Hard week!

Being quite inexperienced at proper training, I haven't got a good grasp of what a hard week is.  Last week was one of them, though I didn't really notice at the time.

Still quite fatigued from RideLondon 100, I had one normal rest day then back into the swing of things with a peppy hour or running intervals, then a bit of a hiccup with a day when I just couldn't fit anything in.  Thursday had an hour of bike intervals on the gym bike, then another set of intervals on the road to get my bike back home from Mr TOTKat's office after RideLondon.  Friday, more bike intervals, even harder ones this time.  Friday, we packed up the car and headed off into Surrey for a weekend away.  Saturday was a bike trip to Farnborough station to catch the train to Winchester for parkrun then riding all the way back up the A30 (route planning fail early on in the ride) to the hotel, along a fairly rolling terrain and with intent to get back at a reasonable pace.  I was whacked!  We stopped for a tea and some fuel half way back (only 65km ride!) and mashed the rest of the way, giving me a few Strava KOMs on the way.

The plan was to have afternoon tea, a nap, then a swim before dinner.  And we did have a fabulous afternoon tea, but were running late enough that the nap was only 10 minutes long before I had to go for a scary looking swim set that included butterfly in the warm up!

This resulted in a bit of a failed swim... I cut out a chunk as I was supposed to be doing descending sets after a substantial warm up and I was simply knackered.  So I did about 3/4 of the session and called it a day.  Just about enough time to get showered and changed for dinner.

Sunday morning had a hard run set planned.  A really nice warm up and then progressively faster and shorter multiples of 400m laps of the rugby pitch (which was de-turfed and being rotavated at the time).  Through lack of familiarity with using the lap function on my Garmin, I made a bit of a hash of it, but still I managed to mash through the session despite feeling like spewing after the first 1600m interval and not wanting to carry on.  10km warm-up plus intervals later, I was done; a sweaty heaving mess, but done.  Time to get back to the room, shower and have breakfast.  Letting the gorgeous breakfast go down a bit, we packed up and checked out before going to The Spa again for another swim.

50m into the warm up, my arms were saying uncouth things to me about what I was asking of them.  This particular session included 8x25m butterfly in the warm up.  I've not done butterfly since I was about 9 or 10 years old and I wasn't any good at it then.  I wasn't convinced I'd be able to get my arms out of the water and that I'd look like a total idiot.  Turns out I can do it for a couple of lengths at a time!  Anyway, given how tired I was from back-loading the hard training to the tail end of the week and not really recovering much from some pedal mashing at RideLondon for a few hours, I called it a day before really getting into the main set of the swim and we sat beside the outdoor pool in the sun for a bit to dry off and have a drink.

Chatting through the week with my coach on Monday night (rest day!) he did say that this week might look innocuous on paper, but after last week I would still be tired and there are a few tough sessions in there that will really add up.  The whole plan was to tire me out and pile on the fatigue some more this week to get me used to pushing hard while I feel fatigued.  Well, I can say with certainty that it's working 'cause this morning's swim times were terrible!

Onwards!

New Year Thoughts - Finding A Coach

Something many aspiring athletes think about at this time of year is; I need a more structured training plan next year and I need help to do that.  I want to get a coach.

Having a coach who has years of experience, study and practical understanding can really help you avoid the common pitfalls of training for sport; of which there are there are many and various.  And the comfort of knowing that someone else is looking after your training schedule and optimising it for your event calendar and keeping an eye on how you're doing can make life simpler/less stressful.  And when you get closer to an event and start worrying about things, they can really help you stop doom-mongering, stop worrying about things that aren't important and reflect on all of the great work you've done and forgotten about.

But how do you find a coach that's appropriate for you?

1. Budget
2. Frequency of interaction
3. Training plan
4. Chemistry

First of all, you need to work out what your budget is.  But that can be difficult if you have no idea what the going rates are for the levels of service you get.  So, we'll come back to that.

Secondly, do you want to work with your coach face-to-face on a frequent basis, or are you happy with an online coach who you speak to on the phone regularly, or do you not need a personal interaction at all?  If the former, you may well be best off working with a personal trainer (PT) at a local gym or with a coach at a local club for your sport.  PTs aren't cheap (central London prices at a top-end gym is around £50 per 1 hour session), but you do get 1:1 training time and if you need that kind of interaction, then you're going to have to fork out for it.

Online/remote coaching can have quite a high level of interaction.  There are many companies who have a range of coaching plans that include a weekly (or even more) call with your coach and training weekends through the year (which cost extra on top of your monthly fee).  A weekly call with your coach in the off season can feel like too much, but you don't have to take them every week if you don't want to - companies are happy to take your money and you miss out on part of the service ;o)  These sorts of coaching packages cost anything from £60 a month, for up to £300 a month depending on interaction, personalisation, response times to questions, extras like sports psychology support.

Thirdly, a training plan is quite key to most people's need for a coach.  You can purchase training plans, from many companies online, which are just a general written plan and not tailored in any way.  These can be quite economical (e.g. £30 or so for a 12 week programme) and effective if you just want to get a structured, consistent plan and you're good at self-motivation.  You'd be surprised how self-motivated you can be if you have a plan that's written out for you already.  Some people need or want a bit more personalisation or interaction than that and that's when you probably want to get a coach who will personalise a plan for you, that you feed back your achievements from each training session and they modify the plan as you go along; on a weekly or monthly basis, usually depending on how much you're paying.

Lastly, if you are going for a personal coach or trainer rather than an off-the-shelf training plan, you want to check out the chemistry.  Having been through 4 gym PTs and 2 triathlon coaches so far, I can vouch for the benefits of really getting on with a trainer/coach.  You need to have faith in their ability and understanding of you and the sport and they need to instil confidence in you.  You'll only find that out by spending some time working with them.

My first triathlon trainer/coach didn't give me the level of confidence in him that I needed for me to believe I'd achieve my basic goal for 2012 by working with him and that meant I had to change quite close to the wire for the tough part of the season.  I'm so glad I did change coach and I've ended up with one I have a lot of trust and faith in now.  He really helped stabilise my mental as well as physical preparedness for the Ironman Ultimate Challenge events this year and with his help I made it through 3/4 of them (OK it was outside of both our control that I didn't make it to the start line of the 4th one, but I have no doubt that I would have completed the 4th one, had I not smashed up my collar bone at the 3rd one).  And I didn't feel silly asking him about the terminology in the training sessions he gave me.

So, back to budget... you need to think about the frequency, type of interaction and training plan you want in order to inform your decision on budget.  You can see you can spend anything from £30 for a 12 week generic training plan to £300 per month for a highly personalised, all the extras, fairly unlimited phone/online interaction arrangement.

So, now that you know what to look for, how do you actually find a coach?  Ask around, see who's advertising in the press of your sport, ask other athletes at events.  Or look for a coaching company that's doing a training day or weekend near you, or one that does a course familiarisation day for a race/event you're doing and go along.  Yes, this will cost you money, but you'll get to meet some coaches and see if you get along with them.  This is pretty much how I found my current coach, though I didn't meet him on the familiarisation day I thought the other coaches from the company were switched on and easy to get along with so I took a punt.

When you decide on a coach or trainer, don't be afraid to have a trial period to see if you get on.  Talk to them face-to-face or on the phone before signing up with them, if you can.  If you don't get on right away or after a few weeks, or even months, or you don't feel you believe in them in the right way, don't be afraid to change coach.  There is utterly nothing wrong with that.  You need to trust them to train and coach you well and you need to believe that they will do you good, support you and boost your confidence when it's needed.  The best thing I did during the 2012 season was change coach and it made a huge difference to my mental state, confidence, performance and ultimately my enjoyment of my sport.

5 hours? Is that all?

So, as you all know because I keep banging on about it, I'm recovering from a broken collar-bone at the moment.  If you've never broken a bone related to upper limbs you probably don't realise quite how many things it impacts that you wouldn't necessarily expect.  You'd expect that "all" you can't do is anything relating to directly weight bearing and lifting with the affected limb.  You wouldn't necessarily and immediately realise that you can't run (easily or naturally and certainly while the break is quite fresh you don't want to be jiggling the joint and broken bits about), you can't cycle at all ("surely you can cycle one-handed?" nope.), you certainly can't swim (and if there's any serious abrasions or related surgical wounds it's an even worse idea) and that stuff like washing, getting dressed, getting in and out of bed/cars etc. is really hard.  So you may not realise that despite it being only one little bone (that was "multifragmentary with anterosuperior, superior and posteroinferior intermediate fragments" which were "malpositioned and displaced" - i.e. broken into a few bits that were in the wrong places), life is impacted quite a bit.  Since I had the plate put in, the clock reset on healing but I already had 10 days of lack of exercise and my arm being permanently bent at the elbow so an extra 10 days of immobility in the muscles and joints of that arm as well as an extra 10 days of gently sliding fitness.  From the day after surgery to put the plate in, I religiously did the basic exercises (pendulum swings, assisted arm raises and cross-body swings progressing to unassisted) to restore mobility to the elbow and shoulder.

Last Thursday I had a hospital check-up that took me off the leash for a few things; showering and bathing (getting the wound/incision site wet), spin bike (no hands on handlebars), and running.  Which meant that I had a green light to get back into training.  With 4 weeks of zero exercise, I need to get it into my head that I can't just pick up where I left off at Galway 70.3.  The physio appointment on the same day as the check-up also gave me an assessment of progress (ridiculously good progress) and some extra exercises to finish off the mobility rehabilitation (straight arm raises overhead, using a mirror and both arms at once to make sure motion is even).  With that green light grinning at me, I let Rich know that I can start doing stuff again and he's given me some training sessions to do that take me up until I go to Kona.  Limited to running and spin bike, with 4 weeks of inactivity, as well as being in the "off season" now, I have a programme this week which totals an incredible 5 hours.  Having been training for months where the average planned sessions in a week was around 13 hours and a peak of 18.5 hours, 5 hours seems weird.  I know a large part of it is the lack of long bike ride at the weekend (that's 4-5 hours straight away) another chunk is no swimming (about 3 hours in a week) and the rest is taking it easy after a break.  But still, 5 hours seems like sod all.  I'll be a good girl though (apart from a little parkrun on Saturday which isn't on the schedule)

Have any of you struggled with getting back to fitness after a long break?  How did you motivate yourself if you didn't feel like doing any exercise or what did you do to hold yourself back if you were desperate to get on with it?  I know that Mike is heading back down the road and has come across revelation number one; how about the rest of you?

Hyoooge week ahead!

Biiiig week of training this week from Coach Rich as I'm not at work:-

Yep.  That's 18 and a half hours and I have literally no excuses not to do it all.  Then I get a taper week into Galway, I think.

Ohgod, there's only 4 weeks until I finish the Ultimate Challenge!

@ironman_uk familiarisation with @thetrilife

Because we're new to all this long course craziness, we thought it would be a good idea to get some familiarisation of the first two courses, Wimbleball/Exmoor and Bolton.  So, we signed up for the organised days run by @thetrilife - one at Wimbleball lake for the 70.3 race and one in Bolton for UK IM.

We'd arranged to do the Saturday for Bolton familiarisation but as it was going to impinge far too much on MrTOTKat's birthday so much he wouldn't have had much of a day, so thanks to the flexibility of the @thetrilife team, we switched to the Sunday one.

The weekend came and it rained.  Lots.  Friday was raining, Saturday was raining and the forecast for Sunday was even more rain.  So we drove on up to Bolton in the rain on Saturday afternoon (after my longest scheduled run on Saturday of 2.5 hours at my IM race pace, which was a great run despite managing to throw myself on the ground and badly bruise the heel of my right hand as well as some grazes) and had a rather too large dinner before crashing to bed, listening to the rain.

Sunday morning we met up with the @thetrilife team and the other course delegates - a couple of older gentlemen, another lady and a few of the usual 30-40something guys.  Duncan, one of the coaches, led the presentations and Liz explained that they'd learned from the day before that the conditions of the weather were really not conducive to a safe and useful day, so the agenda was changed.  We were intending to ride 1 lap of the bike course, run a bit to think about pacing, take a look at the swim area and transition and then back for Q&A.  As it was so wet and cold, we had a look at the lake and T1 area, drove 1 lap of the course and then rode 3 repetitions of the one significant hill (Sheephouse Lane) - the guys from the day before said that was the most significant part of the ride so it made sense to take a good look at that - then ran off the bike to feel the starting pace.  It was still really very cold and as I was woefully under-dressed (I'd expected to have put some effort in and got quite warm riding), one of the coaches lent me an extra long-sleeved jersey which was very welcome and took the edge of the cold for the first ride up the hill until I'd warmed up.

The hill.  It's not -too- bad the first time and descending over some slightly lumpy road surface on the way back down to the start (which won't happen in the race as it's the wrong way 'round) wasn't so scary.  Second time up the hill, the second phase of it was a bugger as it was so windy that the little dip after the first phase gave no advantage up into the second phase that it was hard to make progress against the wind.  Second time back down I was alone, the coaches split between the front group (with MrTOTKat) and the back group who were taking the hill very steady.  Braking on the rough surface in the early part of the descent, I skidded a little to one side and braked a little harder in fear of going over, such that I ended up fish-tailing and wobbling really very badly for around 20 seconds or so before recovering to stable again.  That was pretty damned scary as the bike swung rapidly from one side to the other a good few times, each time feeling like it was going to slide out from underneath me and I'd go over.  But.  I did recover it and once the adrenaline had gone, I felt quite good that I'd managed to keep it under control - I think that riding in the ice over winter helped give me a bit of experience with skidding/sliding.

Third time up the hill wasn't funny.  Still very very windy I wanted to swear a lot and loudly as a lot of the effort I was putting in was being defeated by the wind.  One of the coaches was riding up with me again, a different one than the second time (I think 2nd time it was Dan and 3rd time it was definitely Rich) and we were going up in silence, my bike creaking lightly and his a lot more (thanks for that, it makes me far less worried about my frame!).  I crested the hill around the left band bend, turned around and headed back down for the third time... even faster than the second time :o)  I really enjoyed the descent until I caught up with another of the delegates - the other lady - and had to be encouraged to pass her.  I had thought there wasn't much point passing as we were near the end and we'd need to re-group soon anyway, but got on with it, really enjoyed a couple of swooping bends, and we then rode back to where the cars were parked to get going for a bit of a run.

Ended up going quite quickly in the end - 57.6kph/35.8mph

We set off running and the pace awareness work that Rich has had me doing really paid off.  One group shot off with everyone in it except me, and then MrTOTKat and one of the other guys dropped back with me.  Rich was cycling along beside us as we trotted, and explained that the front group was running at 3hr 30 marathon pace - way too fast for us!  Dan dropped back to run with us, leaving Sam with the front group and we carried on at around 06:15/km - pretty much my IM pace.  A little 5km trot, then back to the car and the hotel for the Q&A session.

After a sarnie and a chat, we launched into the afternoon session where Liz went through some really useful mental preparation work, Dan talked nutrition and Rich explained about the final few weeks training and tapering and the team answered lots of questions about the course, logistics, worries and niggles people had and we wrapped up the day just before 5pm.

Overall the day was very productive.  Initially it had been quite disappointing that we weren't going to get to ride the whole bike course and that meant only 1 hour of riding instead of the 4 we'd been expecting, but it was better to be safe, see the whole course from the safety and comfort of the car and experience the one real hill of it.  We both came out of it feeling pretty positive and MrTOTKat was particularly pleased that some of the mental/logistics preparation work he'd already been thinking about was spot on.  Good day.  Well worth it.  And I'd recommend it to anyone signed up for an Ironman race to attend a familiarisation camp before the race.

Raaaaar!

I have a new coach.  And I think the chemistry/cultural fit is a hell of a lot better.  Where coachJez did a great job with my swim technique, the rest was very much lacking and not working.  So, having really got on with the guys from TheTrilife.com at the Wimbleball (UK 70.3) familiarisation weekend, I decided to take the plunge and move to being coached by one of their coaches.  I was lucky enough to be able to get a place working with Richard Jones, head coach at TheTriLife.com and not only a very well qualified coach, but a very experienced and talented triathlete himself.

The first few weeks of training programme look pretty intimidating, to be honest, but there's a lot of work to do and not very long to do it in.  A lot of the initial sessions are about getting me to understand pacing at all and setting some good habits and basics in place that are simply missing at the moment.  The first swim session on the programme looked horribly complicated but ohgod was it so much fun to do!  I really enjoyed it and it wasn't as complicated as it looked.  The run and bike sessions have been similarly fun and mentally stimulating as well as helping to get a good base muscular feel for cadence and pace.

Noisy graph, but it shows a nice average of around 92rpm.  Good start!

Today's bike ride was a very positive and confidence boosting.  I managed to keep to the cadence target set and got myself into a great position with some bike handling skills that I've been worried about so far - I can now actually take a drink in the saddle almost easily!  I managed it 9 times over the ride as well as getting on and off the clip-on tri-bars in the sections less busy with traffic.  It sounds silly and trivial, but I've struggled with it to date and I think a combination of a huge confidence boost plus a steady cadence has tipped me over the sticking point from where I couldn't manage to do it to being a lot more comfortable with it.

After today's ride, I feel absolutely fabulous.  Full of confidence and the joys of spring.  I guess the sunshine helped as well as the successful ride.  Raaaar!

Rain rain RAIN rain rain RAIN drizzle RAIN...

Still managed a furthest run yesterday though.  28km - 11.5km up to Lloyd Park for parkrun, 5km round the park and then 11.5km home.  The Lloyd Park parkrun has a bit of a hill in it and I blew up up it on the first lap, ended up way outside zone 1 and got into a crappy mental state thereafter.  On the second lap, I half-heartedly tried to keep my heart rate down up the hill, walked some of it and then played about with the descent, trying that thing where you let your arms flail about rather than pump backwards and forwards.  Well, that works pretty well so it turned out.  It's far easier to keep your pace up downhill if you do that rather than try to force your arms to be all disciplined.  Anyway, I did the course in 29 minutes - a horrific parkrun time for me especially given the average heart rate and the peaks that happened.  It meant that I was monumentally cross by the end of it and pretty worried about running home again afterwards.

Turned out I needn't have worried.  Apart from aching quads and a slight niggle in my right knee, getting home took just under a minute longer than getting there.  28km in just under 3 hours, up from a longest run 2 weekends ago of 22.5km is a slightly non-sensible increase in distance.  Which means I've had to pay for it today by working on some trigger point release and total rest.  I'm not begrudging the 10 hours sleep I got last night, waking only to hear rain still falling since Friday night.  And I'm not begrudging not going out for a bike ride today.  Partly because of the Rain rain RAIN rain rain (etc.) that has been going on for well over 48 hours.  Partly because I couldn't work out whether I needed to do a long ride or a hilly ride or what the heck.  I'm not begrudging any of it because I need to keep my brain happy and not stressing over training.

4 weeks now of no training plan from coachJez and I'm now talking to someone else about coaching.  I can't afford to have no properly structured plan and no decent support.  I've got too much I want to accomplish over the next 5 months.  It's 7 weeks to UK 70.3, 12 weeks to UK IM... there's no time left to lose now.  I've got a good base fitness to build on, now I really do have to build on it.

I think coach gets it now

I'd been a bit worried about coachJez potentially not understanding what this year was about for me. It was clear that he knew I was doing IM Wales, but I was pretty sure he'd not taken in the rest of the schedule with any real understanding.  So when he sent me the next 21 sessions of training programme, I replied with an email with the dates of my races so he could schedule for recovery around those.

The next time I saw him, Thursday this week for a cross-train session, the first thing he said to me was "You... are nuts!".  And then we had a long talk about my race schedule.  He gets it now.  Really gets it.  CoachJez has trained people for Ironman before, and people who have a couple of long races in a season, usually one near the beginning and then Kona at the end, but not someone who is doing four of the things in 3 months.  So, he's started to get some advice elsewhere on how we manage this so I get through the season safely.  I'm a little bit worried that he's going to go the other way too far with the training, i.e. wind the hard sessions right back in favour of endurance/base fitness stuff and be overly cautious with recovery - he's already said "no training for 2 days after a Sprint, 4 days after an Olympic..." which, OK I know you put a huge strain on your body with a proper Sprint but... not even gentle spinning or jogging for 2 whole days or 4 after the Olympic?  The other thing is that he's gone really heavy on the rolling regime.  I've had to get some mad, knobbly rollers to use after -every- training session and/or -every- day for 15-30 minutes.  Plus, quite sensibly, Jez wants me to categorise my races as A, B and C so he can work the Cs in as training sessions, the As in as you'd expect and I'm not sure what he's going to do with the Bs.

I'll try to sit back and wait to see what the new programme looks like - coachJez said to throw away the one he just gave me - and trust that he knows what he's doing even though this is new territory for him.  It takes me right out of my comfort zone, though I'm really good at putting all of my trust in professionals, I don't have 100% faith in coachJez(yet).  Probably because I've not seen any results yet, even though I've been training with him for 6.5 months... there haven't been any events to benchmark it.
 

I have a programme

Finally, I have a programme from my coach, coachJez.  It feels funny calling him a coach because he feels more like just a trainer to me.  We've been working together for 6 months on my swimming with a little bit of gym work here and there so I don't feel coached, only trained.

Anyhoo.  Over the winter he was talking about 'next year' this and 'next year' that and when January came and no programme was forthcoming, I started to get worried.  I have some pretty big goals this year and I do not want to screw this up.  So I pushed and I finally got a programme.

At the moment, it's 21 sessions to fit in over a month and I'll get the next set after that's done and the results assessed (no idea how that will happen as there's really only one measurement point and that's a 1500m swimming time trial).  Thing is, I've already been doing a higher training volume of 10-11 hours a week and this, even with fitting in 7 sessions in 1 week, only sums up to 7 hours with almost no running to speak of - one 30 minute hill reps session!  I'd been doing days with 2 sessions in a day, e.g. one gym or swim then a run in the evening, or a gym or bike then a swim in the evening.  Now, it's one session per day and the Training Peaks widgets agree that my fitness is dropping off!

See the blue line above, it usually drops off a bit during the week and picks up at the longer sessions at the weekend, but the last 7 days has been a downwards trickle with almost no pickup at the weekend.  So, I'm going to supplement next week's training schedule:-

Barbican running track

...with a long, slow run during the week at some point.  I also have a bit of a problem with doing mid-week multi-brick sessions - see Thursday for: bike 15 minutes, run 2k, repeat 4 times - in that I can't use a treadmill, so I can't do it in the gym so I can't do it other than at the weekend and even then it's a bit sucky.  If it were a shorter session, I could do it at the Barbican Virgin Active as it has a running track.  So, I talked to coachJez about that and he had forgotten about my inability to use treadmills and said he took it on board for the next section of the programme.  In the mean time, what I may do is try that 90 minute brick session at Barbican after work; but it depends on work as to whether that will happen or not.

We'll see.  And so next week probably looks like this:-