I’m trying to calculate my starting volume for beginning an 8 week transition period, as part of a 24 week training plan. This is the only aspect of preparing my plan that I am having an issue with.

Movescount tells me that in the last 8.5 months (since I started logging everything) I did 301 hours of exercise (includes all training, hillwalking, running etc.) By extrapolating this 12*(301/8.5) I get an annual exercise volume of 425 hours. During this time I’ve been working at sea, in an environment that severely limits my training options (to walking up and down stairs/bodyweight strength etc.) for four weeks out of every eight which is why this figure is so low. While at work, bad weather means it’s often impossible to train for safety reasons (it’s a fairly small boat). My training volume during a four week trip can dip to as low as eight hours (January 2017 trip, consistently awful weather).

Given that this gives me a weekly average of just over 8 hours, including my time at sea, that would have me starting my transition period on 4 hours per week; this is nowhere near the minimum of 6 hours that Scott said the 24 week training plan requires for success on my objective. I’ve never felt ill from overtraining/pushing it too far and I’ve done a week (6 days of xc skiing, heavy pulk) that consisted of 39 hours, as well as a two week period that consisted of 61 hours. I felt fine after both periods.

Based on this history what starting volume would you prescribe? I was going to start with 7 and increase as per page 189, adjusting to how I was feeling.

Attached image shows my movescount summary.