How do you recommend dealing with a busy racing schedule during the seasons? I’ve got two series of 3-5k races for 16 weeks during summer with only a 4 week break over Christmas, and then towards the end of this we need to build up to a number of longer distance races of between 10 and 30 km.

Dave, New Zealand

If you ever saw the movie “Wargames,” the computer  in the movie was confronted with the problem of winning thermonuclear war. The problem is that when nuclear war starts there is no winning. The computer concluded,  ” [nuclear war is] A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?”

To some degree, that is your answer. There is no good way to race year round and be successful. Eventually you are going to fail.  It might not happen this season. It might not happen next season. But eventually the bottom will fall out. For a while your head and heart will keep things moving but eventually your body will catch up with  you and force you to slow down. At some point, you will either start going slower and slower at the races or fatigue will set in and you will give up the sport and do something else.

By the sound of your question, however, you are not planning on going that route and want to know the best strategy to do your best in the most races possible so you can come back and do it again (hopefully faster) next year.

The plan we recommend is that you do your summer races. After that you need to shut it down for a few weeks. Force yourself to take a break. Get out of the water. Go on vacation. Do anything but paddle for a few weeks. That does not mean that you should just sit around doing nothing. It is fine to be active but give yourself a break from the paddling and structured training. Remember – it is not only OK to shut it down at the end of the season it is beneficial.

After you shut things down for a few weeks go back to your base training. Long and slow. Every year you need to go back to base and rebuild your foundation. During this time you can still go to the long races but, with the exception of a few races, use them as training races. Train right through them and use them as long workouts. As things ramp back up next spring go ahead and do like the pros – pick and choose a few races that you want to focus on . The only thing you do not want to do is try to do well at every race all year round. That is a recipe for disaster.

Another thing you can do, if you have the time during the week, is to shuffle the schedule we recommend and do your endurance paddling during the week and use your short weekend races as your intensity (e.g. interval) workouts. The one thing you want to watch out for in the spring, even though the races are short,  is too much intensity. Some people can handle it but doing intervals or other hard workout during the week then racing every weekend might also push you over the edge.

Roch