Since I wrote Fast After 50 I’ve gotten lots of queries from aging athletes about how to set up nine-day training “week” as I describe in the book. If you’ve read it you know that I suggest this for athletes who find they aren’t recovering as quickly as they did when younger—which is most all 50-pluses. With the standard seven-day training week typically only two hard training days can be included due to the need for extended rest. Whereas when younger the athlete may have done three hard days in a week. So, essentially, by going to a nine-day week you can do more high-quality sessions throughout a training period and still get plenty of recovery time. The downside is that such a training schedule may not fit into your lifestyle, especially the common Monday through Friday workdays with weekends off. The first day you have to do a long training session and be at work by 8 a.m. you’ll fully appreciate the dilemma. So the nine-day week works best for over-50 athletes who are retired or have a flexible lifestyle.
Most of the inquiries I’ve gotten on how to do this have come from triathletes. Setting up a nine-day training week for a triathlete is a challenge. The bottom line for most triathletes is that it comes down to doing two high-intensity (HIT–near and well above lactate/anaerobic threshold or FTP) workouts in two different sports every third day with two light (very easy up to aerobic threshold which is about the bottom portion of HR zone 2 using my system) workouts on the two days in between. So the pattern could look something like this:
Day Workouts
1 run HIT
bike HIT
2 swim easy
run easy
3 bike aerobic threshold (or easy)
swim aerobic threshold (or easy)
4 run HIT
swim HIT
5 bike easy
run easy
6 swim aerobic threshold (or easy)
run aerobic threshold (or easy)
7 bike HIT
swim HIT
8 bike easy
run easy
9 bike aerobic threshold (or easy)
swim aerobic threshold (or easy)
The easy days following the hard days may be changed to one workout only on a given day to allow for even more recovery time if you find fatigue is quite high with two easy sessions on those days.
After 18 days (two of these weeks) it’s likely time for an extended period of recovery before starting the next period with a slightly increased training load. For most over-50 triathletes five days of such recovery is adequate, although some may be able to get by with four or even three. Notice that days 8 and 9 are already easy-session days (which could each be made into single workout days). By adding another three days of easy workouts (usually one each day) a five-day R&R period is ready to go. After that you start back over with Day 1.
Of course, this isn't meant to be a plan designed specifically for you or anyone else. It's just a sample of one way of doing it. I'm sure that with some thought you can come up with something that better fits your unique needs.
