Tuesday 23 June 2009

Taper Update

I have come to the conclusion that tapering is much easier than 'proper' training. It was nice not to ruin my legs this weekend, the 3 hour ride with 60 min run on Saturday felt easy and I ran really well at the end. I did the same loop that I have been doing following my long bike rides which involves a 1.2km run to the park, then 3 x 3km loop and the run back home again, so approx 11.4km in all and the plan this week was to pick up the pace for the last 15 minutes. This wasn't too difficult and I actually got home in 54.30 which is a pretty good pace for me. I also covered almost 90km on the bike which considering the wind and the shocking road conditions is pretty good.

I had a nice moment on the ride when I went past another couple of bikes and they decided to hitch a free ride on my wheel. I was happy to pull them along for a bit, I was just cruising with a HR of 130 and after 10 minutes or so sat up to have a chat to see where they were off to, they were both somewhat red in the face and obviously working pretty hard to keep up which was a nice ego boost as I was really taking it easy.

Sunday was an open water swim. Haven't had much chance to swim in the wetsuit so wanted to do a decent swim to make sure it was ok. I did 5 laps of the 550m loop at Leybourne, although I cut the last corner of the loop a bit each time as the weeds were a bit close to the surface around the edges of the lake and I didn't want to get tangled up in them. Had a bit of a fright on my last lap as I managed to swim into another person!! There were only about 5 people in the lake at the time so the chances were fairly small (it's a pretty big lake!) and it certainly made me jump!

I started sorting out my stuff a bit yesterday, on the ride on Saturday I decided that my bike was starting to creek a bit so I have booked it in for a service this week. Bike chains stretch over time so I will replace that and the rear cassette as well as having them look at a couple of other things so it should be in top condition for the race. I'll pick it up on Saturday morning and then take it out for a ride before packing it for Austria to make sure everything is ok.

Everything else feels relatively organised, I have a bit to do on the weekend as I need some sun cream etc for my transition bags and also need to do the rounds to pick up any stuff that people want transported in the car rather than trying to take on the plane. I'm also going to take a bit of food down with me as I found in Barcelona that it was a pain having to rely on local shops for snacks and also very expensive.

We are booked on an 11.20 eurotunnel train on Monday morning although they say that if you are there within 2 hours of that time they will put you on the next available train so there is a chance we may get across the Channel a bit earlier. The plan is then to try and do the bigger driving day on Monday, heading down through Lille, Luxembourg with an overnight stop in Stuttgart. That should then leave a relatively easy day of driving on Tuesday to get down past Munich, Salzburg and then through Austria to Klagenfurt.

I'm not really nervous about it yet, although I'm sure that will come. I just want to get this week out of the way and get over there.

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