January 18th 2025

Top Tips with Rob Dallimore

Foot Traffic Coaching’s Rob Dallimore is taking us through everything you need to know as we draw closer to race day. This is by no means the hard and fast rules for approaching this race, but having done it plenty of times before, Rob has figured out how to get to race week with the best preparation and least amount of stress.

He will go into more detail on the months of  October to January in future posts, but below are his suggestions for October.

 

Check out more info on Rob and Foot Traffic Coaching

 

 

T minus 4 months

 

Time is ticking…We’re now 4 months out from the 2022 Mount Festival, so there are a couple more important things to be aware of

 

Training Plan

With still a decent amount of time to the Mount Festival event now is the time to really start knuckling down into your training.  For the past few weeks you have been ticking along with some nice base fitness work, not getting too worn down, and looking at making the most of your recovery and down time.  But now comes the time to start actually planning for how you are going to train for the event.
This shouldn’t mean you suddenly start doubling up your training hours, doing crazy long and hard workouts, or ripping into over race paced work….not at all.  In fact the training volume probably won’t need to change much over the next few weeks, but what does change is your mental focus for the event coming up. Now when you go training the sessions are going to start becoming more specific to your race.

 

So how do you chose the Training Plan to use, and how long should it run for? 

The ideal for most events up to Half Iron Distance is either a 12 or 16-week plan.  16 weeks gives you a bit more Base training whereas the 12 weeks might put you into harder training sooner.  One thing you want to make sure of though is that the Training Plan is well structured and specific to the event you’re training for, and is scaled to your own ability.  You don’t want to be following an advanced level plan if you are doing your first event, and likewise, an Advanced athlete may find a Beginner plan leaves them a bit short on Training Load. Use a trusted source to find your Training Plan.  Quite often word of mouth is good here, and if you have a friend who’s followed a plan successfully and found it prepared them well for the event, then it’s probably a good plan for you to follow.

 

You may come across a Training Plan from a printable PDF, which works great, these are simple to follow and convenient.  Other plans are incorporated into Athlete Community management software, so you receive the plan to your Desktop or Phone App and within that, you may have access to an online community to learn from and share ideas with.  This is one of the Coaching models we have here at Foot Traffic and we have found it to be a highly successful method of training.  Whichever option you follow make sure you follow the plan, trust the process and try not to modify it too much.  The plan would have been written with the intention of it being followed mostly to the letter.

 

Next Step - Visualisation

Visualisation

You should start using visualisation techniques through your training from now through to race day.  Place yourself on the course while performing a work out, put yourself in to a race situation, imagine how you will be feeling at this stage in the race and how you will get yourself to the end with your best performance….don’t start day dreaming though, we don’t want any accidents.
Any opportunity you get while training thinks about what you will be doing at certain stages, and consider how you will cope with various situations in the race.  Have some fun with it, make it something to look forward to on race day.  I guarantee you will start smiling as you visualise yourself running down the finish chute in your mind.

This sort of visualisation is one of the key strategies to a successful race.  All of the best athletes in the sport use visualisation in training so that when unexpected things happen on race day they aren’t surprised by them.

With still a decent amount of time to the Mount Festival event now is the time to really start knuckling down into your training.  For the previous weeks you have been ticking along with some nice base fitness work, not getting too worn down, and looking at making the most of recovery.  But now comes the time to start actually planning for how you are going to train for the event.

This shouldn’t mean you suddenly start doubling up your training hours, doing crazy long and hard workouts, or ripping into over race paced work….not at all.  In fact, the training volume probably won’t need to change much over the next few weeks, but what does change is your mental focus for the event coming up. Now when you go training the sessions are going to start becoming more specific to your race.

 

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