New Training Cycle

Monday morning was a bit tough after the swimathon the day before. I woke up with hot and pulsing biceps. Not had that before. I also had a nice set of bruises all around my neck from where the speed suit chaffed. Looks life someone tried to garotte me with a wire rope - or had an 18 inch wide mouth :)

The new plan is running based but for some reason I had a swim session planned.l So I went down the the pool with a plan for about 2000m including lots of sprints.

No.

The swimming was really nice but there was no way that this was going to be anything but a recovery swim. I did 250m very easy and then another 250m with pull buoy equally easy. It was quite difficult trying to pull as gently as possible to avoid stressing my delicate arm muscles. That was about the shortest session I'd done for a while but definitely felt that it was an excellent session. The result was that on Tuesday my arms felt great and all residual stiffness had gone.

Tuesday's session was a negative split 90 minute run. I'd intended to do a big circle out to the sprint and back but it was raining at 0600. OK so I'll stay in bed. :). Then I remembered that it was one week on rolling hills and the other on the treadmill. Damm.

So 0615 I started on a 90 minute blast at 10km for the first 30 minutes, 13kmh for the second 30 and 16kmh for the last 30. I started off barefoot and really enjoyed it but my feet started getting very sore by about 45 minutes and I jumped off and put some old Saucony trainers on. The different was huge.

My vertical oscillation massively increased as the shoes made me bounce up and down and it was very hard to maintain my cadence. and it slowly declined. I also made a concious decision to stop using a fan for cooling whilst training on the treadmill on the balcony.

One of my big limiters is running in the heat. By running in an air con environment or with the aid of a fan I'm getting a load of cooling which I won't get on race day. It is surely better to suffer the effects of heat now and gain some adaptation than have a shock on race day. The last 15 minutes were pretty hellish and I stumbled straight across to the garden hose and drenched myself as an emergency cooling mechanism as soon as I finished.

92 minutes - 19.8km