Development

After my post about training smart I decided to go back and look at ALL of the training I have ever logged in order to examine it. Unfortunately I'm lacking a good amount of information around 2003-2005. I only have 10 weeks from 2003, NOTHING from 2004, 41 weeks from from 2005, and all from 2006-2009. Either way, I took what I had and threw it in a bar graph by week with a 10 week moving average trend line. When examining it I found what I had sort of expected to find:

1) I'm lacking in aerobic development (who isn't?)
2) It seems like I've never had a consistent block over 2 months at a decent volume.
3) There aren't any plateaus (this goes back to the 2nd observation) but I believe it identifies something much more important: that I might be increasing mileage at too fast a rate which leads to injury (the sharp declines).
4) Around 2006-2009 there have been 3 relatively big drops in volume which took awhile to build back from. Unfortunately this is happening to me right now in 2010, so that makes 4 big decreases.
5) This graph identifies the problem with the high school and collegiate systems. There is way too much racing, attempted peaking, and not enough time to focus on aerobic development. That's all I'll say about that though, I don't need to rant.

I'm sure there is more that I can interpret from this data, but I have only looked at it for about 10 minutes thus far. The main thing I figured I would find is that I really need to focus on a long term block of training. Like I've said before, this is the step I probably need to take for long term development. I figure this means a few months of just running and developing my lacking aerobic foundation. I think my focus needs to be steered away from any major racing or peaking (which can inhibit aerobic development) in order to get stronger and to allow myself to make that jump in training and racing which I've been waiting for. Here's the graph, what do you see (you can click on it to enlarge)?