How to Plan Your Offseason
It’s not just about taking one, you have to mean it
by Chris Bagg
It’s not just about taking one, you have to mean it, too
Every year we start around this time we begin to harangue you about taking an offseason. We’ve told you how the pros do it. We’ve told you how you should approach it. But until today, we’ve never taught you how you should plan your own offseason. We’re doing this because one of our athletes raced Kona a few weeks ago, took a short recovery week, and then began moving towards Indian Wells 70.3, her last race of the season. But then things started feeling off. Workouts were either way harder than she thought they would be, but then a few times she knocked the stuffing out of her intervals. Over the past weekend she had a few tough workouts, and we decided together to ditch Indian Wells, start the offseason now, and get some rest ahead of 2024, during which she’s going to tackle Ironman New Zealand on March 2nd. With an Ironman that soon (four months from today, dear reader), we had to nail our offseason planning, and you are reaping the benefit.
Today we’ll guide you through how to plan an offseason so that you actually begin next season both fitter than you began last season, AND more rested. If those two things feel contradictory, well hell, you have come to the right place, voyager. Today we’re gonna cover the following topics.
1. A good offseason starts with a good season review
2. What’s the goal of next season and does that change your offseason?
3. What your offseason includes
4. How to stick with it
5. How you know it worked
A good off-season begins by reviewing this season
In order to get somewhere else, you need to know where you’re at. This fact is elementary for almost everything. If you’re trying to get to the grocery store, it helps quite a bit to know where your HOME is before you head to the store. Sure, this is less of a problem in the age of the pulsing blue dot, but the metaphor still lands (does it? Please tell us it does): it helps to know where you are before you go somewhere else. Working with your coach (or just asking yourself), answer the following questions:
What was my favorite aspect of the season?
Go nuts here, but make sure you think about what was favorite. You’re thinking of it right now, but part of you thinks you shouldn’t write “popsicles.” Fuck it. Write “popsicles” if going to get a popsicle after a hard, hot ride or run was your favorite part of the season. Stop editing yourself and just be honest. What was your favorite moment of the season? For your author, it was arriving in Hayward, Wisconsin on the Friday before the American Birkebeiner. I parked my rental at my Airbnb and walked to main street, reveling in the clear cold air, the joyful clatter of cowbells, and the palpable sense of excitement thrumming the small north woods town. Even writing these words now I get a small surge of joy, imagining that moment. My 2024 will be about trying to recreate those feelings where I can. So how to make that actionable? I will only take part in events that make me feel that sense of giddiness I felt that afternoon in Hayward.
Where did I make mistakes?
Think about the moments during this past season when you wince because you know you made a choice that hurt your training and/or racing. For me the list is pretty darn consistent from year-to-year:
Trying to fit too much into too little time
Not taking the time to fix the [insert piece of equipment here]
Thinking there is always time to make up the training later
Not organizing things so that strength training can actually happen each week
You notice a theme? Ha, yeah, TIME, which eventually makes fools of us all. I spent a lot of 2023 being made a fool of by good old implacable, never-ending time, and I want that to be different next year. Contrary to popular belief, fixing this issue for me isn’t about being more efficient, it’s about choosing to do less, both in my life and in other people’s lives. So rather than just wallow in the knowledge that sometimes my clock-eyes are bigger than my clock-stomach, I’m gonna turn that into an affirmation about 2024: I limit the things I do to only what is necessary for my happiness and success as an athlete, coach, business owner, friend, and partner.
What should stay?
OK, we’re getting into the really helpful stuff, now. Think about what worked for you in training, what made you feel STRONG.
4+ hour skis in the final six weeks before the Birkie.
LOTS of double-poling in my roller-ski sessions.
Swimming 3x/week even though I don’t race triathlon any more kept my body working
What should go?
Some of this got covered in “mistakes,” but maybe there’s more. Is there a kind of training that, no matter how much of it you do, just…doesn’t seem to move the needle? It may not be that that kind of training “doesn’t work,” but it could be that it doesn’t suit you, you haven’t done the work underneath it to make that training useful, or it just may not speak to you as an athlete. You may have trouble convincing your coach that aerobic endurance training isn’t for you, but if you have hammered away at VO2max intervals or anaerobic capacity work and only gotten fatigue for your trouble, then maybe it’s time to get away from that stuff.
What’s the Goal Next Year?
What is the big, scary goal you’ve got on your calendar for next season? Mine are:
Top 100 at the Birkie (means skiing a 2:30 or faster, probably, YIKES)
Top 10 at the Rift Gravel in Iceland in July
Ride with a little more…verve at Oregon Trail Gravel Grinder
Most athletes would look at this list and tell me that I clearly need to work on speed, since two of my goals require, well, getting faster. I don’t agree. In 2023 I didn’t prioritize my training in the manner I wanted to, and as the spring unfolded my commitment to long rides was…spotty. I know that for me, going fast comes from a significant volume of endurance work (that’s probably the case for you, too). If I look at me “what should stay” list you’ll see that all three are about volume and consistency.
Once you know what you want to do next year, then you need to shape your offseason around it. If your goal in 2024 is going to require some big hours or high intensity, then what you need to do at the end of this season is to REST. What if, on the other hand, your goal is around improved technique in either swim, bike, or run? Then your offseason should include a focus on technique or skill work. Do your transitions (pardon) suck? Well, schedule some sessions in your local park where you PRACTICE. It blows our mind how few endurance athletes perform skill work, and the offseason is a great time to do it.
What it Includes
First of all, it includes REST. We won’t belabor this point, since we have talked about it AT LENGTH before, but you absolutely must rest. Did you do mostly Olympic-distance and sprint-distance races, or races that were under three hours or so? You probably only a need a week of ZERO training. Olympic to 70.3, with a marathon in there? 7-10 days, for sure, of NO training. Ironman or (gulp) multiple ironman races? 10-14 days, absolutely. Endurance athletes often chafe at this, but we’ll trot out our old chestnut: if you can’t take a week off you are an addict, not an athlete.
Next? Your offseason includes 2-3 weeks of EASY, unstructured training, ideally with a skill focus. Can’t bilateral breathe? This is your winter to do so (it doesn’t take long). Always skip your strength sessions? Let’s set that habit now to get to the gym twice a week. Feel like you can never get out of 3rd gear on the bike or run? Let’s do some SHORT high-cadence or fartlek work while cycling or running. If you don’t have an answer, here is what should go in your next offseason.
REST (see above)
Strength training, but begin with light weights and proper movement. Hire a personal trainer for a few sessions to teach you how to lift properly. That will be fun and it’ll be nice to be social in your sessions for once. Make it a habit.
Spend 3-4 weeks on relatively unstructured, light training. I always tell the athletes I work with that they should try to do each sport 2-3 times per week, lift twice, and only do as much of each sport that is fun and enjoyable. Once your attention begins to drift, it’s time to shut it down for the day.
All told, your offseason should take about four to six weeks, depending on how long your total rest period was. By the end of it, you should find yourself pretty excited about the upcoming season.
How To Stick With It
OK, this is the hard part. You’re a type A person. Your whole life the equation has been simple: work hard, get the result. You’ve made that work in your professional and academic lives, and your guess is that that is what happens in endurance sport, too.
We’re sorry to tell you but that’s not true. Cruelly, it did work for a little while when you started the sport, so you would be forgiven for thinking that that linear relationship (hard work + time = reward) is going to work forever. After a season or two, though, something odd happens: your improvement becomes more undulating, requiring periods of rest and rejuvenation to reach new heights, and that’s what your offseason is (you should take a midseason break, too, but we’ve written about that elsewhere). Right now you’re thinking great! I can stick with this, no problem. But think back to the last time you took a break, due to sickness, injury, or stress.
Not pretty, huh? We’re guessing that, perhaps, like most endurance athletes, you struggle to take your foot off the gas. But again, if you can’t take a week off of sport you are an addict, not an athlete. So how do you stick to something that is going to feel deeply unsettling?
By leaning into the unsettling part. We bump into this while coaching swimming, too. We’ll make an adjustment in a swimmer’s stroke, have that swimmer try out the new adjustment for some distance, and then ask them “OK, how did that feel?”
“Weird,” they say, an expression on their face halfway between confusion and fear.
“Good!” we reply. “Weird is good! Was what you were doing before working?”
“No,” the swimmer says, slightly grudgingly.
“So can ‘weird’ mean ‘trying something new?’”
“Maybe,” our athlete says, even more grudgingly.
We understand. Change is hard, and for most of us, doing it the way we were doing it, while certainly not perfect, felt…comfortable.
Is comfortable working for you anymore?
No? You’d like to get off the plateau you’re on? Then begin to embrace to discomfort of not training for 7-14 days. It won’t kill you. And it WILL make you stronger next season. So the message here is to come up with a mantra or saying, something you can push back on when the demons begin to whisper to you that you need to stop resting and blast some FTP intervals (even though your event is 8 months away). Something that helps, something real. Something that actually makes you feel in control of your training, rather than it being in control of you (sound familiar?).
“I decide when I am going to push in my training and when I am going to rest, and that pattern makes me a stronger athlete long term.”
How Do You Know if It’s Working?
One concession we’ll make to Type A types is that it IS really helpful to know if your resting is actually working. This is a hard one to measure, but we have two ways you can do it, one of the short term and one longer term. The first is implementing some kind of aerobic benchmarking and maintaining that approach through the offseason. Aerobic benchmarking has been around ever since endurance sport has been around, and goes under so many different names: “fastest easy pace,” “aerobic decoupling threshold,” “aerobic threshold,” the “Swedish Aerobic Readiness Test or S.A.R.T.” Yeesh. Basically we are training at a very moderate effort and tracking heart rate response. You can track lactate response, too, if you have access to that measuring ability. But whatever you do, you should perform this benchmark every week during your offseason period, which is, as we’ve said, about 4-6 weeks long. The test can look like any of the following:
Swimming, cycling, or running at the top of your endurance zone (make sure you and your coach agree on what this means) and track your heart rate for 15-20 minutes after a solid warmup. Also make notes about how you feel subjectively. Perform this assessment every week and see what happens. It is very helpful to have a secondary metric (pace, power, speed) so you can see what is changing. Often at the end of a season an athlete is TIRED, and HR response is somewhat depressed. You will know you are getting ready for the season when HR starts low and STAYS low, and the subjective metrics are “I feel great.”
Swedish Aerobic Readiness Test. You can read more about this over on Gordo Byrn’s Substack, but basically it’s a short ramp test with some Tabata-like efforts at the end. In order to do this fully you need a lactate monitor, but just HR works too:
10-20’ WU
5’ @ 50% of FTP
5’ @ 65% of FTP
5’ @ 75% of FTP
Get average HR for each step, and then take lactate (if using) after the 5’ @ 75% of FTP.
3’ of 30” @ FTP, 30” easy. Get average HR for this 3’ section.
Write all of that information down and also make subjective notes of how you feel
Perform the test every week. Ideally you see HR and lactate generation come down over the course of the offseason. This is also a good test to repeat at the start of training blocks. If you do it and HR and lactate are elevated, you are NOT ready to tackle a tough week.
CONCLUSION
This is a lot of stuff! But a good offseason serves a lot of purposes. Executed effectively, a good offseason will:
Help you start this season fitter AND fresher than last year
Give your poor body and brain and heart a break after a tough year
Give you the space to rediscover your joy and enthusiasm for the sport
Give you time and space to focus on things such as family, work, and other pursuits—in other words, a balanced existence
So start making a plan right now. If you want to hire someone to help out with this, book one of our coaches for a consultation!