A whole week in review. It's good to be back!

Monday 17^th June 2013

It’s been a while since my last blog up date.  Sounds like a bit of a confession doesn’t it.

I have finally managed to string together a couple of weeks worth of half reasonable training that resembles something like Triathlon training.

Following the Crooked Lake Triathlon last weekend I felt really good, almost like I hadn’t done a triathlon at all. No aches, pains or niggles.  Great news and this led to a sense of optimism about getting a decent week of training in.

This week I managed to get in about 8 hours of training and that is the most I have managed in quite some time – mainly through injuries but sometimes life just gets in the way.

The sense of euphoria about feeling healthy and gaining fitness again led me to put my head above the parapet and ask if anyone else out there fancied joining me in doing Ironman Zurich in July 2014.

Yep – it looks like I ma going to be back on that Iron-path again for next year.  Entries open in late July and so far there are about 4 or 5 of us who are committed.

It will be fantastic to be part of a club trip to a huge event like this.

Anyway back to a quick re-cap on the week.

Swimming – both sessions went well for me considering the elbow still is not completely right.  I would say it is at about 90% mobility and about 70% of strength.  This does hamper the swimming a but, but I just got on with it and managed two decent sessions.  Slower than I would have liked but done anyway.

Biking – this is where I think things have really started to progress.  I know I haven’t been doing a lot of cycling at all but what I have been doing is trying to have quality sessions, such as the hill repeats.

This effort is aimed at building strength and I think it may be starting to show early signs of paying of.

I did two rides this week and on both occasions I managed to average over 17mph. Admittedly this is not fast by any means but it is about 1mph faster than I tended to average through my Ironman training last year and it is noticeably quicker than I have been able to sustain in the past.

Both rides were on rolling terrain and would not be classed as difficult but I am delighted at the progress.  I would love to be able to get myself to a point where I can comfortably average about 18mph on a long ride. That’s the goal!

Running – again some pretty good sessions here.  I missed a 30 minute tempo run but it was no big deal, and I managed to have a pretty decent longer run mid week which was for a large part on the route of the Lisburn Half Marathon, which is on Wednesday night this week.

Last year I was only about 4 weeks out from Ironman and was treating the event as a training run, however the amount of training and fitness just shone through and I ran an accidental PB of 1H50M.  There is no way I will be equalling that this year.  I’m just not fit enough to hold that pace for the length of time required.  This year I would be happy with sub 2 hours and delighted with a 1H55M run.

I’m looking forward to the event.  It’s my hometown race and a firm favourite for me.

Last week and this week I have had to travel to London and this interrupts the training a bit but I will do my best to do all the planned sessions this week, which should give me about 8 hours of training again.

It also probably is helping that I managed to shift over 10lbs in weight over the last 5 weeks.  I can notice a bit of a difference but there is a lot more to go still!

Here’s a summary of last week.