The dawn of a new year.  New hopes.  New dreams.  New resolutions.  New goals.  Back in my 4-H days we lived by a motto: To Make the Best Better.  Pretty good words to live by and great words for starting a new year.

For me those words have significant meaning coming off of 2015.  Last year I broke just about every personal record possible, including both 70.3 and 140.6 finish times.  It was my best year to date.  By a long shot.  So what does 2016 hold?  Hopefully making the best better.

Last year I maxed out at about a 230 FTP on the bike.  I would love to see that be closer to 250 by mid year and up into the 260-270 range this fall.  So once again I’ve turned to Sufferfest to bring the pain.  Their plan has you ride six days a week with three hard rides and three easy / recovery rides.  I’ve been experimenting with it over the last few months to see what happens when I drop the recovery rides.  I still worked out on recovery days, just not riding.

Instead, I’m attempting to build a better run base this year.  My bike mileage more than doubled from 2014 to 2015 and as a result my bike performance increased dramatically.  This year I’m hoping to do the same with the run.  I took a hard look at several different training plans and the one that interested me the most was by BarryP over on Slowtwitch.  His plan calls for running six days a week with ratios of 1/2/1/2/1/3.  I started it out in January with runs of 3/6/3/6/3/9 and it seemed to work well with the Sufferfest rides.  I used the 3 mile runs coming off the bike on M/W/F and then do the longer runs on T/TR/S with a rest day on Sunday.  Since then I’ve worked up to 4/8/4/8/4/12.  I’m doing almost all of my running at a low heart rate / slow pace for now.  I went back and looked at two comparable 8 mile runs, one last September and one last week.  Since then I’ve managed to drop my heart rate from 155 to 140 while holding just under a 9 minute pace.  Good stuff.

Oh, and for the swim?  I’ve been trying to swim once or twice a week just to keep up some fitness.  Once I get my bike and run where I want them the swim will be the last frontier.

This week is race week.  We’ll head down to Galveston on Friday for the 70.3 race on Sunday.  After a few months of training I’ll finally find out if it’s paying off.

Here’s to a great 2016.  I hope you hit all of your goals and smash a few PR’s along the way.