Today it seemed that I was starting to feel withdrawal symptoms and a little bit of yearning for some more of the Pete Plan training. So today was the beginning of the 3rd cycle for me of the Pete Plan.
When the title for this post, “A New Beginning,” came to mind, I searched on the internet for an appropriate image among the “free to share and use” choices, which was associated with the phrase. One of the images that came up in the search was similar to the above, only it included the words “Part 2”. I liked the image because of the elements of storm, water and its depiction of the big boat Noah built. So I looked for the website where the picture was hosted and found it at the Torah Family website. I might listen to one or more of the relevant video presentations later, to find out what it’s about. I’m trusting that it is something good, so a link to the website is included in the previous sentence.
The first session of each cycle of the Pete Plan is an 8×500 R3:30. I re-read the Pete Plan looking for any advice relating to whether any adjustments should be made if a person takes time off from doing the Plan and according to Pete’s guidelines, “It’s best not to take extended periods off training if you can help it, but life has to get in the way sometimes. A good method to get back into the plan after time off, for whatever reason, is to back off your targets by 1 second in pace for each week you have had off. So if you have been away on holiday for two weeks, take 2seconds off your pacing targets for this cycle, and build back from there.”
So I could have “backed off” by 1 second in pace, since I took a week off. But I didn’t TOTALLY stop rowing. So I decided to NOT back off on the pace and see if it felt ok. It felt ok. The target pace for the first 7 intervals, therefore, was 1:54.1, based on the resulting average pace for all 8 intervals of this session in the previous cycle. The resulting average pace for all 8 today was 1:53.2, which will be used as target pace for all but the last interval the next time this is done in (hopefully) three weeks.
The training session was preceded by a 15 minute warm up and followed by a 15 minute warm down.
Happy trails to you.