Recovery week has begun!  My first one of my training season.  The plan this week is to slightly back down on the weights that I'm using for strength training while maintaing the same amount of reps for each exercise.  I'm hesitant to back completely off of weights this week as it may cause me to regress in any of the strength I have built up over the last 3 weeks.  Doing my first workout like this a a couple hours ago felt really easy and really enjoyable.  Workouts will not be nearly as long this week as they were in the past 3 weeks.  Next week I'll begin my base training which will really start making things real for me.

I'm looking forward to begin my first round of base training but am also nervous about getting the amount of free time to devote to training.  I'm also incredibly excited to get to this next stage to feel like I'm really building toward Madison.  I understand the value of the Prep stage but it gets incredibly stagnant and boring.  So this week will be all about stretching and staying active, and also saying goodbye to the relaxed life for 9 months.