Tuesday 5 May 2009

2 months to go

Today marks the 2 months to go point and my training is really starting to get challenging. This weekend was really tough but I managed to survive and feel like I learnt a few things which is good.

Saturday's ride was good, I made an early start, getting out the door by 6am so it was nice and quiet on the roads. I decided to take a route that meant a lot of the ride was on the A21 towards Hastings, a dual carriageway at some points but I was keen to try and get some uninterrupted riding with less junctions and better road surfaces which worked quite well, I got home n just over 5 hours with 145km covered, a quick change at home and I then headed out for my one hour run. I started this at a nice easy pace and managed to plod along ok, legs didn't feel too bad, pace was certainly not high but I had never intended it to be.

Sunday's plan was a 90 min easy ride followed by a 2.5 hour run, the ride was fine, a bit windy on the way home but no major problems, quick change and out for my run, I took a camelback filled with water and 3 gels for the run which would normally be plenty. My plan was to take 1 gel after 1 hour, the next after 1hour40 and the last one just after the 2 hour mark. These plans changed pretty rapidly when after only about 15 minutes, I was feeling awful. My legs felt like they had nothing in them and as such I could not get my HR up to where I would have liked it to be so with over 2 hours of running still to go, I decided to revert to a damage limitation type of strategy. I therefore took one of my gels after 20 minutes and that helped for a little while but I was then into the cycle of being slightly lifted after each gel and then feeling this slowly wear off over the next 20-30 minutes and then feeling terrible again! As I only had 3 gels I had to just try and battle through the terrible parts and try and keep going. I am fully expecting to feel like this on the actual day so in a way it was probably pretty good practice, although in hindsight I think I need to start taking out a sports drink rather than simply water, at least during the race there will be an aid station every 2km or so where I can properly re-fuel if I need to.

As you can probably imagine, the next 2 hours of the run were not a whole heap of fun and I was pretty happy to get home in one piece. Hopefully some lessons learned for next time though, and was also encouraging that I still managed to cover 27km even though I felt like death for most of it, had the run gone really well I would have expected to cover something like 29km so it was not the end of the world.

I have booked this Wednesday off work and am planning to do my 2nd Half Ironman simulation. The weather forecast looks ok so I am expecting this to go ahead. I'm going to follow the same format as last time, which means braving the public swimming pool again which will no doubt drive me mental!! I'm going to try a few tweaks to my nutrition strategy as I felt a bit bloated on the bike this Saturday.

This session will be done at my planned Ironman pace which I think I have worked out in my head, and only 2 and a half weeks out from Barcelona will also give me a bit more practice stringing all three sports together. The only other thing I need to sort out before then is getting some open water swimming in, I had hoped to do this yesterday but ran out of time and was feeling pretty beaten up after the weekend so I will try and work out a time to get down to the lake to get used to my wetsuit again.

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