Olbrecht Style Meso Cycle Plan

I tried to go through the recommendation from Olbrecht’s book to plan meso cycles based on my annual plan. Everything beyond January is just penciled in and will need to be refined based on test results and available time.

I started by putting the main events (business trips that I am aware of, vacation, and races). The event called “Racice” in week 4 of meso cycle IV of the Preparation phase is a week long stage at the 2k track in Racice that our club plans in preparation for the 6k race in Horin.

Then I planned the 6 week cycle IV leading to the 6k race in Horin, copying an example 6 week cycle from the book. Then I added the cycles II and III and tried to think about what type of training. It’s a bit a compromise between the test rows that I want to do and the ideal type of training. The gray volume bars are just notional now but I am thinking of it in terms of hours per week.

I still have to fill in the little triangles that indicate the intensity and volume of the individual “quality” trainings (i.e. everything else than extensive steady state La<2.0 training). I will do that only the coming meso cycle.

mesoplan1.jpg

Here’s a close-up of the first meso cycle.

mesoplan2.JPG

As you see, a Half Marathon attempt is planned for one of the Christmas days …

Final remark. The plan is not different from what I planned as a “typical” training week in this blog post. All it does is add some guidance for the total volume and for what type of quality sessions I am planning to do. As said, the overall plan still follows roughly what I have been doing intuitively for the past 2 years, but planning it out like this gives a nice feel for where the pain points are.

Training today consists of a bike ride to work and a bike ride home, 2×45 minutes in total of active recovery. Interestingly, even though I classified yesterday’s session as “needs to be done at higher intensity”, I had unusually “empty” legs this morning.

Follow me in social media