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Is Taking is Easy During the Winter Stupid?

Wednesday, 05 March 2014 00:10

By Tony Zamora (usatriathlon.org)

Over all the years I’ve been training and coaching, I hear the same question year after year. “Should I be training in the winter?” I recently came across a post in a popular training forum with the same question as well, and the overwhelming response was that you should take it easy between December and March, allowing your body to recover and then slowly build back up for the next year’s racing season.

I am completely against this thought process! Not only will you lose most of what you’ve...

gained over the last year of training and racing, but you’ll be way behind your competition that actually took advantage of the winter months to get in quality training.

Now, note what I said. Quality training. There are many schools of thought regarding what winter training should look like, with the most known method being LSD — long, slow distance — training in your program. As someone who grew up in California and then later lived in Florida, I adopted that philosophy for many years. Now living in Chicago, where it’s pretty cold December through March, I now favor intensity versus volume in my winter training.READ MORE