May when I raced again and did well, winning my age-group. I had a small rest after this race but was soon back to training and managed to bring my fitness levels back up to a peak just before my race at the European Championships in June. Once again I raced well here, winning my age-group.

I now had a few months until my next race so had some downtime and a bit of a rest before gradually increasing my training load up to a peak just before the World Championships in the middle of September. Once again, I was fit but well rested for the race and did well.

I’ve since had quite a bit of time off with no proper structured training. I’ve been fairly active still, but have also let my diet slip. I was feeling ready to start getting back into something a little more structured ready for the winter base training phase, but my recent mountain-bike crash has put that on hold for just a bit longer. Hopefully next week I’ll start easing myself into some proper training though so that I can start  next year with my PMC chart scores just a little higher than they started this year.

Tags: TrainingTriathlon