Recovery/adaptation week

This week is an adaptation week.  When my body gets to think about all the stuff I've asked it to do over the previous 3 weeks and make some changes to reflect that.  Well, not really, but that's the approximation.  It means that the amount of training this week is significantly reduced and I get two whole days of rest!  It's also meant no running from Monday to Friday, instead of the two work-day runs I've started to get used to and really quite enjoy (er, OK, who is this person and what have they done with the real me?).

 The view of Coach Rich is that we'll get better return on investment if I don't race Thames Turbo this coming Monday and train through the bank holiday weekend quite hard.  It's a hard decision in one way for me as I'm obsessive in collecting sets and this means I don't get to collect the set of 4 Thames Turbo races this year.  It also means no benchmark.  But in other ways it's an irrelevant benchmark this year and I am far better off following the plan to get some quite challenging sessions in over the weekend.  I'll end up with a really tough brick session on Tuesday of a 4.5 hour hilly bike ride, followed by a 90 minute run.  After having done my longest training run three days beforehand, a lap of the IM UK bike course and run course a couple of days before, and another 2 hour ride and 2.5km swim the day before it.  I'll be knackered and that's the whole idea.  FUN!

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.)

Ow (but it's still good!)

Had a "fun" run session today.  01:50 planned with 30 minutes warm up, 15 minutes at half-marathon pace, 3 minutes recovery, 15 minutes at half-marathon pace and then jog down for 45ish minutes.

So, I jogged up to the common; there's a known 15ish minute circuit I could use and it takes about 30 minutes to get there.  Perfect!  There were a few frustrations around Garmin having a fit with pacing and being a bit random in the trees, but it settled and the pacing was pretty consistent throughout and I hit my half-marathon pace nicely, but over-cooked the recovery and jog down a bit.  Still some learning to do on that for sure.

At the start of the jog down, I hit a really muddy bridleway that was peppered with horse crap.  There was a moment where I pitched into some nasty brambles, tried to jump through to save myself but ended up sliced up on my legs.  I carried on for the last 40 minutes or so, thinking it was probably just a couple of tiny prickles, and it stung a bit, but when I got home...

 
And these are the thorns I pulled out of the wounds...

Looks a bit less bad cleaned up, but sore nonetheless.

The other leg wasn't so bad as the thorns hit lower down and on the front of my leg where I had long socks on.

So I'll be in shorts for the rest of today while those close up and scab over properly.  But I was proud that I achieved the goals of today's sessions and didn't stop and have a moment when I got injured (and that it wasn't serious at all - to be fair there were a lot of trees I could have ended up head-first into rather than just sliced by some brambles).  Good run!

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.

Turns out not.

Full results published and, er, well, it's a weird race.  Only 26 women out of 174 finishers.  I was 13th, so slap bang in the middle of the field, 4th in my age category (out of 8 overall), the first two women were in the 55-59 age category and finished in roughly the same time as Mr TOTKat, and in the top 5 women, 3 were over 50!  I beat both of the 34-39 competitors and would have been 11th, 10th or even 9th woman if it weren't for the weird stuff that happened at the end of the bike leg (though still 4th in my category).

• 7th fastest female in the swim
• 15th fastest female in the 800m run to transition
• 14th fastest female on the bike (though should have been about 10th)
• 14th fastest female on the run - which given everything else I'm pretty pleased with

Given that I'd had at 3.5 hour bike ride the day before (and a 400m TT in the pool), plus the head-mess at the end of the bike leg that resulted in a thoroughly defeated and "why bother" feeling for a good chunk of the run, I think that wasn't a bad show at all.

I learned a few things:-

• I can drink in the saddle and eat gels (taping them to the top tube really is a good idea)
• Remember to actually start the bike computer so it doesn't auto-turn off after the first 10 minutes cycling while flying down a hill
• With a totally new course, make sure I really pay attention and understand the route and how many laps of each bit there are (tiny loop plus big loop = 2 laps in this course's parlance)
• Ignore the PA system unless you're actually crossing the finish line
• Focus on swimming in a straight line more
• I must not expect a good position or time when I've just put in the heaviest training week of my life - too much mental pressure on myself
• More focus on nutrition is needed - I think I was bonking towards the end of the run
• Cycling cadence of around 90 is really a good thing

 I'm still crapping myself about Wimbleball and more so for Bolton now.  I need to spend more time talking through that with Rich.