Tuesday 30 September 2008

Embracing the hills

It's now been two weeks since my last race and my training has included a 'recovery' week and then the first week of a 3 week block with an extra focus on my running.

The recovery week involved a similar number of sessions but less time spent on each session so that was pretty easy. We visited friends in Swindon on the weekend and I had a good run out in the coutryside being guided by Simon on his mountain bike which made a nice change from Welling. I had to run down a nice steep mountain bke trail that was interesting and almost fell over in a big muddy patch but it was nice to not have to run on roads the whole time and I got to the end of the 90 minutes with plenty of energy left.

Last week was a bit more eventful. I had a couple of days off work with Erika to sort out the remaining stuff that was still in boxes following our return from Australia and then she had an appointment with a cardiologist following her recent decisoin to collapse on a train on the way to work. She has been diagnosed with WPW Syndrome and needs to have a procedure called a catheter ablation to destroy a rogue electrical connection in her heart (I hope no one with any medical knowledge reads that as I think i may have over-simplified it!!). She's been told not to exercise until she's had the procedure which is tough for her but the procedure should completely cure the problem so hopefully no more trips to the floor of the train.

I managed to log a total of 85km (53 miles) of running this week. I've been a bit worried about the potential for injury with the increased running volume but have had no ill effects so far.

On the weekend I had a 4hour 15 minute ride on the Saturday and a 1 Hour 55 minute run scheduled for the Sunday. I've got a duathlon coming up called the Ballbuster which involves multiple laps of a hilly course and have also entered a half marathon in Maidstone that has a few hills in it so I decided that this weekend would be all about embracing the hills.

I woke up early on Saturday morning to watch the AFL Grand Final frm Melbourne, 26 degrees and sunny over there but I wasn't worried as the forecast over here was for a nice day, however, when I looked out of the window all I could see was fog!

I set off at about 8.30am hoping that it would clear and I had planned the bike route to take in as many climbs as I could find around the local area. The ride went pretty well, it was certainly tough going but I actually enjoyed the challenge of the climbs, and the profile of the ride from my computer looks pretty cool:



To give you some idea of the scale (since you can't read the graph) home is about 60m above sea level and the highest point is about 240m, I think the total climbing for the whole ride was about 1,300 vertical meters (Ironman Austria is 1,600m over the entire 180km course)

The hilly theme continued with my run on Sunday, I decided to run to my mums house, but with that being about 25 miles away got Erika to drop me some of the way there. This run started with about 12km of running almost constantly up hill and towards the end of the run the downhill sections were also pretty tough on my legs but I was pleased with the distance covered. I managed 21.3km in just under 1 hour 55 minutes.

Total training amounts forthe last two weeks have been as follows:

15 September 22 September

Swim 2.4km (1.5miles) 7.58km (4.7 miles)

Bike 224.5km (140.3 miles) 185km (115.6 miles)

Run 26.26km (16.4 miles) 85.2km (53.3 miles)

This week is agian mainly about running, we are off to France on holiday for a week on Saturday which I am really looking forward to and I plan to keep up regular runs out there as I have the Maidstone Half Marathon to do on October 19th. Ironman Austria is now only 40 weeks away, a long time I know but considering I entered it with 52 weeks to go, time is already going by pretty quickly, good motivation to keep the training up though.

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