What's all this twitter nonsense?

I'm going to start tweeting my workouts on the @fitnick account, but before I start, I think I should explain a few things. I'm trying to get ready for some triathlons that are two months away. Triathlons come in many categories, but the most popular are olympic and sprint. An olympic distance triathlon has the following components:

• 800 - 1200 meter swim
• 20 mile bike ride
• 10 kilometer run

A sprint distance has the following components:

• 300 - 600 meter swim
• 10 mile bike ride
• 5 kilometer run

The "sprint" is named because the people who do the olympic distance races should be able to do the entire race sprinting. I hate those people. I've almost always signed up for sprint triathlons and have been happy with my "just finishing" philosophy, but this year I've decided to push a little harder and sign up for two olympic distance races: The Kansas City Triathlon on May 23rd and the Shawnee Mission Triathlon on July 11th. Since December I've been trying to do at least two "indoor triathlons" a week, composed of:

• 400 ~ 800 meter swim
• 5 ~ 8 mile bike ride
• 1 ~ 2 mile run.

Obviously I'm not even doing sprint distance, let alone triathlon distance. Now that nice weather has finally come to KC, I'm working on trying to improve my speed and distance in all three categories. Because there are only so many days a week, this means I have to often do two activities a day: swimming and running, swimming and biking, or biking and running.

I've never read too much about the proper way to train for these races. I follow the pyramid method used to train for marathons, where your training week centers around a long run, where the days before build up distance and the days after bring the distance back down. The long run distance is increased every week until you've reached your goal. In my routine my intended long day is Sunday, where I hope to do a triathlon (swimming pool, biking, and running). The days before and the days after pyramid up and down from that. There are probably other good approaches.

So, if you see the twitter feed and think, "what is that guy doing?" Yeah, that's what I'm up to. I hope to post data on the main blog just so I can track my own progress.