Monday 2 February 2009

A hectic week and snow on the way

Had a pretty good week this week, had to miss a couple of sessions due to some unforeseen circumstances. Kings College thought it would be a good idea to let my step dad out of hospital following some major surgery in less than 48 hours. Turns out that wasn't sch a good idea as 24 hours later he was on his way back in with a paramedic and had to endure a very nasty few days whilst they got him on the right treatment plan to help recover from the op. I was not particularly impressed with the treatment so had a moan to the patient complaints service which ironically was very quick to respond saying that they will investigate.

Hopefully he's back on the way to recovery now, although this has made me more determined to try and raise a decent amount of money for my chosen charity. Both he and my mum have had a hellish year at the mercy of a disease that people know little about, so it would be nice o try and help out a bit. For those that don't know, Mick has Polymyositis http://www.myositis.org/about_myositis/polymyositis.cfm which developed following a nasty virus towards the end of 2007. This has caused sever and irreversible muscle damage and also causes great difficulty in swallowing due to the muscle damage. This meant that in the early stages getting nutrients into his system was almost impossible and he became very ill. The lack of knowledge about treatment (there is currently no cure) meant that it took some time for the doctors to be able to start to bring the condition under control although thankfully over the last year they have manages to bring the symptoms under control with a variety of steroids and chemotherapy drugs. The recent operation he had was to remove a lump in his chest that was attached to the thymus gland(also removed) which may or may not have contributed to the initial cause.

SO I'd be grateful if anyone reading could take the time out to make a small donation through my just giving web page www.justgiving.com/robgrummitt once i get the donations up to £500 my work will match that initial £500 which would be a good start. I've not pushed the fundraising too hard at work yet as the actual event is still some way off and there are currently a team of people from my department trying to raise £20,000 for the Princes Trust so I think they are getting every penny out of people that they can, they do the event in April so I will start promoting my event a bit more after that. I've been a bit disappointed with the initial response from some emails but I realise that post Christmas people don't have too much money to spare so I'll just keep trying!

On the training front I still managed to have a pretty good week, only got 2 swims in and missed a bit of commuting time but had a good weekend. A 5 hour 40 min ride yesterday with a crazy wind. I rode out towards Ashford turning left just before I got there to take in a climb up towards Canterbury, progress was hard going into a head wind but after half of my planned time I turned around and headed back assuming that the tail wind would balance out the fatigue and I'd get back home in about the same time.

Hadn't realised how strong the wind was as I flew back towards Maidstone averaging about 40km/h. By the time I got to within 30 minutes of home I had made up half an hour so took a bit of a detour to make up the planned time. Despite riding an extra 10km I still got home 5 minutes earlier than planned and legs actually didn't feel too bad. 151km covered and some very cold feet!

Erika is on her course this weekend so I had agreed to go out on her run with her in the evening as I don't really want her going out on her own in the dark. She is on her recovery week (I'm writing her a training program for a half marathon at the end of March) so had an easy 50 minutes to do. We did that without too much drama, although I am clearly getting old as I was moaning about the nasty kids n hoodies sitting at a bus stop pointing laser pens at me, if only I could have thought of things that were that much fun when I was a kid! Would have gone and really told them what I thought but no doubt they all had knives on them as is the way over here so thought it was probably better just to whinge to Erika!

This mornings long run was planned for 2 hour 40 mins again (same as last week). I'm beginning to understand more about how my body reacts to being stressed through exercise and generally on these long seasons it is my muscles in my legs that give out rather than my cardiovascular system. SO I thought I would go a little bit quicker this morning to see how I felt. I have a heart rate zone that I try and stick to (Zone 2 for long runs is between 145 and 155 beats per minute for me). Last week I averaged 145 but I set out trying to go at 150ish and see how I felt in the end.

The answer was that I was pretty tired!! The run was good though, the last hour was pretty tough, as your legs get tired they want to slow down but in an effort to try ad keep my heart rate at 150 I just kept pushing along and trying to hold a decent pace, which I just about managed. Covered 31.6km in 2 hours 42 which I was very pleased with, was happy to get into the shower though as it was cold out this morning, then rewarded myself with an hour laying in bed to let the legs recover!

I'm have a recovery week scheduled for this week which I am looking forward to. This means a similar number of sessions but shorter sessions to let the training from the last few weeks sink in, I definitely feel as though I have made some progress which is good. I'm going to do a 1km time trial in the pool and have a 10km running race next Sunday to test out where I am at.

The current weather forecasts for tonight and tomorrow are for some heavy snow showers so the recovery week may be more of a recovery than I had planned, commuting into work on 23mm wide tyres in the snow doesn't seem too sensible but I'll see what i am faced with when I get up in the morning.

Sorry for the very long post, if you've got this far down you must be bored! Next week is the Half Ironman in Geelong that started all these thoughts of Ironman races for me. I would love to be there doing it again but wish all those that are good luck, I'll certainly be looking forward to seeing the results and hearing how everyone gets on.

I can't believe that I am already 8 weeks into my 30 week program for Austria, the 2nd 10 weeks is a new block of training for me when I start to include some higher intensity intervals to build on the base fitness that I've been putting down over the last few months. I don't need to be able to go fast on the day of the race but doing higher intensity stuff should help to make the race pace efforts seem easier, it also helps your running and cycling efficiency but I expect the training to start to get tough as I get into this phase. I'll also be dropping the time of my long ride and long run back a bit but will start to do more brick sessions where I will run after my long bike ride (probably up to an hour-90 mins) and also do an easy ride before my long run to start to build towards the race. I'm hoping that this phase of training is greeted with some warmer weather!

I think that's about it for now, quite tired still from my run so may have another lay down! Totals for this week are as follows:

Swim - 5.8km (3.6 miles) - 2 hours 4 mins
Bike - 280.0km (175 miles) - 11 hours 6 mins
Run - 54.7km (34.2 miles) - 4 hours 50 mins
Total time - 18 hours

As we're now into Feb I also have my monthly totals. I've had a really good month and this has been the most hours I have done in a month to date, totals are:

Swim - 23.0 km (14.4 miles) - 8 hours 23 mins
Bike - 1169.8km (731.1 miles) - 44 hours 55 mins
Run - 202.5km (126.6 miles) - 17 hours 44 mins
Total training time - 71 hours 22 mins

Have now also been keeping track of my calories burned through exercise, I've got through 50,274 during January!

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