XTERRA Trail Races

I am getting excited about the XTERRA Trail race series that starts in October. I have registered for the 1st race which is on October 4th, it is a 5K race. That is a good distance to start the series and the distances go up with each race.

I have started training for the 1st race, even with my sore back. It will be like having a cross-country season, I love it. I'll keep doing my tri training, but with adding Roy Benson's workouts to my schedule it should help me with the trail races.

I even got a new pair of Brooks Adrenaline ASR trail shoes for my trail running. They are really good shoes, I have an older pair of them that I still wear, but now I can rotate trail shoes for training.

Plan Modification

I have modified my Tri Plan and have substituted Roy Benson's running workouts in the place of the plan's running workouts. By doing this I will start to get some easy speed work with his Heart Rate intervals instead of just running slow minutes every running workout. I will be using 142 bpm as the upper limit and 124 as the lower limit for the Heart Rate fartlek runs.

Hope this energizes my runs. To start with most of the runs will be 2 miles then increase from there.

Plans for the Coming Season

As you know if you read my previous blog entry that I have been using
a training plan that I found on the beginnertriathlete.com website. I
am doing a Sprint Tri training plan because it isn't as difficult to
keep up with as Long Course, etc. training plans.

I haven't been doing a very good job keeping up with the sprint plan
even though it is easier than the longer distance plans. I guess since
I haven't had much success with the swim workouts due to a lack of
available pool time I have let the whole training plan slip.

School is back in session now so maybe I will be able to get some lap
swimming time in shortly. I still intend to do the tri training just
because of the multi-sport aspect of it. My training plan isn't a
complete failure or anything like that, I just don't seem to stay on
the schedule laid out in the plan. I usually substitute running for
swimming and I need to get the swimming going.

Most of my running is still on trails and I think that helps my back,
not as much pounding as on pavement.

I intend on running the GA XTERRA Trail Race series starting in
October as well as the "Twilight Zone Tower of Terror 13K" at
Disney's Hollywood Studios in Orlando on October 25th. Of course all
of this hinges on if I can overcome this nagging chronic back pain.

We will see how it goes and I will update the blog again soon, at
least sooner than I did this time.