Triathlon Training Planner Now Available
OK Folks, here it is: The final version of the Excel Triathlon Training Planner!
What it’s for:
Planning the training for large events (marathons, Ironman races, ultra-races, your first half-marathon etc), or for a series of smaller races (a whole bunch of 10k races in a year, or several sprint triathlons, etc) can be really daunting. You want to get to the peak of fitness for the right races, without over-cooking it and ending up injured.
Many athletes use what’s called a periodized training plan to build their fitness up, while allowing their bodies time to recover and grow stronger during their training. Done right, this can get you to levels of fitness and endurance that would otherwise seem impossible.
The trouble is that building a periodized training plan can be a real pain. It’s difficult to figure out how much time to allocate each week, and how to vary your workouts accordingly.
This MS Excel Triathlon Training Planner takes away all this aggravation. In as little as five minutes, you can build a full, 52-week training plan that’ll help you focus on your goals and plan how best to spend your training time to get results.
Key features:
- An overall annual plan, so that you can determine the key races during the year that you want to focus on, and which will be treated more as training events.
- Fully customisable workout design - create individual types of workouts for swim, bike, run, or anything else, and define these in terms of durations and if applicable, distances. Set individual units-of-measure for all distances, so for example you can mix track work (measured in metres) with road running (measured in miles)
- You can define up to 16 different weekly schedules using your workouts - a “standard” one, and then optional ones for each different training periods from your annual plan, one for recovery weeks, and up to five completely custom ones.
- A Calendar View that selects weekly plans that match the training period, or if one isn’t available, the “standard” one as a default. Or if you don’t like the schedule applied to a particular week, you can manually select any other one that you’ve defined.
- Any part of the calendar can be over-written with custom details - you can apply your common sense in preference to what the programme tells you!
- There’s a printer-friendly version of the calendar that omits the distances.
- The instructions and copy-write pages are the only ones that are passworded. All others are protected to prevent accidental damage, but there’s no password.
- Each page that needs it has instructions at the top for ease of use.
Anyway, the MS Excel Triathlon Training Planner is available via KAGI , and is priced at just £6.49 (about $10 to you over there).
Sounds like a bargain, considering how much head-scratching and confusion this could save you as you plan to achieve your fitness goals!
Here’s what my beta-testers said about the earlier versions . . .
So if these people sound like they’ve had the same problems you have with planning your training, then buy the Triathlon Training Planner NOW from my Kagi store!
Thank you, that saved considerable time having to do a lot of calculations using Joe Friel’s Triathlon Bible. Would have been nice if I could have added color to some of the blocks, but alas, most of the page is write protected. Thanks again.
G’Day Champ,
It would be great if we could add extra workouts to the drop-down lists withing Week’s Plan - eg: Swim Technique, Yoga, etc.
Sensational.
Nath
Ian Gould , on January 18th, 2008 at 11:14 pm Said:
Hi Karl,
This is a great piece of work and it has really motivated me to plan my season properly. I have loads of questions, comments and requests, is there an address I can mail you at?
micayer , on September 10th, 2008 at 12:01 am Said:
Hi Karl,
The spreadsheet you created above is fantastic. I wish I had come across it earlier in the year. Will you be updating it for 2009?
Keith , on October 8th, 2008 at 9:39 am Said:
Hello Karl,
Great document you have produced, but like others I would like the ability to add colour and additional tabs for training records, race times etc. to make it all encompassing for the season.
Not being an Excel wiz like yourself, generating a spreadsheet from scratch would result in me not finishing it until April and loosing all my winter training in front of the pc.
Would really appreciate a copy with a little more freedom.
Thanks and take care.
Jon Ford , on December 12th, 2008 at 10:15 pm Said:
Fantastic! Great effort on your part. Thanks so much for sharing it. Would agree with the above. Clearly its not good for novices to have access to areas that would ruin the formulas, but a little flexibility would be good. And is it just me, or does the spreadsheet list “swim,” “bike” and “bike” instead of SBR?
shebaduhkitty , on December 20th, 2008 at 8:33 pm Said:
Cool spread sheet, still trying to figure it all out, text overlaps on page one so hard to read instructions. Also it has swim, bike and bike… where is run?
B , on March 23rd, 2009 at 3:04 pm Said:
Cool spreadsheet. I tried adding a monthly calendar but it is locked. Is there any way I can do this?
Tod , on May 25th, 2009 at 12:55 am Said: Edit Comment
Hmmm… Link appears to be broken. Under construction for 2009?
Karl On Sea , on May 25th, 2009 at 10:20 am Said: Edit Comment
Tod - Sorry about that - I need to get it re-hosted. In the meantime, I’ll email you a copy.
Matt , on May 27th, 2009 at 7:33 am Said:
Dear Karl,
I blundered onto your site somehow looking for bike reviews, but stayed to check it out and very much enjoyed it (as well as lock your bike). I now live in Singapore where belive it or not you can leave your bike poorly locked and it will still be there most likely.
Anyway, if you have time would you mind sending me a copy of the training planner when it’s ready for release?
Cheers
Karl,
I really like the weekly planner view. Could I get the file? I’m not too sure how complex it is, but want to start my training out right this year.
Thanks,
Chris
Karl On Sea , on January 11th, 2010 at 11:11 pm Said:
Sorting out hosting this week. In the meantime, thanks to users’ feedback, I’ve:
o Added the highlighting function to the Annual Plan
o Made all workouts completely customizable - you can even select different units of measure for different events in the same discipline.
o Allowed a whole stack (16, in fact) of different weekly patterns to be defined - a “standard” one, and then optional ones for each different training period, one for recovery weeks, and up to five custom ones
o The Calendar now selects weekly plans that match the training period, or if one isn’t available, the “standard” one as a default.
o Any week in the calendar can have a different weekly pattern applied to it, though once you do that, it’ll lose the ability to auto-populate that week, so use this function with caution.
o Any part of the calendar can be over-written with custom details, though again, this does degrade it’s ability to do things automatically for you.
o The instructions and copy-write pages are the only ones that are passworded. All others are protected to prevent accidental damage, but there’s no password.
o Each page that needs it has instructions at the top for ease of use.
It’s still possible to construct a full annual plan in about five minutes, or you can really go to town with lots of different weekly schedule patterns.
Matt , on January 15th, 2010 at 1:32 pm Said:
I had your old training planner and really liked it a lot. The improvements look awesome-and just in time for me to start working out again. I cant wait until you can get it on-line so I can download it. Thanks for all your work.