We learn best by making mistakes - never be afraid to fail; be terrified.

Sprint finish I lost at Pilgrim Challenge after 33ish miles

I’ve read a lot about training and recovery and fatigue and overtraining and having not really ever trained or raced hard I’d not actually come near really feeling tired or the effects of being tired.  And I mean *properly* tired, not just a bit sleepy but deep, crushing tired.  And the tired that is related to significant physical damage to muscles that will take months to repair.  I hadn’t experienced it until now.

I was, for want of a better term, utterly thick and I completely under-estimated the run last Sunday.  Having rocked up and mashed around some longish races over the last few months, I got blasé about it and thought 33 miles at an easy pace would be something my body could absorb and get back to hard training in a week.  I got a glimpse of the wrongness during the run, when I felt sleepy for none of the usual reasons and then when I found it mentally very difficult not to simply pull out when I really should have done (around CP2 or 3 if I’m honest).  I mentioned to @abradypus that I was thinking that perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to carry on, but convinced myself that it’d be weak and feeble to DNF so soldiered on and finished (without coming last of even the people who only did Day 2 like we did).

In hindsight, this is probably the biggest mistake I’ve made since I took up sport with any intent in 2010.

My legs are mush.  Literally mush:

“If the training session or race caused muscle stiffness, it can be assumed that there was muscle damage with elevated levels of creatine-kinase activity in the blood.  Creatine kinase is an enzyme that usually occurs within the muscle cell - when it is measured in the blood, it means that the muscle-cell membrane is damaged and the enzyme has leaked out of the muscle cell into the blood.  After an ultramarathon, muscle pain subsides only after about seven days, whereas creatine-kinase activity in the blood reduces after five days (Burgess and Lambert 2008).  Muscle function and neuromuscular coordination takes weeks to recover fully after an ultra marathon (Chambers et al. 1998), whereas muscle fibers may take months to regenerate completely (Warhol et al. 1985).
The disturbing point about gauging long-term recovery is that pain is not a good guide of the state of repair of the muscle.  It stands to reason that subjecting the muscles to hard training sessions before they have fully recovered is not desirable.  For these reasons, adequate recovery after training and racing is important for optimal adaptation.”*

(* - http://sporttudomany.hu/Hirlevel/pdf/15/Recovering_marathon.pdf)

That would be fine if I’d just done the one, but having battered in a second with only 20 days in between, I’ve significantly compounded the problem by doing something really quite strenuous and extended when the recovery from the first race was only part-way through.  Not only am I back to square one with recovery, but it’s going to take longer and I have to be very careful to balance the mental stress of not doing intense training sessions (as they would not only not have the desired training effect, but they would actively impede the recovery process) and panicking that I’m “never” going to be able to perform as I’d like, vs actually helping the recovery happen.

If I was actually a runner and had been running lots of miles for many years, my body might have adapted better to recovering from this sort of event, but I’m not and I haven’t.  I’m an ex-obese, new to sport person who runs quite infrequently.

So. Priorities for now are sleep, keeping stress low, eating well, avoiding intense running (and cycling) sessions, walking a lot and actually starting to swim a bit.  And remembering that there is a limit and I just found it.

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!

Peak training session

After the hill reps on the familiarisation day, I had the hardest, longest training session ever.  A 6 and a half hour brick; 5 hour bike, 1.5 hour run.  And it turned out to be a tiny bit longer as you can never be -quite- sure about traffic and pace...

I was due to do 3 sets of over-gearing for 15 minutes but it got difficult due to the terrain.  Firstly, due to the awful road surface around East Clandon, I was just chowing down on a particularly tasty Mule bar, when I hit a bump and 90% of the bar (I'd just had one bite) slid out of the wrapper and bounced down the road, leaving me holding an empty wrapper and a grouchy expression.  Then as I decided to use the first hill to start an over-geared section, it was too high a gradient descent to carry on putting in any effort at all so I ended up with not even 10 minutes for the first repetition.  The second one I started before my favourite hill - Crocknorth.  I think I got about 12ish minutes in to the over-gearing repetition and then hit the hill itself which needed no over-gearing whatsoever.  The third go was coming in to Box Hill and included Box Hill itself, which I left myself in 4th gear for just to make it a bit harder.  Interestingly, I was a bit tired going up Box Hill and actually fancied leaning on my tri-bars, so I did that almost all the way up and it was fine.  In fact, it was really rather comfy.

On reflection, I don't think I'm doing over-gearing right.  Or rather, making it hard enough.  I don't know.  It's hard when there's nothing to measure against and I still have relatively little experience at all of this stuff.  I was doubtful enough that I decided to do one more over-geared section while out on the Thames Turbo route towards the end, where I did manage to squeeze in another 15 minutes of it.

Garmin gets over-excited about kcals - I actually burned 2254kcals (and consumed 1387kcals, 239g carbs - needed 300g for the ride, in theory)

I thought I'd done over 125km on the bike.  Mostly because I accidentally hit the lap counter when I was trying to get the display back to cadence after moving the position of the Garmin on the bike and knocking it into a different display that I really wasn't interested in at the time.  Hey ho.  So, it's still quite a long way and the furthest in a single bike ride to date - and with only one wee stop, the longest in the saddle to date.

Hopping off the bike at home, I scampered for another wee (yeah, I think I was hydrated enough despite having not finished the two 750ml bottles on the ride), changed out of my bib-tights and cycling top into capri tights and a running t-shirt as well as out of my cycling shoes and into my favourite trainers and off out for a 90 minute run.

It took a while to settle into a stride that felt OK - I was worried that all the fatigue I accumulated on the ride and the previous two days would hit home and I'd run out of endurance.  But no, this was a really useful run to have in the mental bank as well as physical.  Once I got into my stride, I felt pretty good.  And by the time I got home, I felt like I could have carried on.  It wouldn't have been pretty and I'd've been quite knackered, but I could have gone on.

My IM run pace is around 06:12/km (I think) and, after this brick, I now think I will actually be able to sustain that over 42km on the day.  This brick session showed me a few things, one of which is that yes although there is a certain amount of background fatigue that accumulates, with the appropriate fuelling and a good taper, on the day it'll be achievable.  I was worried that I'd just be really dead in the legs, they'd feel awful throughout the whole run and I'd need to use all the psychological tricks in the book to get to the end of the run course.

These are my km splits for this brick session and remembering that there is a non-trivial hill in there, that's some quite encouraging data.  And my effort level was nicely consistent...

Got 2 streets away and turned back to get a gel to keep me going - I didn't need to find out what bonking feels like today

I must say that I didn't feel sparkling when got home, but after a Recovery XS and a chicken and avocado bagel and a 10 minute sit down, I was fine to trot out to sit in the cinema for two hours.  And 8 hours sleep later (which I really rather needed), ready to get up and go for a 2.4km swim :o)

This brick session gave me a great confidence boost.  Mostly around learning that longer races are a little bit like the shorter ones; once you get stuck into the next discipline, the previous one fades in the memory a bit and doesn't have a huge effect unless you've over-cooked it and/or not taken on board enough calories/carbohydrates.  If you have managed your effort well and fuelled well, you're in good stead for motoring on.  I did 1.38x the 70.3 bike distance (with around half of the hills) and 0.75x the run (with 1/3 the hills).  After a few days of fatiguing myself.  And I feel fine. (and when I wrote this, I'd just done a 2.4km swim and another 1.25 hours on the bike - rest day today!)

Restdaynowpls?

I'm really very pleased with the technical improvements I've been making on the bike and run over the last 3 weeks.  Now, I can reliably drink on the bike, in the saddle, sometimes even while pedalling, and from either bottle rack.  I can eat too.  This is going to be invaluable for the longer races this year.  Running-wise, I'm starting to get to grips with pacing.  I'm still not anywhere near there yet, but generally more aware of paces and how they feel.  There are doubts in my mind whether I'd be able to stop relying on a GPS enabled watch to really get it right in a race, but we'll see.

This weekend's training has been tough in the heat.  Can it be a bit less hot in 3 weekends time please?

Saturday was a long bike and a brick run.  I intended to do about 03:30 on the bike, pick up some running shoes back at home, then cycle another 30 minutes to Prologue bikes to drop my bike off for a service before next weekend's Bolton familiarisation weekend (and UK 70.3 not long after that).  Then run back home for 40 minutes or so as a brick run.

The ride was my old familiar 3 Surrey hills, 2 of which I formed part of two of the intervals in the main set to hit 65rpm for 10 minutes for some over-gearing work.  It was *HOT* and *WINDY* and for the first time I did the route without stopping at all.  Thankfully, the traffic down to Sheen to the bike shop wasn't as horrible as last time I went that way, but when I got to Prologue, it was shut!  A one-off they say, so I went a few doors down to Pearsons and appealed to them to help.  Come Friday I should have a bike that doesn't creak in random places. 

I started the run home and, in case I'd not already said, it was really very hot.  I struggled to keep pace up at all.  Also, I forgot to turn on my Garmin for the first minute or so - another sign that I'm mentally quite tired as I've been making a lot of mistakes and getting mixed up in the last few complicated training sessions.  Intended that the 1st km was easy, but then I just couldn't increase the pace at all after that. The little undulating hills didn't help for sure.

I stopped running after the planned 40 minutes and walked the next 15 minutes to Paul in the village.  As I was craving "real food" after the bars, sports drinks and gels, I bought and pretty much inhaled a chicken baguette (can't remember the last time I had a baguette!) on the way home from there.

Today was a recovery run with some "pick ups" in there (30s sections of increased pace to get the feel without the fatigue of a fast run).  I went back up to the common to run in the trees to get as much shade as possible.  And yes, I'm definitely quite fatigued in the brain.  As I headed into a trail section from the main gravel/soil track, I tripped over a tree root and didn't realise I was falling until I hit the ground.  Covered in dusty mud and a bit scraped for the rest of the run, I really had to concentrate hard on not letting that happen again.

 Anyway, I really enjoyed the strides/pick ups, which I started to do after 30 minutes of warm up and then roughly every 5 minutes after that for the next hour and 15 minutes or so, then had to knock it on the head coming back down through town as there were a lot of people on the street.  My Camelbak run belt is probably the best running purchase I've made this year (last year was the emergency baseball cap I bought at the Virgin London Triathlon and it meant that I could have a bottle of iced water (fill to 4/5 full of cold water, then top up with an entire tray of ice cubes - OK, they rattle a lot when you're running, but it's well worth it for the chilling effect) with me today and yesterday.  Today I was pretty disciplined with hydration and sipped every km and refilled about 200ml from the public fountain to get me to the end.

I'm glad I've got these sessions in the bank but oh-boy was it a tough end to the week!  (And I hope to tidy up that last core strength session today, so I'm not totally remiss on that front.)

Consistent training... early results

Consistent training.  That's the key.  And the last 3 weeks have been really quite good (I was ill 4 weeks ago, so missed a few sessions).  If you look at the sessions success, you'll see a few red ones in there, but trust me it's a lot more consistent than it used to be and I don't really have a proper training plan so I'm just trying to get more base stuff in there than I had before.

And the results are really starting to show in my performance charts (the blue line is overall fitness, pink is fatigue levels, yellow is "freshness").  You can see clearly an improvement in fitness, though the significance of the scale eludes me at the moment, upwards seems good to me.

What really caught my interest was the small dip in fitness where I didn't do much while I was sick - the big drop in the pink line - really was quite small in the grand scheme of things.  My fatigue level dropped significantly, which helped me recover from being ill and conversely the freshness level goes up and I'm back on my feet again not much lost over that 2.5 week period of two illnesses back to back (one chest infection and a gastric thing).  Onwards and upwards now and I'm looking forward to see how things shape over the coming weeks and months.

Another hungry day

It wasn't so bad this morning, but throughout the afternoon I've just been hungry all of the time. Lack of exercise (I did iron 5 shirts, 2 dresses, 2 jumpers, and two very complicated cardigans though and that has to count for -something- right?) means less food than on an exercisey day, and even though I'm over the number of calories I'd like to have had today, I'm still under maintenance levels. Then again... I'm still hungry. I won't even start cooking dinner for an hour yet as well.

That said, we've cooked up big batches of lamb biryani (with brown rice this time) and beef chilli, so there's been a smell of cooking food in the house all afternoon which probably hasn't helped.

I'm definitely feeling mentally fatigued around food and exercise both at the moment, which is a bugger 'cause I still want to shift that last 2lbs. I almost moved 1 last week, but as keeps happening, there are meals out, fancy meals with lots of wine in etc. Always some excuse to go a little bit OTT. Having bought lunch only twice since 1st January, making lunches is getting a touch frazzling and I'm bored of all of the evening meals I keep cooking. Some are a bit too time-consuming to do on a week night (chicken in black bean sauce, vindaloo, tikka masala etc.) and just end up with me feeling too tired afterwards. I need some re-vamping in the meals and to cook a bit less often; so weekend batch cooking is really helpful there.

I'd like to just go on maintenance for a while and stop trying to lose those 2lbs, but if I do that, I'll end up gaining, given all of the weekly excesses that keep happening. They are only once a week, and I am doing weights 3x a week and cardio once or twice and I am staying reasonably to well under maintenance on most days and definitely not going over maintenance on all days bar one each week.

So mentally fatigued with it all at the moment. For sure. But what to do to fix that?

Today went like this:-

B - greek yogurt with 1 scoop and some Dorset Cereals muesli
L - ham, lettuce and Philadelphia Extra Light on toasted granary bread
S - celery and houmous
S - a lunchies bar
D - pasta with salmon fillets, peas, broccoli and low-fat cream cheese stirred through

Calories (kcal) [kcals to maintain weight (inc. exercise)	1661 1793]
Protein (g)	122.1 (30.2%)
Carbohydrate (g)	172.9 (40%)
Fat (g)	53.6 (29.8%)
Fruit & Veg	3.6