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…