Set against Brian I seem to come up short in my blog posting and again this week I am catching up with a whole week of training. Blah.
So on Friday I was on hard resistance intervals on the turbo. 3 minutes on max gear, max resistance and holding the brakes; then 90 seconds off to recover. 10 Reps make it a tedious and mind numbingly boring exercise but like my treadmill my turbo is on the balcony. So with a 0630 start I watch the day slowly turning from night to dawn to light.
Saturday is meant to be a run day but because I was running on Sunday I swapped it for my bike. Cycling is still a very low priority at the moment as all my big races for the next couple of months are marathons. This is to help me figure out how to start running a sub-4 hour marathon in the heat. So I was meant to do 90 minutes in a high cadence - as it turned out I did about 110. Happy with the 32km/h as I was focusing more on the cadence than on my speed. Nice. As I switch to bike training in the second part of the year I'm going to be looking to start pushing that up towards 35km/h. That's going to be tough and hurt a lot.
Sunday was the week's big event - A training day with the team for the Labourt Day Hash Challenge Marathon. We met at Batu Dam - Julie, Azmar, AJ and me. The original plan was to do 5km trail loops so I'd turned up with lots of bottles of go juice to repower (I'd planned for 3 hours of running). As it turned out we didn't come back to the car and I was truly grateful for Julie carrying a bottle for me. Of course I had to carry the camelbak for half the time :(
After an easy start we decided that trails were boring and spent most of our time going cross country. Great fun. I wouldn't generally have the courage to do it if I was by myself but with 3 others crashing through the undergrowth it was a lot of fun. We kept a good comfortable pace up but didn't manage to complete a circuit - turning back at the 2 hour mark and finishing in about 2 hours 50. A really great trail. Mostly flat along the lake shore and then climbing steadily - with some fast descents and several river crossings.
Felt pretty good at the end and was surprised that it had been 3 hours. Drank a lot of fluid at the end and had fun flicking leeches off my legs.
Monday was back into the pool for a sprint session. 2 25m easy and then a sprint, repeated 8 times before a 200m sprint. Then repeated. Not the most fun session but one which is quite relaxing and satisfying to complete. This is especially true as the 200m sprints loom very large to start with and then get worse as you know that you are deliberately tiring your arms and lungs out before you get to them. That makes each one that is completed all the more satisfying.
Tuesday was the hardest session this week. It was a 90 minute naegative split. I'm really trying to improve my run so I tried a new method of working out my route. I set a target pace level for each sector and then measured how far I should go in that time and then planned the route on that basis.
It was a really good run - I fell far short of my target time (by 22 minutes) but I really pushed myself - and I think something I'm starting to learn is accepting the pain as a good thing , not something to be avoided.
Logistics were a little complicated along the way as I stopped for drinks and had to arrange a drop off as well. Knowing the route better I'll stop at petrol stations in future. Got back to Armanee Terrace and collapsed at the guard post - Arif stopped and asked how I was - said I'd done 50 minutes hard. He sid Ok and drove off knowing that there was a reason that I looked like shit. I love it when people understand. :)
Wednesday was back to the pool for 600m efforts. Not the fastest in the world at 13:50 but it was a good session. This was the first of these and the real challenge was to find out what the maximum sustainable pace that I can keep up for 600m. The first and last sets were at easy and the middle three were hard. It was all a matter of adjusting cadence and pull to get the right cadence to kill my arms without putting a huge aerobic stress on my lungs.
Into the pool in the afternoon with Maya who jumped off the side without any buoyancy and then swam to the side with no assistance. Then did it a few more times to prove that it was not ana accident. Cool.
In the evening I decided to go to Yoga and picked something that I couldn't pronounce and can't remember. The idea was a bit of stretching and muscle relaxation. The result was lots of press-ups and bodily twisting. A very intense upper body workout - hard after killing my arms in the morning but enjoyable.
Then we ended up getting pissed. Thursday morning - well the hill intervals were postponed into the evening. We were due to go to friends for a birthday (Happy Birthday Ercument and Nur that Cake was one of the best Birthday cakes I've ever eaten. Yum. Yum.) so I had to go out at 7 despite the rain, thunder and lightening.
TriTwins' Simon has a great blog about training in the rain. After so many years of avoiding it in the UK I was a bit apprehensive but loved it after a few minutes. Especially as my Kona C's with their bottom holes were really good at keeping my feet dry.
10 sprints up a hill in the dark in the pouring rain with the only illumination from lightening that turned everything an electric blue. Great. I focused on keeping my form good rather than all out speed and generally managed to have a good 45 seconds on each interval with the last 15 becoming increasingly painful. The limiting factor was definitely the aerobic capacity - though I think cadence and leg lift was also decreasing at the end of each interval. A lot of fun - especially walking back to the starting point after each effort.
Friday morning - kind of taper for the hash marathon tomorrow. I reduced the turbo hard intervals to 5 instead of ten and reduced the intensity by not applying the brakes whilst I was doing them. A nice easy start to the day.
All in all I feel pretty good at the moment. The frightening thing is that I am still in base period. Yikes! Everest Marathon is coming up soon and then I have a couple of months of racing lots of short triathlons. Yeee ha!
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