Another long break...

It has been months since I have put fingers to keyboard to write a blog post - why?? Well it has been just a little busy at work and in life...

Evie is nearly eight months old and this year I have travelled to most of Europe in addition to Canada, Japan and the states (with Hong Kong, the US and maybe Japan (again) this month...

So has this left time for training? Yes and no...in some respects the training I now do is better than it used to be! Why? Well I have to ensure that any training I do is worthwhile, I have had to ask Mike to loose the junk miles, the sessions which have limited bearing, and focus me on key sessions which improve output.

There is a a 'however' though, my swimming has suffered significantly as this is the only area which I cannot routinely do. When I go on trips I can always pack running kit and there is usually a gym for a training bike (more on that later), but good pools are few and far between and despite having an app on my iPhone which tells me about local pools I have yet to use it in anger. As a result of this drop in skill/fitness and due to time, I have decided not to attempt several races that I had considered this year - the 14km Bridge to Bridge race, the UK Masters Open Water National Championships and a couple of other open water races. This is frustrating but it is balanced out, to a degree, by the positives.

So what are the positives - well the running and cycling have benefitted!! My running pace/km has improved from an average of 7min/km when I trained for IM Switzerland to around 5:45min/km now. My top tempo pace has improved to about 5min/km and with all the 'brick' (bike/run) I can feel good about running after about 1km off a long ride. As for the cycling that has improved dramatically . After IM I realised that if I wanted to be middle of the pack (MOP) rather than back of pack (BOP) I had to up my game on the bike. Initially we (Mike and I (I always think of my coach as part of the team)) tried to go for increased cadence, with some increased strength work, this was the strategy we tried in the build for last year and it worked, to a degree, however it was only when I changed the chainrings to 54/42 TT setup, before IM 70.3 Ireland that there was a step change.

During the Irish race I did something for the first time - I overtook people on the bike. This change was the foundation for the training plans this year - rather than focus on high cadence rather to move towards significant strength work. In an ideal world this would mean lots of gym work on building muscle BUT life through a curve ball in there and I blistered the cartilage on the back of my left patella running for a train - rather than go for surgery, the recommendation was to stop doing exercises which loaded the knee eccentrically (ie no squats, etc). Therefore we started to introduce some significant interval work in through the winter (all of my training was based on building speed/pace rather than base over winter) building over time culminating in some recent significant sets. My current favourite set is a 2hour ride broken down as into 30min blocks (warm up/effort/easy/effort) where the effort block is basically put the bike into the highest gear possible - in my case 54-12, rather high....- it is immensely hard but delivers a really effective strength workout. The output of these sets came home to me yesterday as I did an interval set on the turbo:

WU: 10mins Ez (Focus on good technique 3 x 3mins, ILT (3 x 30s), Spin-ups 3 x 30s as (10s 100RPM,10s 110RPM, 10s 110RPM+))

MS: 6 x 5mins - Hill Climbing (RPE 15-17!)
Rep 1 - 250w @ 90rpm
Rep 2 - 260w @ 80rpm
Rep 3 - 270w @ 70rpm
Rep 4 - 280w @ 70rpm
Rep 5-6 - 290w @ 80rpm
5mins Ez in b/t @ 95rpm!

CD: Stetch down

If last year someone had told me I could hold 290W for 5mins I would have laughed!

As you will guess if you read this blog post in a one'er you will realise that it has been written over several days...today is a week since I started writing this and I am currently sitting in Washington DC's BA lounge finishing it off. since I started writing this I have been to Stockholm (where as far as I can see everyone is drop dead gorgeous (well those who run at 6-7am anyway!) and I have spent several days in the US Capitol - all I can say is - what a place to run! I was lucky enough to be staying in the JW Marriot on Pennsylvania Avenue - just down for the White House - and despite the temperature ranging from 36-42 degrees during my trip, an the humidity in the 80s-90s I managed to get in s couple of runs. Yesterday I ran 11.47km in 1:10 - a slow pace but the heat killed me - I took a work colleague and friend out with me and he held up well despite his longest run recently being 5km!! We ran around the White House, the Lincoln, WWII, Vietnam, Korean and Washington memorials and then headed up to The Capitol before returning to base, the long way round - it was fantastic - sightseeing and running :-)

More to follow with maps :-)
Later
I