Five Ways to Plan Your Season

Simple ways to be smart about choosing races…

Planning your season properly is such an important job when you consider the blood, sweat and tears that go into your training. It should take careful research, thought and planning.

It’s not something you do on the back of an envelope. And you shouldn’t be entering races on a whim just because your mate suggests it (yep, I’ve done this).

To help you make smarter choices, check out our ​simple five-point list below.

Five Things to Consider When Planning Your Season

1. Location

Is the event somewhere you’d like to visit even if you weren’t racing? After all, you’re spending a lot of money to enter and travel there. You may as well go somewhere that you’ll enjoy. It’ll make the whole experience more positive and memorable for you and your family. Boggy field in the middle of Milton Keynes anyone?

2. Conditions

Does the race suit your strengths and weaknesses? We’re all naturally better at some things than others, so to maximise your chances of success and enjoyment you should choose your races accordingly. For example, if you’re great at hilly courses in hot weather, make sure you enter plenty of them. We all get a kick from doing well.

3. Excitement

If you’re not sure whether or not to enter a particular race, ask yourself this: Is it an event that you’ll really look forward to? If the prospect of racing doesn’t get you excited, the chances are it won’t motivate you to train hard either. So choose something better instead.

4. Meaningful Outcome

The more good reasons you have for doing a race, the more you’ll enjoy training for them. Therefore, seek events that offer the potential for a meaningful personal outcome.

Examples include:

  1. Does it offer the prospect of a new personal best or an age group medal?
  2. Is there is an inter-club or team prize?
  3. Do you have friends racing who you want to compete against or race with?
  4. Is it a special distance (such as Ironman 70.3) that motivates you to reach the finish line.

All of these examples will add meaning to your races and help keep you motivated.

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5. Minimise Race Stress

Are your races stressful in terms of travel, location, cost and accommodation? We’ve all been guilty of entering races and then later realising they’re a complete nightmare to travel to or there’s nowhere left to stay. Minimising stress is important if you want to race to your potential.

That’s all for this week. In next week’s blog, we’ll show you how to prioritise each race you’ve entered so that you can make sure you peak at the right times.

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Phil Mosley (Coach & Founder)
Phil Mosley (Coach & Founder)

Phil is a recognised endurance expert who founded MyProCoach in 2010 to offer smart training plans that still leave quality time for your family, friends & career - complete with highly-rated coach support (he has sold over 40,000 so far). Learn more here!

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Planning Your Off-Season

You can start our Off-Season (Fitness Maintenance) plans anytime you like.

They’re designed to help you maintain a good level of fitness when you’re not specifically targeting an event, such as, during the off-season, or anytime you’re taking a break from racing.

Planning For Your Event

For the best outcome, input the date for your “A” target race and the tool will default to a plan that will fill that gap nicely. If you want, you can then adjust the plan length to start it on a different day.

Note that you can still work in other, smaller races during your plan too!

Unlimited Athlete Price Rise - Dec 1st 2021

As mentioned a couple of weeks ago, after 2 hugely successful years of our Unlimited Athlete subscription with over 1300 active members, we’ve decided to increase our prices for the first time on December 1st.

The feedback has been outstanding (rated 5.0 from 100’s of testimonials), and recently we’ve also added further personal coach time… For example, our coaches now check your personalised training zones are set up correctly, and also keep you accountable by getting in touch if you haven’t logged any training for 2 weeks.

So, to maintain this great customer service and to support our coaches, on Dec 1st we’re increasing both price options by $5 per month, or by $4 per month if you pay annually (but for all existing Unlimited Athletes, to give a fair warning, renewals will not increase in price until Feb 1st, 2022).

Lock-In Prices, Plus an Extra $20-Off!

For Black Friday, we are also giving a bonus $20 off any new annual subscription! Our annual prices are going up by $4 per month, or $48 per year. This means if you sign up this week with our bonus $20 off, you’ll be saving $68 compared to our future annual pricing.

Which comes down to as little as $3.55 per week for unlimited training plans and ongoing certified coach support. We can’t thank everyone enough for all your support!

The longer plans start easier and progress more gradually. This has a bearing on the difficulty level you choose. For example, a 12-week plan starts off at a higher level than a 36-week plan because with 12 weeks left there’s not as much opportunity to build up slowly.
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