Plan Your Season, Not Your Week

Ask a climber what their training looks like this week and most can tell you. Ask what it looks like in October and you get a shrug.

I'd include myself in that for most of the years I've been climbing. Planning happens on Sunday night, covers seven days, and the horizon never moves. Which is fine, right up until you notice that the base phase you've been meaning to do for two years has still never happened.

A Phase You Haven't Dated Isn't a Phase

Here's the thing about periodization that nobody says out loud. The hard part isn't knowing you should do it — everyone knows, every training book has a chapter on it. The hard part is that "I'll do a base period at some point" is not a plan. It's a feeling, and feelings lose to whatever your mates are projecting on Tuesday.

A base period becomes real the moment it has a start date and an end date. Not before.

Zoom Out

We've added a year view to the planner, and training phase blocks you can draw across a range of dates. I expected them to be useful. I didn't expect how much they'd change what I was willing to commit to.

Looking at seven days, an eight week strength block feels enormous — it's your entire visible world. Looking at a year, eight weeks is a strip you drag across February and March, and there's still a whole spring and summer sitting behind it. The commitment hasn't shrunk. Your sense of what it costs has.

Trips work the same way. If you've got a fortnight in Kalymnos in September, that isn't an interruption to your training. It's a fixed point. Put it on the calendar first and work backwards, and the question stops being "should I train endurance" and becomes "when does the endurance block have to start for me to arrive fit".

Try This

Open the planner, switch to year view, and drop in the three or four things you already know about. A trip. A comp. The month you always lose to work. Then draw phases into the gaps between them.

It takes about five minutes, and you'll see straight away whether the season you've got in your head actually fits in the year you've got.