Post 11 - Time to ease off

Training this week was as follows (my biggest training week so far in 2014):

Monday 24^th February – Rest
Tuesday 25^th February – 1:10 turbo (1 hour hard), 25 minute run
Wed 26^th February – 30 minute fartlek run
Thurs 27^th February – 1:05 turbo (6 x 5 mins hard, 5 mins easy), 30 minute run
Friday 28^th February – Swim 3km (with 2 x 10 x 100m off 2 minutes), 1 hour turbo (single leg drills)
Saturday 1^st March – 2:15 turbo (increasing resistance), 65 minute run
Sunday 2^nd March – Swim 3.3km (with hand paddle drills)

Totals: Swim 6.3km, Bike 110 miles, Run 23 miles


Looking back over my training diary, this has been my fifth tough week in a row. Normally I would only do two tough weeks before taking an easier week. However, in the past weeks, my schedule has been thrown off by moving house and by the Norway trip last week, and also by the forthcoming Aberdeen trip next week. Right now I am feeling very fatigued and in need of some rest and recovery time.

However, without wanting to jinx myself, I feel like my injury problems from earlier in the year are behind me, and I feel that my training has been going well and that my fitness is moving in the right direction. My mileages and intensity have increased week by week over the past month and I have coped well with this.

My two sets of 10 x 100m swim repeats this week were solid. Each 100m repeat and recovery is based on 2-minute intervals, so if the 100m is completed in 1:29, then the recovery time is 31 seconds. I had a lane to myself when doing this session, which in real-life terms probably isn’t far off having an entire 5-star hotel or theme park to oneself. Or being the proverbial kid in the sweet shop, or the bull enjoying the china shop. It meant I didn’t have to dodge around slow swimmers and be held up, or be kicked by annoyingly slow breaststrokers in the fast lane. “Fast lane” means “fast”! “Breaststroke” generally isn’t fast!

In the past, when I have done this session, the first set of 10 x 100m usually averages around 1:27 or 1:28 or so, followed by an easy 500m recovery swim before starting the second set. Usually, the times would drop off to something like 1:32 or 1:33 for the second 10 x 100m. On Friday, my first 10 x 100m were averaging around 1:27 and my second 10 x 100m were averaging around 1:29, so I was pleased with this.

I’m also feeling reasonably good on the bike and reasonably good on my runs too. I feel “strong”, thanks in part to all of the core work I have been doing – weights, press-ups, sit-ups, planks, stretching, foam rolling, using the heat pack, and in particular my squatting and crab-walking exercises are very beneficial.

My new “pain cave” in my new house is much better than in my old house. I’m now turbo training inside in a good temperature, and I can watch things while I train. In the past week I have watched the Ireland v England rugby match, a documentary about the K2 mountain, a documentary about jumbo jets, two episodes of Top Gear, and a BBC Northern Ireland comedy show. All of these were infinitely more interesting and infinitely less dull then staring at a garage door. Even a Top Gear drive through rural Ukraine seemed exciting in comparison…

 

New pain cave - contrast this with photos from a few weeks ago...

The increased fitness is evident in a number of ways. One is that I have a serious appetite at the minute, illustrated by the following story: On Friday after work I went down to the bike shop to buy a cheap cassette for a spare set of wheels. The idea is that I will take the expensive race wheels off my triathlon bike and store them, and I’ll train on a cheap set of wheels. Hopefully this will help in not stressing and torqueing my race wheels day in and day out for the months to come.

Anyway, I had been grazing all day at work, left work, went to the shop, bought and ate food, walked to the bike shop, bought the cassette, went to another shop, bought and ate more food, walked to the station, bought and ate more food, took the train, got off at my stop, went to the shop, bought and ate more food, went home, ate more food, trained, ate dinner, and then went to bed. Then, next morning it wasn’t my alarm clock that woke me up, it was hunger pangs. I came back to my house on Friday to see a freshly-made ginger cake on the bench in the kitchen, with a knife beside it. I could have gobbled the whole damn thing up in 60 seconds flat, and it took a lot of discipline to look but not touch… 

A couple of days of fuel

Incidentally, the store price for the cassette was £53.99, but it retails online for less than half that and is available for £23.99. So I took the store up on their “price match” promise, and the salesman (yes, he was a salesman, not what I would consider a bike shop man) looked a bit disappointed when he checked online and found the cassette retailing for £23.99. So, if you ever go to Cycle Surgery (or any of the other big bike retailers to buy something), check online and price-match them…

Despite all this eating, I am still losing weight and last week when I weighed myself I was down at 69kg. Considering I went up to 75kg in the aftermath of Ironman Wales, I have lost a fair chunk of weight. In the run-up to Ironman UK last year I was about 68 or 69kg, so I’m obviously working at a higher level than I was this time last year and I will need to make sure I don’t peak too soon.

On a side note, I was in a supermarket during the week, and I was scanning the aisle signs when I noticed an “Irish” aisle. Intrigued, I went to have a look. What Irish stuff could they possibly be selling in London? Surely not Irish flags? Or Ireland rugby jerseys? But then again, St Patrick’s Day isn’t far away… It turned out there was a whole section of one aisle devoted to Tayto crisps, Club Orange and Harp lager. All of which were tempting but off-limits to me. Another manifestation of the increased fitness and intensity of the past few weeks is that I am even more tired than normal, and again on Friday night and Saturday night I slept for almost 12 hours each night.

Logic would perhaps dictate that when one feels like one’s fitness is improving, and when things are going well, this is the time to push on, increase the mileage, increase the intensity and generally ramp things up. Experience has taught me the exact opposite. When I feel that improvements have been made and that my fitness has improved after a heavy block of training, this is precisely the time to take a step back, ease off, and allow recovery. During this “easing off” period, the body can rest, recover and repair itself. Yes, a certain degree of fitness will be lost, but only a small amount. Then, after an easier week or two, during which time I will still train, albeit with significantly reduced mileages and intensities, the body will be ready for another spell of tough stuff.

Continuing to train at high intensity for months on end, in my experience, will lead to burn-out, injuries and frustration. So, the easy weeks are vital, and in my current circumstances, an easy week is long overdue. I will use the week in Aberdeen to recuperate, and if I feel adequately rested, I’ll start another block of hard training the following week.

A simple and very crude graph illustrates this concept: 

The black line shows the approach I am taking, with shorter blocks of tough training interspersed with regular “easy time”. Over time, gradual progress is made and the chances of having injury or burn-out setbacks are minimised. The red line shows how I used to approach my running training about 8 years ago. Going hell-for-leather with no structure and no recovery time built in can lead to enforced, frustrating and lengthy layoffs. Much better to have smaller but more regular, uninterrupted gains, as over time this will lead to better longer-term gains.

I try to judge my training not just on the miles I put in, but on the quality of rest I get, and on how fresh I feel. It’s important to feel fresh during tough training. At the minute, I don’t feel fresh and so the easy week next week will be a great benefit to me.

As a final anecdote, I am still struggling to adapt to the new commute. Getting to central London on the train is frustrating enough, but getting from the central London train station to work is even more frustrating because I won’t take the tube, walk on busy roads, or cycle on busy roads – the air pollution is pretty bad. So I have ended up taking painfully slow buses. I am going to change the central London station I commute to, and go to a slightly less direct station, which will eat away even more of my time on a daily basis but which will enable me to walk/between the station and the office on quieter roads.

Anyway, the anecdote is that I use SouthEastern trains to get from the house to central London. A recent newspaper article reported that SouthEastern trains have the lowest customer satisfaction rating of any train company in Britain. When challenged about this, SouthEastern unbelievably said something along the lines of: “We’re not surprised, because we charge people money they don’t want to pay, to travel on trains they don’t want to be on, to take them somewhere they don’t want to be (i.e. work!)” Not quite the response that the public were expecting! Also, they forgot that their trains are always late, slow, smelly, overcrowded, hot, noisy, grossly overpriced and generally not somewhere one wants to spend 2 hours a day. No wonder satisfaction is low…!