90 days until USARA Nationals and we just completed the first month of our new training cycle.  I’ll call it the easy month, although it never felt easy.  Our training plan has been based on Don Fink’s book, “IronFit Secrets for Half Iron-Distance Triathlon Success” but modified to fit adventure racing activities.

In Fink’s book, he has three workouts: The Competitive Program, The Intermediate Program, and the Just Finish Program. Given our commitments and available free time, we are doing the Intermediate Program with an average of 9.4 hours per week spent training and a max week of 11.8 hours.  Some of the changes we made were swapping the swimming workouts for canoeing and the road biking for either spin biking or mountain biking.  With two small boys, we don’t want to eat into our evening family time so our longest workout during the week is 1.5 hours with one long workout every Saturday.  This is very similar to what I did to prepare for the Blue Ridge Mountain AR and I felt well prepared for that event.

However, I’ve reluctantly come around to addressing nutrition. So, for month 2 of our 4-month plan we’ll start looking at food.  I’ve recently read Matt Fitzgerlad’s, “Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance” which has led me to his follow-on book, “Racing Weight Cookbook: Lean, Light Recipes for Athletes”

I’m pretty sure that this is going to be the tougher month.  I don’t know why it is so hard to eat nutritious meals.  I guess it’s more of an issue of how convenient it is to eat bad meals.  Since I wasn’t sure if the first cookbook would have enough good stuff in it, I also ordered “The Runner’s World Cookbook.”  It was also highly recommended on Amazon.

What I really want is a cookbook that is 1 month of recipes, breakfast lunch and dinner with an attached weekly grocery list and calorie count/nutritional facts.  In other words, I don’t want to have to think about it.  Just tell me what to buy for the week and then give me daily recipes to follow.  Oh, and don’t include sweet potatoes…those things are disgusting.

If you’ve found a good workout or nutritional plan, I’d love to hear about it.  Post in the comments below.  And if you know of a good cookbook for athletes, post that as well. If you really want to know how our workout schedule is progressing, check out The Motivator box on the sidebar—>

It links to our training log on Attackpoint AR, training and competition logs for adventure athletes.

Lastly, if you want to check out these books, click on the links above and buy from Amazon.  They’ll send us a couple of nickels and that will go towards Nationals.