This feels good!

I'm really enjoying my new training programme.  It's tough to fit it all in, but I'm learning a lot, getting even fitter and picking up some better bike skills too.

Two training sessions a day 6 days a week is really hard to fit in with work continuing to dominate 12 hours a day (2 hours commuting, 10 hours or more in the office).  Sometimes I shift a session (e.g. I did Thursday's swim on Wednesday as I had a scheduled session with coachJez to check up on technique) and sometimes I miss a core strength session but I'm packing in way more hours than previously and they're more quality hours than before:-

Red = missed, significantly too short or significantly too long; Yellow = appreciably too short or too long; Green = on target; Grey = unscheduled; pale colours are in the future.

Today was hill reps of Box Hill - the only hill I know which even vaguely fit the bill that my coach asked for for the hill reps.  Six times up the main bit of it, while there was an event going on which gave me the opportunity to pass quite a few people even though I was taking it relatively easy up the hill.

Pointy! (950m climbing in total)

Looks like a scribble because there are 6 traces - 6 reps - fun!

This was followed by a negative split run - 16mins out, 14mins back - to focus on pacing and not going too quickly off the bike.  I think I went out a bit too hard, which meant that the reverse route was even tougher, but I just about managed 16:00 out and 14:18 back (over 5.48km).  Given the fact that I'm very inexperienced at pacing, I'm pretty pleased with that.

More wins today - drinking while cycling uphill, eating 4 High5 gels and a Clif bar in the saddle.  Very positive stuff.  Feeling good.  Looking forward in a couple of weeks to a good long chat about the first race itself - race plan and strategy, tactics, putting it all together, nutrition and hydration etc.  I'm actually starting to get excited about UK 70.3 though still nigh on terrified of UK IM a few weeks after that.

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:-