Marching Forwards

Turbo of Suffering

Winning coffee cake

For a variety of reasons I've not had time to write a blog post but I figured I should put something together to sum up February/March. I lost a solid week of training due to Real (Not-Man)Flu, but overall it took me 2-3 weeks to get back to full fitness but these things are somewhat unavoidable. Overall my current plan for early season seems to be going reasonably well, the aim is to have a session I do every day of the week and when the inevitable missed session per week happens I get that as a rest day  - Not perfect but it fits my schedule. I have 3 key sessions, a hard bike 1-2 hour turbo intervals, a hard run - intervals  and a fast club swim.  I've been doing Sufferfest videos on the turbo which have been keeping me pretty motivated, I think they're brilliant. But I'm looking forward to a week of outdoor cycling in Tenerife watching my friend John whiz up volcanoes before Easter.

BADTri have announced the races for this years club championships, I've entered the Burnahm-on-sea supersprint, so will be good to see how I'm going. I might run the Bristol 10k.... Hmm too many races and not enough time. On a slightly less athletic note, I came joint winner of the BADTri bake off with my coffee cake with coffee cream chocolates. The savoury bread/pretzl entry that also came top was amazing. To be fair everyone's cakes were awesome, and nothing like training to justify tasting all of them. Although too much of this cake debauchery and I won't be fit for racing anywhere.

At the moment I'm a bit concerned with my long runs I've been gradually building up my longer runs on a Sunday, but I'm quite aware that I'm not in as good a shape (for distance) as I have been in the last couple of years where I've ran the Manchester marathon in April.  I'm not doing it this year simply because its taken me too long to recover in the past and I don't want to lose a month of training. I'd like to think if I take it slowly I can build up to running for 3hrs without my legs feeling like shite over the summer I'll be in reasonable shape for Iroman.

Last Thursday was particularly brutal tack session, 3x450 m, 5x300 m, 3x450 m 5x300m. Why do I never learn don't go too hard too soon. When I started the second round of 450s my legs felt like they were running through jelly. Its good to keep doing these sessions as they are improving my fitness but I'm also getting a better feel for how hard I can run sustainably - I still want to get a sub 20 5k at some point this summer.

Despite the tough run, I managed to hobble into the pool.  Friday is normally a long steady swim as its normally fairly quiet and the pool is at full length and I've decided doing hard interval swims after a hard run the night before is a recipe for bad cramp.  It turned into a bit of an Ironman Swim timetrial as I did 3.8 km in 64:46 - I'm pretty pleased with this considering I've still got six months to improve and my splits are fairly steady I was not looking at my watch except to count the number of laps.

I think that there is a lot to be said for structured sets but  doing one long continuous swim per week is also useful.  Particularly if I'm not killing myself I can focus on maintaining a smooth stroke right to the end. Its also good to see how my legs turn to rubber when I jump out the pool at the end :)



 My splits at 200 m @ 3:24  avg
3:11 - Always too fast on lap 1!
3:21
3:31
3:18
3:20
3:23
3:24
3:25
3:27
3:24
3:22
3:26
3:24
3:39 - Traffic
3:27
3:31
3:28
3:27
3:20