Year One

First week of 2008 is gone and I’ve just come back from a morning run in Taupo along the Ironman course. Taupo is the location of Ironman New Zealand – an iconic race, alongside Hawaii and Ironman Canada, on the Ironman circuit. The bike course is generally quite flat, 2 lap course, with one steep climb coming out of town. It looks like it could be windy on a bad day. The swim is one lap in the clear waters of the Lake Taupo. The run course has some undulations but no ,major climbs and it’s basicall 2laps out and back along the lake shore. Looks like it could be a good course to race on.
Last weekend watched the Nez Zealand Long course championships at the Port of Tauranga Half Iroman. Great race, you can read my race report in the post below.

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Last week I promised to write about what year 1 of my 3-year plan includes. Here it is:
Year 1 is basically getting back to some structured training. October to March is running only and getting back to some kind of running fitness, which is what I was lacking for the last couple of years. The target is to be able to run a sub-35 min 10k, 1:15 half marathon and a sub 2:45 marathon, but most importantly just enjoy running. In April I have the London Marathon and the Tour de Flanders (260km bike ride in Belgium) with my team mates. May and June are going to be about getting some miles in on the bike. Mid June I will have a good test of fitness at the 70.3 UK half ironman. After that it’s getting ready for Ironman Austria in July which I will treat as a training race and then Ironman Canada at the end of August. Already looking forward to getting back to Ironman racing.


I’ve looked at my training diary and since October I’ve run just over 700km at an average pace of 4:40/km (that Garmin 305 GPS is invaluable). Not bad, I didn’t realise I’ve been running that well. Maybe it’s not that impressive, but It’s certainly more than I did during the same period in the last couple of seasons.

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Last week’s training was quite good. Total 65km running and one 2km swim. Running is going well and on Thursday I run some 800m reps (4x800m) on a grass track at Auckland. On Sunday I run 17.5km at a good pace. The rest of the running was quite mellow. While in Auckland I’ve managed to get in a swim at an open air pool. I felt like I haven’t swam in ages (which is true) and I thought I was going quite slow until Alex has told me that the pool was 60m long, not 50 like I thought. Maybe not that slow after all…