You Need a New (Annual Template) Plan

Stop wandering aimlessly with your training and get where you want to go

There’s a moment in comedian Mike Birbiglia’s show My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend where he tells the story of his first kiss, which he thought was going to take place at an amusement park. I heartily encourage you to watch the full show, above, but if you just want the good part skip to 21:25) .Full of funnel cake and cotton candy and hot dogs, however, he gets on a ride with his putative first kiss called “The Scrambler,” with terrible results. At one point during the scrambling, Birbiglia hatches a plan to keep from throwing up and ruining his chances at that first kiss. You can watch the moment below, but (spoilers) he quickly realizes his plan isn’t going to work. “I need a new plan,” the adolescent Birbiglia thinks, moments before “coating the inside of the car with my homemade carnival salsa.” He did not get his first kiss that day.

We so often wait too long to hatch an effective plan, realizing in the moment of crisis that we should have approached this goal differently. For Birbiglia, his amusement park dining choices exposed his abysmal (or absent) plan. For those of you reading this endurance sports blog, wondering what the hell I am talking about, the same moment might occur during a race, when you realize the manner in which you’ve prepared won’t get you the result you desire. Changing your physiology for an endurance event takes a long time, with each session moving you incrementally closer to your destination. Most people, however, never create an effective map to get them where they want to go as directly as possible.

Let’s change that.

An Annual Training Plan (ATP, but not adenosine tri-phospate, of course, that’s another very important ATP) can do this for you, but, like many things in this word, you need to actually create one and then actually use it. Too often when we are trying to change we acquire the tools of change, but not the actions of change. Sadly, following this path means a computer and a garage full of things but no change in your actual life. Remember that the next time you look at that Nordictrack aging ungracefully in your attic. Today we’re going to walk through what should go into an ATP, how to create one, how to use one, and then give you three different versions you can use to set up this season’s training.

  1. Proactive versus Reactive

  2. What Goes In It?

  3. How to Use an ATP

  4. How to KEEP Using an ATP

  5. Resources and Downloads

Proactive Versus Reactive

The best thing a good ATP does for you is to keep you *proactive* versus *reactive*. We all know a reactive athlete or person outside of sports: they always have a new thing or process or mindset that they claim is going to make the difference this time: ketones, or fasted training, or a shake-weight. They move from thing to thing steadily throughout the year, but somehow they go nowhere at all. This constant shifting from gadget to gadget, approach to approach, mindset to mindset (or, worse, coach to coach or physical therapist to physical therapist) means that you are always starting over. Physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual changes take time to become effective. If you cannot get on board with one particular approach for an entire season, we can guarantee that you’ll be right back here 365 days from now in the same spot.

It doesn’t have to be like that.

Reactive athletes and people are very often looking for a silver bullet, something that will save them or change them TODAY. I’m sorry to say that a) it doesn’t work like that, b) no one is coming to save you, and c) MOST plans, regardless of their quality, will be more effective if you stick to them than switching constantly between different plans and approaches. Yes, you read that right: a mediocre approach that you commit to you will have better results than standing in one place and spinning in a circle all year, which is the visual metaphor you should take away from this assertion.

By being proactive, however, you insulate yourself from reactive thinking. The reactive thinker *can’t* commit, for whatever reason, but the proactive thinker always has something by their side. When adversity appears (and it will appear), having a plan you’ve committed to becomes a kind of pedestal or foundation. It becomes your rock. Whenever you’re not sure, you simply return to the plan and see if you’ve strayed from it. If you have, get back on your path and be patient. Great athletic bodies take years and sometimes decades to develop. A good annual plan reminds you that improvement is incremental, and the only thing you have to do today is follow the plan. The folks in AA say “one day at a time,” and if that can work to save people’s lives, then it can also work to make you a better endurance athlete.

What Goes Into a Good ATP?

First of all a good goal. We’re not going to get reactive and talk about good goal setting here, because that deserves an entire post (or book, or series of books) by itself. But the very first thing on your plan other than your name should be the destination. Write down:

  • Primary goal: what is the ONE BIG THING you’d like to accomplish this year? If you don’t accomplish it, you would be disappointed.

  • Secondary goal: what is one thing you feel is possible this year beyond the primary goal that would be a really nice goal to accomplish

  • Tertiary goal: what is one thing that would be unexpected but great if it happened this year?

Next, we need to figure out the timeline. Is it by the end of the season, 364 days from now? Is it 16 weeks away, in April? Happily, if your goal is around a particular event or race, this part has already been done for you. It’s OK at this point in the process to establish outcome goals, like “I want to go sub-9 at Challenge Roth in July.” Outcome goals can lead you astray during events, but in the planning phase it really helps to have a very specific target. We’ll do performance goals next. Below your three goals, write down the three changes that need to happen for you to accomplish that goal. Our Challenge Roth athlete, Broseph, usually swims about 70 minutes for a 2.4 mile swim. He writes down: “swim 3800m in 65 minutes” as one of his performance goals. Next we need to ask what needs to *change* in Broseph’s training to make that possible, which is where Broseph’s coach (or you, if you are Broseph’s coach) comes in. A good coach will know how Broseph will get to the goal—not the way that they got to the goal, or the mythical average athlete will achieve that goal. Maybe Broseph needs to do more pace-specific swimming at 1:41/100m (1:32/100y). Maybe it’s a technique issue standing in Broseph’s way. Maybe Broseph can swim at 1:41/100m just fine, but lacks the conditioning base to hold it longer than 1500m or so.

Regardless, you now have a big goal to achieve on one day (your outcome goal), a medium goal you will work towards over the course of several months (building your ability to accomplish the outcome goal, your performance goal), and one that you will apply as often as possible in your training (your process goal).

Hmmm. I said we weren’t gonna go in depth on goals. Oh well! Onward.

How to Use an ATP

Now you need to begin plotting your season. You don’t need to do the whole year (more on that in a minute), but you should probably do at least half the year, and at least through your outcome goal event. You’ll need to decide which sports and what intensities you will focus upon during different parts of year, and this is the moment when we break it to you that you cannot improve at three sports AND get stronger all at the same time. You’re gonna have to rotate your focus. If you’re a single sport athlete this is a little simpler. Instead of choosing which sport, you’ll pick a certain energy system that is a weakness for you. Are you fast for short distances but run out of stamina quickly? Sounds like a fatigue resistance block. No problem hanging with the pack but you get blown away in the final minute of an event? Sounds like you need to work on speed. Been stuck on a performance plateau for ages? Could be technique holding you back.

We see more and more from exercise physiology research that the best approach to training is a balanced one, where all energy systems and intensities get used throughout a training year. Obviously, however, you cannot incorporate recovery, endurance, tempo, sweet spot, threshold, vo2max, anaerobic capacity, and max power/speed work in three sports every week. That would be terrible. At any given moment in a triathlete’s existence, two of the disciplines will be more in an aerobic/endurance maintenance mode while you aim to develop the third sport. Then, after a few training cycles or 6-8 weeks, you’ll assess what you’ve been working on and decide if you’ve done enough on this particular sport, or if you need to shift to a different sport or different energy system in this sport. Coaching triathlon becomes a puzzle—if you’re working on developing one of your sports for 6-8 weeks, you may not have too many of those cycles throughout the year. It’s why you need an ATP in the first place—you don’t have the time to be reactive the way we described above. Your ATP should set the course for a good portion of your training year—there’s always the opportunity to assess with your coach if you need to take a different approach, but that is best done in July, after you’ve had a solid amount of time to see if your approach is working.

How to KEEP Using an ATP

I would guess that many coaches create ATPs at this point of the year, but then, around April, realize they haven’t looked at their sheaf of plans in a month or two. This is normal and not as bad as you might think. Back when I was still a teacher, all of the young faculty would desperately build intricate syllabi for their new classes, working long hours to develop something that would head off the terror of standing in front of 25-35 teenagers who a) might not want to be in your class in the first place and b) are expecting you to actually *teach* them something. Many of those beautiful syllabi didn’t survive September. Why? Too intricate. Your ATP should be a *rough* but useful guide. It is not supposed to outline every single session for the year—that’s unsustainable.

A good ATP (one that you will use the whole year long) is a rough guide, telling you what to focus on, but not what to do on a day-in, day-out basis. It’s your job, as the coach or the self-coached athlete, to look at what needs to be improved and then decide from there. But if you try to make your ATP so exact as to detail all of your athlete’s workouts, then a) it’s gonna take you too long to create and you’ll begin to resent it, b) you don’t know how your athlete is going to respond to your training and so a lot of your work might get wasted, and c) the tool is supposed to help you do the work—not replace the work. Lewis Carroll, in *Sylvie and Bruno Concluded*, depicts an interaction between a stranger in a strange land and one of that country’s cartographers:

"What a useful thing a pocket-map is!" I remarked.

"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"

"About six inches to the mile."

"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"

"Have you used it much?" I enquired.

"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."

— Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Lewis Carroll

My favorite piece of dialogue in that passage is the narrator’s understated “Have you used it much?” That’s something I think about when I see overbuilt ATPs. Remember: there is a real flesh and blood person that is the object of the ATP you are writing. Make sure you are not confusing your athlete and your spreadsheets.

Resources and Downloads

If you would like three different versions of annual training plans we have used at Campfire over the years, you can go and grab them here. One of them is, frankly, overbuilt. I used it for several years but found it was too detailed. The second is nice because it nicely blocks out a whole year on a page, which is great, but its structure does lead one into thinking they have to plan the whole year. I’ve added a second page that lets you block out sections of the year for different foci. Finally, there’s a newer one that we build using Notion, so you’ll need to use that databasing software, but I believe it strikes a nice balance of what an ATP should do.

Conclusion

Annual Training Plans are powerful tools that can cut both ways. On the positive side, if you take some time at the beginning of the year, they can make your program writing simple and straightforward for the entire season. They can help alleviate athlete anxiety, because you have a plan and you’re the coach and you need to have a plan. On the other side of the balance, however, is the fact that it can be tempting to build and ATP for the sake of building an ATP. If it doesn’t fit the athlete, if it’s too detailed, if it’s not nimble and adjustable, it will break OR, worse, break the athlete. As with everything in this industry of helping athletes get faster, happier, and healthier, a good ATP is a tool in the toolbox—it doesn’t replace the athlete or you and your personal expertise. Happy planning.