Pain and suffering!

It’s been a while since my last post, so here is a brief overview of what I’ve been up to lately.

After flying back to London from Bangkok we were greeted with some cold weather and it was a bit of a shock to the system to have to adjust from 36C to 4C in a space of hours. Nevertheless I picked up my number for the London Marathon on Friday and was ready to go on Sunday morning. The plan was to run to half way only, but try to keep a decent pace. I didn’t like the idea of a DNF next to my name, but unfortunately there was no way I was going to be able to go the whole way so I had an option of either watching the race or getting a good training run done by going half way, so I opted for the latter. We got to the start without major disasters and after my usual warm up I lined up on the green start behind the celebrities. As the gun went off I wound myself in the lead having passed the aforementioned celebrities and running comfortably at 6mi/mile pace. Sadly shortly after I got to the 5 mile mark in just under 30 minutes the wheel came off. Eventually I got half way point in about 1:22 and as planned called it a day.

The good thing was that having only completed 21km I didn’t need an extended recovery and I was able to hit the next two weeks pretty hard as far as training is concerned.
The first week ended up being 18.5 hours training with 45km run, 335 bike and 5km swim and I suffered every minute of it. I suffered in the hands of my training partners in the pool and on the bike. It’s funny how the mind works – even though I knew I’ve done little training in the last 6 months subconsciously somehow while training I preserved an image of myself from 6 months ago, from when I was probably the fittest in the whole of last year. It’s disappointing when the mind says “yes”, but the body says “no”. Fortunately my recovery seems to be good at the moment, perhaps as a direct result not being as lean as I was before.

The second week ended up being 16 hours of training consisting of 55km running, 271 km cycling and 4km swim. Still a pretty good week, but it left me quite tired as I was back at work full time. Things started to look a bit better on Saturday when I did the “7 hills ride” (85km) with Nick and then followed with a good run of 12km in the eve – on the run it was probably the best I felt for a long time. Unfortunately on Sunday when I went out on the bike I felt very flat (the rain didn’t help) and quickly abandoned the idea of doing a solo TT and just rode steady for 70 km.
As for the numbers (for the data orientated) my FTP (functional threshold power) on the bike is 25W down from 270 last year to 245 now and these numbers fit in with the times up the BoxHill climb (6:45 last year, 7:30 just after returning to London, 7:10 last week). It looks like I have a bit of work to do on the bike if I want to even complete IM Austria, let alone race! I’ll explain next week the test I do to test my bike FTP and typical bike sessions, but now I’ve gotta go and run and it's getting late! See ya…

100 days to go...

Yesterday was exactly 100 days to go to Ironman Austria. It’s not a lot of time to prepare coming from the state of being fairly unfit, but it might just be possible. I will have a little reality check and a small taste of things to come on the 15th June as I kick off the triathlon season with the 70.3 half ironman Wimbleball.
I’ve looked at my training diary and since the beginning of our trip I’ve run just over 1000km and swam about 40. I suppose it’s not too bad considering that it was supposed to be a training break and we’ve been traveling constantly. The good thing is that my weight is fairly stable now, after gaining some and then loosing it I’m back to 71kg as of yesterday. We will see what kind of shape I’m in once I return to the UK. It’s difficult to gauge fitness by heart rate here in the 35C temperature due to heat stress and I’ve not really done any measured training or racing.
In the last few days we’ve been staying in Bangkok and I’ve been using the gym facilities at the hotel with a nice hill session on the stationery trainer. On Saturday some of my teammates from Trisportnews were riding the Ronde de Flanders sportive in Belguim. 260km over cobbles in wind rain and snow! Hat’s off to everyone who finished or even attempted it. Must have been a hell of a tough day – I wish I was there, although I do prefer the sunshine. LOL. To join them in misery I did an extra long hill session on the trainer in the gym, imagining I was going up the Muur…
Just a short update – have to go to the gym and then a long flight back to the UK awaits.