What it Means to Choose an Early Season Goal Race

Early season goal races often sound fun and great when athletes sign up for them.  But as race day looms, some truths about what having a goal race this early in the year means become clear.  Coach Laura dives into what it actually means to select an early season race as a goal race.

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Disclaimer: The information shared in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health goals. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you heard on this podcast. Reliance on any information provided is solely at your own risk.

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening
• 0:16 Race Registration Excitement
• 2:07 What is an Early Season Goal Race?
• 6:29 How Does Choosing an Early Season Goal Race Impact Training?
• 16:58 The Bottom Line
• 17:28 Closing

Transcript

(0:04 - 0:24)
Hello, and welcome to the Full Circle Podcast, your source for insights into the science and art of endurance sports training and racing. I'm your host, Coach Laura Henry. Goal races that take place early in the year often sound really fun and really great when athletes sign up for them.

(0:24 - 0:48)
Since athletes typically sign up for goal races relatively far in advance, six months or more, they don't necessarily fully appreciate what it'll be like when they are actually in peak training for a goal race. And this means that if a race is early, they don't necessarily fully appreciate how the early race date will be impacting their training. This is common in many situations other than just early season races.

(0:48 - 1:10)
Signing up for the Walt Disney World Marathon, which requires peak training to happen during Christmas week is another such example. Athletes often sign up for early season races at a time of the year where they are wistful and longing for race season and, or when they are sad about the ending of a particular race season. Signing up for a race when you are emotional like this can cloud your perspective on what the training for said race is actually going to be like.

(1:11 - 1:26)
Athletes sign up at this time because of these emotions and also because of the pressure, honestly, that race directors put on athletes via price increases. And also the fact that there are a lot of races that do actually sell out, so you can't necessarily wait until closer to race day. You have to sign up pretty early.

(1:26 - 2:13)
As it pertains specifically to early season goal races, I specifically started first noticing this phenomenon, I'll call it, with athletes from my home region of Central New York who signed up for long course races early in the season. So races like Ironman 70.3 Chattanooga, Ironman Texas, the Gettysburg North-South Marathon, the Shamrock Marathon, and more are all examples of early season races I've seen athletes local to me sign up for, and then later wonder, what was I thinking? And or I've seen them resist doing what is necessary training-wise close to race day when the time actually comes. So what is an early season goal race? It is a race that takes place, well, early in the season.

(2:13 - 2:27)
Early in the season means that the goal race happens closer to the end of the previous season. And that's important to remember because I don't necessarily think a lot of folks bear that in mind. But if it is early season in one season, it means it is close to the end of the previous one.

(2:27 - 2:37)
This is important. Early season races are not the same as early season goal races. You can race early in the season without having the race be a goal race.

(2:37 - 2:56)
For the purposes of this podcast episode and in my work coaching athletes, I consider A-races that occur in March, April, and May for Northern Hemisphere athletes to be early season goal races. If you race more than twice a year, not all races should be treated equally in your annual season plan. This is important.

(2:57 - 3:04)
I encourage athletes to prioritize their races using an ABC method. And this is common. This is something that a lot of coaches deploy.

(3:04 - 3:13)
I learned this from my first coach, Karen Ellen Turner. A-races are the races that are most important to you in a given season or in a given year. They are your top priority.

(3:14 - 3:29)
They are what you care most about as far as races go in a year. Most, if not all, of what you do in a given season or over the course of many consecutive seasons is preparing you to be successful at your A-races. Your annual training plan is built around these races.

(3:29 - 3:48)
A good annual training plan will work backwards from your A-race date and build your training backwards from that. So all of your training will be set based on that exact date to have you ready at that exact date to have your best performance. A-races are races that you are intended to be in your peak and best shape for in a given year.

(3:48 - 4:03)
And that's why training is oriented around it. They require a lot of time and energy, physically and mentally, to train and prepare for. They also require a decent amount of time to recover from because the intensity and or the duration is high, long in these A-races.

(4:03 - 4:18)
So for this reason, and hear me when I say this, athletes can only have a maximum of two to three A-races in their calendars in a year. And A-races must be at least two to three months apart from each other time-wise. This is very important.

(4:18 - 4:32)
A lot of athletes think that anytime that they show up to a race, it's like an A-race. Even if they don't know these terms, they end up treating the race like it's an A-race. But you will find that you'll be disappointed over time or you'll get burnt out or you'll get injured if you're always treating every race like that.

(4:32 - 4:45)
You need to prioritize and decide which races are most important to you. Which races are the North Star in your annual calendar that you're going to be working towards? But not all races are A-races. Some races are B-races.

(4:46 - 4:57)
B-races are races that are important to you, but they are not your top priority. These are not races that you will or should be in peak shape for. So this means you're not going to get your potential best results at these B-races.

(4:57 - 5:19)
B-races are great opportunities to test out tactics and gear and techniques, hydration and fuel that you are planning or wanting to use in your A-race. But this being said, B-races do not need to be a specific preparation or test for an A-race and can be races that you just want to do just because, just for the sake of doing that race. And you can have goals for them that are separate from goals related to your A-race.

(5:20 - 5:32)
Athletes can have a maximum of four to six B-races in their calendar in a year. B-races must be separated by at least a month, four weeks or more from each other or from an A-race. And finally, we have C-races.

(5:33 - 5:44)
C-races are fun races. In theory, you can have as many C-races in your racing calendar as you would like. However, in order to do that, there are some specific guidelines that must be followed.

(5:44 - 5:54)
You have to do this in order for these to be true. The races that you designate as C-races must truly just be for fun. You cannot have any performance or time-based expectations.

(5:55 - 6:06)
You can't have secret goals at these races. You can't say out loud that it's a C-race just because you want to race a lot and then treat it internally like it's an A or a B-race. You need to truly embrace with your heart and your mind that it is just for fun.

(6:07 - 6:20)
C-races may actually have workout-specific targets such as intervals or different kinds of structure. In essence, C-races are considered to be supported training days. It's like you're conducting a workout like you would in any other normal training day on your own.

(6:20 - 6:44)
But within a C-race, you are completing that training day or that workout in a race setting. So you have the support of a race, but you're actually just completing a normal training day. So what's the deal with early season goal races? Why am I dedicating an entire episode to this on this podcast? How do early season goal races actually impact training? One of the biggest ways is that you will have a shorter runway of training time if you choose to have an early season goal race.

(6:44 - 7:05)
This means that you will have less time in your race build to prepare for the race than you would if you had selected a later season goal race or a goal race that isn't happening in that early part of the season. You always need to be taking a maintenance phase at the end of a training season. Maintenance phase is a very important training phase that is used as a break from the other training phases or training cycles.

(7:05 - 7:22)
And it's used as a way to resensitize the body to volume and intensity. And it's this volume and intensity that is required to make gains during the main season. So we need to make sure that the body is primed to handle volume and intensity and to adapt to volume and intensity in training.

(7:22 - 7:37)
Maintenance phase is used as a way to resensitize the body to those stimuli so that you can make adaptations later on. So it's really important. During maintenance phase, athletes still do workouts, but they are a bit more flexible than during the main season.

(7:37 - 7:57)
Volume is lower and intensity is also lower. This phase is a time when a lot of athletes have some free choice about what they're doing and when they do do different types of workouts or movement. So for example, you may hike or trail run, ski, snowshoe, do other types of movement that aren't specifically oriented around the goals that you have during your main endurance sports training season.

(7:57 - 8:12)
Maintenance phase lasts at least six weeks, but it often ends up being eight to 10 weeks long. If you do an early season race, your maintenance phase will be on the shorter side of those ranges. And depending on how early your goal race is in the season, maintenance phase may even be as short as two to four weeks.

(8:12 - 8:26)
You can only sustain this having a shortened maintenance phase and then the shorter runways for so long. The body will break down and or you will burn out if you do this in too many consecutive seasons. Stress plus rest equals growth.

(8:26 - 8:39)
This is true on a micro scale week over week. And even within a workout that you impose stimulus, you take a rest within a training week, you have up days and down days, you have rest days. And then you also need to be looking at this on an annual scale.

(8:40 - 9:08)
You have many months when you are intensely training for something, when you're in a race build or race preparation, and then you plan for some D training at the end of that season so that you can be ready to go for the following season. You need that downtime in order to be able to build back stronger in consecutive seasons. They've actually done some really interesting studies on this and athletes who take a maintenance phase or a planned period of D training at the end of a season see better gains in the following season than athletes who do not take a maintenance phase.

(9:08 - 9:23)
It also should be noted that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. There is an effective dose of this. Athletes who D train too much, meaning that they don't get the dosage of training right during maintenance phase also see fewer gains in the following season.

(9:23 - 9:32)
So maintenance phase is kind of Goldilocks. You need to get it just right. You need to have this planned period of D training so that you can see progress season over season.

(9:32 - 9:49)
It's really critical. If you start your next season earlier due to a shortened maintenance phase and you have an early season goal race, then you don't have the benefit of a longer runway or a longer base phase. This longer runway I'm talking about is literally just the time that you have to build to that race.

(9:49 - 10:05)
So if you train for a later season goal race, say like in October, you might have the benefit of six to eight months. That's your runway. If you plan for a race in April, you only have two to four months, depending on when maintenance phase ends for you based on when your final races of the previous season were.

(10:05 - 10:10)
And that's a big deal. It's a significant difference. It's really important to bear this in mind.

(10:10 - 10:31)
Yes, races do take place early in the season and that's fine, but not all races are equal in terms of how much time you're given for preparation or you'll get for preparation based on what you've chosen to do in previous seasons. So again, your training is developed by working backwards from your goal race. If you have less time, you have less time and there's nothing you can do about that.

(10:31 - 10:45)
Base phase is effectively the foundation of your training. This is the phase that sets up your ability to complete more specific training down the line or further on in your training. Aerobic system development, building your endurance so you can exercise for longer periods of time is one of the main objectives in base phase.

(10:46 - 11:03)
Less time spent in base phase means that you don't have the luxury of time for things to go wrong or as much time to lay down this foundation for specific and harder training later in your race build. So all of this is just to say that the shortened runway is significantly impactful. It's not something that you can't overcome.

(11:04 - 11:14)
It's just something to be aware of that. Let's say you do get sick during a shortened runway of training. It's going to have a more profound impact on that race than it would if you had a longer runway to prepare for that race.

(11:14 - 11:32)
Next, an early season goal race will require that you get outdoors earlier than you probably would prefer. This is especially true for athletes who live in the northern climates or colder climates because they're actually south climates if they're cold in the southern hemisphere. In some cases, depending on how early your race is, you might not actually be able to safely get outside.

(11:32 - 11:50)
You may have too much snow or too much ice. You may not be able to ride your bike or run the same way or get in an open water swim practice. So as a specific example, this would be true for athletes living in colder climates in northern climates in the northern hemisphere where there is snow and ice during the winter who choose a triathlon that takes place in March as their A goal race or even in April.

(11:51 - 12:02)
This could be very true that you might not be able to get outside. But in a lot of cases, what actually ends up becoming true is that you need to get outside before you are comfortable going outside. So in a lot of cases, it's not necessarily that it's actually unsafe.

(12:02 - 12:19)
It's just that athletes are super uncomfortable because the temperatures aren't sunny in 75. So this may necessitate buying additional gear that is appropriate for that time of year or for those conditions because you don't have the luxury of waiting until it's sunny in 75 before you head outside. If you've selected an early season goal race.

(12:20 - 12:36)
My experience has been that athletes really, really don't like this when it actually happens and they're confronted with this reality that they need to get outside and it's going to be uncomfortable. I have to remind them that they are the ones who chose to sign up for and to do this early season goal race. It wasn't me.

(12:36 - 12:48)
It was them. My job as a coach is to help athletes stay on track to achieve the goals that they have set are important to them. If the early season goal race is important to them and by designating as a goal race, they have made it important.

(12:48 - 13:01)
I am going to encourage athletes to do all of the things that will help yield them the highest probability of success. And that includes encouraging them to do things that are uncomfortable for them. Yes, I encourage them to face the discomfort dragon.

(13:02 - 13:19)
Of course, if you have an early season goal race, you can choose not to go outside and whether people want to admit this or not, race day performance does suffer. If there is a lack of specificity and training over the years, I've heard a lot of athletes say, Oh, I think I'll be fine. Or I hope I'll be fine thinking and hoping aren't the same thing.

(13:19 - 13:24)
Yes. You may hope that that's true. You may wish that to be true, but race day performance does suffer.

(13:24 - 13:39)
If you don't have specificity, specificity is needed to help you achieve your top best performances. So what this means is that if you don't get to train outdoors, even if it's not in the same conditions that you'll be racing in. So it doesn't matter if it's going to be hot where you are, it can be cold where you are and you can go outside.

(13:39 - 13:47)
There's still specificity there. That's valuable. If you don't do that, you are missing out on something that is critical to your ability to have your strongest race day performance.

(13:47 - 14:05)
Indoor training absolutely helps you develop your aerobic endurance, but it does lack several specifics. Skills development and adversity are two big ones that help make you stronger, more resilient, more robust, and more confident come race day. And without this, you're just not going to have the best performance that you could have.

(14:05 - 14:28)
If you had trained with a specificity related to this, the next impact that early season goal races has on training is that you will have less time to train to the specifics of what you need. This is related to everything we've already talked about, including the shorter runway, especially to the shorter runway. You have less time to test out and train gear choices, feeling hydration choices to get used to adverse conditions outside, et cetera.

(14:28 - 14:45)
So for all of these reasons, early season goal races are honestly best left to more experienced athletes. Experienced athletes have a lot of the finer details dialed in since they are, uh, well experienced. They've had more time to sort things out, to figure out what they like, what works best for them.

(14:46 - 15:01)
They have fewer details that they need to be managing as they train towards race day because of this experience. If you're a newer athlete, you will benefit from a mid season or later season goal race. So you can have that longer runway, which means that you're going to have fewer variables impacting your training.

(15:01 - 15:17)
And remember folks, early season races are not the same as early season goal races. You can race early in the season and have those races be B races or C races. Doing this is honestly a great idea as it takes some of the pressure off and enables you to have a longer runway to your actual, a race or a races.

(15:17 - 15:40)
Something else to note too, is that your season may end earlier if you start with an early season goal race. And this may be relative to past years, just earlier relative to past years or earlier relative to your friends or other fellow athletes that might be racing in a given season. If you start your season early, it means that if you were to continue to a normal quote unquote end time of the season, it's just going to be a long season.

(15:40 - 16:00)
So it's not uncommon for athletes to find that a long season, AKA one that starts early and then ends on time in the fall is a bit much and is a bit overwhelming. Many athletes find that they are tired and even a little burnt out by the fall if they start their season early. So you want to be thoughtful about when your other races are planned for and how long you plan your season to go for.

(16:00 - 16:15)
I get it. You are excited and enthusiastic about getting going and you're itching to race. And so a lot of athletes will jump in pretty early, but without really thinking about how that choice is going to impact how they feel in November and then how that will snowball into subsequent seasons.

(16:15 - 16:27)
If you end one season burnt out or tired, that's going to impact following season. So it's really important to be thoughtful about this if you're planning an early season goal race. And as I previously mentioned, maintenance phase is important for a lot of reasons.

(16:27 - 16:35)
And one of them is that a racing season is long. It is long enough to necessitate a mental and physical respite. This doesn't mean that we stop all workouts.

(16:35 - 16:47)
It just means that we are a bit more relaxed in our approach. As they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder. Doing less, planning some de-training and taking this mental break from training are necessary from both a mental and physical perspective.

(16:47 - 17:03)
And it's what enables athletes to come back stronger the following year. So if you start your season early, you may need to end it early and take a little bit of a longer maintenance phase before you begin your following subsequent season. Early season races can be really motivating and really exciting, especially when you're first registering for them.

(17:04 - 17:27)
However, early season goal races do necessitate specific and thoughtful changes to your training plan and approach from how you would handle training for goal races that take place later in the season. If you are tempted to sign up for a goal race that takes place in the early part of the season, be sure to carefully consider all of what that choice will entail. With the right mindset and approach, you can be successful at an early season goal race and have a really successful season overall.

(17:30 - 17:45)
That was another episode of the Full Circle Podcast. Subscribe to the Full Circle Podcast wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. If you like what you listen to, please be sure to leave us a rating and review as this goes a long way in helping us reach others.

(17:45 - 18:02)
The thoughts and opinions expressed on the Full Circle Podcast are those of the individual. As always, we'd love to hear from you and we value your feedback. Please send us an email at podcast at fullcircleendurance.com or visit us at fullcircleendurance.com backslash podcast.

(18:03 - 18:13)
To find training plans, see what other coaching services we offer, or to join our community, please visit fullcircleendurance.com. I'm Coach Laura Henry. Thanks for listening.