Laying the foundations

This month has been a tough one with work being very busy. That has meant the majority of my training has been done early in the morning, you do get used to it but the 5am alarm call is still rarely a happy moment of each day.


Despite work being hectic, I've managed to keep the training fairly consistent and in the last few weeks have really been focussing on the long ride on Saturdays and the long run on Sundays, particularly given that the Melbourne marathon is now only 5 weeks away. I'm still not able to run as often as I would like for a proper marathon build up but feel like I will be in decent shape come race day.

Swim - 23.4km (8.07)
Bike - 721.15km (24.45)
Run - 233.95km (18.39)

If I look back to the early build up to Port Macquarie, I entered that race with only 12 weeks to go until race day and prior to that we had the move to Australia and plenty of other things going on so whilst my fitness was ok it was not great. The benefit I have had this time is a longer period of consistent training. I compared the hours training from 30 weeks out until 14 weeks out (i.e. where I am currently) for both races and came up with the following:

That shows fairly clearly that I’m in a better position now than I was 14 weeks out from Port Macquarie. The big dip at week 12 on the blue line was due to a skiing holiday in New Zealand where I was still pretty active!

The challenging part will be matching the final 14 weeks of training where for Port Macquarie I had a great period of consistent training, averaging nearly 16 hours per week.

I’m sure work will try its hardest to make this difficult for me but we’ll see where we get to!