Altering your calendar to accomodate for layering of Training Plans

How to alter your calendar when you have multiple Training Plans overlapping

At times through a season you may be following multiple Training Plans.  These plans may overlap one another, meaning some days you might have numerous sessions on one day, or back to back high intensity sessions.  These anomalies have to be accommodated for in order to avoid over-reaching in your training.

This is easy to fix, it just takes a bit of picking and dragging, and maybe deleting the occasional workout.  There is a bit of science, a bit of art and everyone is a little bit different in what will work for them.
Having a good understanding of what your focus for the next few weeks is important.

The important thing to understand is which sessions are the key ones in your week, and which can afford to be culled.  Keep in mind that you should be avoiding consecutive days of hard sessions, of the same activity, however you can have a light workout either side of a key session or race of the same activity.

Let's look at this calendar below where there is an Indoor Cycling Plan overlaying a Half Marathon plan.  The Half Marathon is scheduled to be on a couple of weeks after the Cycling Training Plan finishes, so there should be an emphasis on the running sessions in this case.

Looking at the week 31 May - 6 Jun, you will see there are some days with sessions that clash.

• Monday - This is a Foot Traffic Group session, so we will keep that in place, but remove the Easy jog.
• Tuesday - The 800's session is a key workout in the Half Marathon plan.  As long as the run is done in the morning it will be 36 hours prior to the Zwift race, so is fine to keep in place
• Wednesday - The Rest Day/Optional Jog can be taken out leaving a Zwift race Warmup and Event
• Thursday - The Windsprints session is a good one to do in the PM, so it's almost 24 hours after the previous day's Zwift race.  The Core session can be done in the AM.  The Recovery workout can be removed.
• Friday - The Cycle session should be removed from here as the weekend run workouts are quite important and need to be done fresh.
• Saturday - The run session will most likely be done early, so the Recovery Ride can be left for the afternoon.
• Sunday - The Long Run is a key session for the week.  The Recovery ride can be removed.

So as you can see now this same week has been trimmed quite a bit.  We still have the key bike workout, the race and a recovery ride, and there has been no compromise to the run sessions that were planned for the week.

If you had some swim sessions in the plan as well I would look to move them to Tuesday PM, and maybe an easy one on Friday AM.

See how you go with the first week of the plan once you have modified it and if you feel you struggled a bit with the workouts then look to take out the Saturday easy ride.  You are still doing plenty of aerobic work with this plan, so don't stress that your cycling may seem a bit on the low side.  The key thing is you are getting the Monday bike ride and the Wednesday race done without impacting the run sessions that fall around them.