This week I did my first really tough, fully
focussed training week of the year. It was very tough and intense. And I had problems
with tiger balm.
Between Ironman Wales in mid-September last year and sometime in
December, it’s fair to say I didn’t do much training. Yes I still trained.
Maybe even 3-4 times a week. Plus a few weights and stretches thrown in. But
relative to what I had been doing, I hadn’t been doing much. I didn’t eat
super-clean, and I drank stuff that’s more powerful than water. So I became
quite unfit. But that’s OK. It was downtime. Break time. I knew I had a couple
of races over Christmas, so I trained a little harder in the few weeks before
Christmas. And I continued this on into January. Now, I have as much of a plan
as it is currently possible for me to have for 2016. Depending on if or when I
lose my job. Or if/when I “have to” move to Oslo or Paddington or elsewhere. I
will re-assess things as I go. In the meantime, I’m 100% for the Northern
Ireland/Ulster cross-country championships in 3 weeks.
I need to be really fit for this. I want to race and
contribute to the club’s team effort. My overall ideal plan for 2016 wouldn’t
have seen me doing the intense training needed for the Ulsters until much later
in the year. My reasoning is that I don’t need to peak in late February for a
summer Ironman. I need to peak in July. But I might not make it to July, so I
am going to have a few intermediate goals along the way so I don’t waste the
training I’m doing if it turns out that Ironman doesn’t work out.
So this week was the first week of really intense training.
It was so tough. By two days in, I was knackered. And this was only Wednesday!
By the weekend I was ruined, and I don’t know how I got through Saturday and
Sunday’s sessions. But I did. And it was so tough that I might need an easy
week to recover. My body just isn’t used to that kind of punishment yet. And
it’s getting better at letting me know this. The efforts are tougher, they are
more difficult to recover from, and it’s more of an effort to block out the
voice in the head that screams “why bother?” That said, the first proper week
back training was never going to be easy…
Plus, I picked up a cold and a sore throat in Italy
recently, and I didn’t feel that I had properly recovered from this. How long
should I wait to recover? Should I postpone the first few days of tough
training this week? How long would I wait to feel fully better? Time is running
out before the Ulsters… So I thought I’d just get on with it and do the planned
training, and if I felt I was getting worse instead of better, I’d be forced
into resting fully.
Monday was the usual rest day. On Tuesday I did some very
high intensity efforts on the bike. I wanted to do a full-on FTP (functional
threshold power) benchmarking test – as hard as you can go for 20 full minutes.
It seems more like 200 minutes when you’re doing it. But I’d have done more
harm than good with such a test as I’m still deconditioned. I’ll do it in a few
weeks. Instead I did 2 x 10 minute efforts. This doesn’t sound like much, but…
But look what happens after 6 minutes when your heart rate
is over 170 and sweat is dripping everywhere and the big fan is going full
blast in your face and you’re still dripping sweat everywhere, and your
breathing is louder than the fan and the turbo flywheel combined, and your
housemates are wondering what the hell is going on in that room, and you’re
struggling to maintain the 310+ watts you started out at, and you just want to
stop but you’ve got 4 minutes left before the 10 minutes are up and then after
what is surely another minute has passed you look up again to see that only 10
more seconds have passed, and then you only get a 5 minute recovery (which will
feel like 5 seconds) before you have another 10 minutes to do and how on earth
will I get through another 10 minutes in this state…
I watched "The 20 greatest moments of the Tour de France" while on the turbo, which led me to this brilliant photo of Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor almost literally locked together on the Puy de Dome climb in the 1964 Tour de France:
On the subject of old photos, I also came across the old photo below, which I would guess is the Col d'Izoard, another big Tour de France Alpine climb. The landscape looks very like the photo I took when climbing the Izoard a couple of years ago. One photo is looking back down the road, and the other is looking up the climb. Are they the same spot on the same climb...?
Wednesday was a fartlek run. 1 minute fast and 1 minute slow
for 40 minutes. With a 5 minute warm-up and a 5-minute cool down, this means 15
x 1-minute efforts. You play a numbers game. Don’t think about anything until
you’ve done 3 or 4. Then you’re at a stage where you’ve only got nearly 10
efforts left. Then after a couple more you’ll be halfway through it. Then, one
more and you’re well inside halfway. A couple more and you’re two-thirds of the
way through, which means you’ve only got half as many to do as you’ve already
down. 4 left. 3 left. 2 left. Last one… And a fartlek run isn’t even a
super-tough session. I was pretty wiped out after this, but at least I had
planned for Thursday to be a rest day. I needed it.
Friday was a pool session. This was the first time I’ve swam
hard since September last year. I was dreading it. But, dread or not, low
motivation or high, there was no decision to make. It was going to be done. Commitment
is doing what you said you’d do, long after the mood you said it in has gone. I
decided on 2 sets of 10 x 100m intervals, off a generous 2 minutes (which means
I hoped to do each 100m in 1:30, which would give me 30 seconds of recovery).
I’ve done these sets off 1:40 and 1:30 before (much shorter recoveries), but I
wasn’t ready for such horror so early in the year. For the first set of 10, I
averaged around 1:27. I was actually pleased with this, but the level of
pleasing would rightly be affected by how much slower the second set was.
I had it in my head that a similar session in the past had
seen something like 1:33 for the second set. So I was fairly satisfied to be
able to hold 1:30 for all of the second set. This was in spite of the water in
the pool seemingly being replaced with treacle - lots of effort being put in, but
going nowhere fast, and terrible visibility (which might just have been my
goggles steaming up, or tunnel vision kicking in). I checked my heart rate at
the end of the final two intervals. Over 185. Really high. But good. I need to
train like this for the Ulsters. Needless to say, I was completely spent after
this pool session. No energy. And with a tough weekend of training ahead. I thought I might go and do a Park Run on Saturday morning, but then thought that an extra 4 or 5 hours in bed would do me more good. So at least I could spend 12 hours in bed and get up at 11am on Saturday. Small
mercies…
After my swim, I got home and put the washing on. Then I did
a stupid thing. The scoop that I use to put the washing powder in the machine
folds in flat on itself. You have to push it into shape. I wondered if I could
whip it through the air so hard that it would pop itself into shape. I had just
done a really tough pool workout and my arms were sore. If I’d thought about
this, I wouldn’t have done it. I didn’t think about it. I did it. It half went
into shape. And my right arm half went out of shape. It was immediately very
painful right up through my right shoulder and upper arm. Idiot, that was a
bloody stupid thing to do. I was raging at myself. All I could do was hope it
would clear up quickly. Another illustration of how finely-tuned I am, and how
a simple thing that’s “out of routine” can cause problems.
I was really tired. Saturday’s bike passed OK. A moderately tough hour, not
going all guns blazing but hard enough for a good workout. I averaged 251 watts
at 151bpm. I watched “the rack pack” on the laptop, a film about the “glory
days” of snooker back in the 80s, when I would have started watching the game.
The film centred on Alex Higgins, Steve Davis and Barry Hearn. It was a really
good show, telling the story of Northern Ireland snooker maverick and
self-styled “people’s champion” Alex Higgins struggling to cope with his
drinking issues and with the increasing “corporatisation” of the game, led by
promoter Barry Hearn and his number one player Steve Davis. It was sad in a lot
of respects. Worth a watch. After the bike, I realised I had overstretched my
hamstrings beforehand. They were sore and not in a good way. I could only hope
for the best.
Sunday’s hill repetitions were tough. It’s a simple concept.
Run up a hill as fast as possible, jog back down, and repeat lots of times.
Last year, in late spring, when I was running well, I was able to average
around 68 seconds per interval for 14 intervals/repetitions/reps/whatever you want to call them. On Sunday it was windy and my
legs were really sore and I was knackered. It was a tough session. I planned to
do 12 intervals. My legs were tired, but that’s OK. My right shoulder was still
sore, but that’s OK, I don’t run with my shoulder. My hamstrings were really
sore, which wasn’t OK. I had overstretched them the day before, to the point
where today I couldn’t walk normally. So I would have to see how the hills
went, and I knew that if the hamstrings were bad then I’d have to stop. There’s
good pain and bad pain. Bad pain is not to be argued with. Stopping is the
sensible thing. Don’t overstep the line. The body can only do so much.
I went out anyway to see how things would feel. The hamstrings didn’t seem to be
restricting me too much. I started the first hill. The usual mental games
began. Don’t do the first one too hard. This feels easy, is it hard enough? 73
seconds isn’t super-quick, but there’s a strong headwind. And I’m layered up in
jacket and tights. Stick with it. After a couple of reps you’ll settle into it.
Doing two or three reps isn’t too much bother. Each rep takes around 70
seconds, but call it a minute, that fools you into thinking it’s shorter. 10
reps left. That means 10 minutes of effort. Only 10 minutes. “Only” 10
minutes?! 9 left. I feel terrible now, this is so tough. How will I do another
8 of these? At least my times aren’t slipping too much, keep going.
7 done, that’s halfway there. Another one down, now 6
minutes of effort left. That’s about a mile. Only a mile. Don’t let the time it
takes to jog back down slip too much. 5 efforts left. It’s like running through
quicksand. You could just stop. You’ve done 10. That’s enough. No it isn’t.
Finish off. The last few are the hardest, but they’ll make the difference on
race day. Feck, I just ran 75 seconds, that’s a 2-second drop-off, but the wind
seemed stronger, that’s why. Ah feck again, another 75-second interval and
still two more to go. A couple of seconds of drop-off is OK, any more means
I’ll be doing more harm than good.
Massive effort then, two more to go, get that time back
down. You could just stop your watch a fraction of a second early to see a 74
or a 73… but who’s that cheating? Argh, another 75, but at least I will finish
my 12. Final one, leave it all out there, get up that hill, hammer it, 74
seconds. Collapse onto the wall. Tomorrow is a rest day. I don’t have to push
myself for 2 whole days. I don’t have to do these reps again for one whole
week. Welcome to my world…
After Sunday's hill reps, I spent the rest of the day eating. Training
like this makes me very hungry. I got through a massive omelette, 4 bowls of
porridge, 3 slices of toast, 3 apples, 2 kiwi fruits, 2 bananas, 2 energy bars,
some (lots) of cake, a bag of rice, 2 chicken breasts, an onion and a bag of
vegetables, lots of water and lemon juice, and I still woke up the next day
feeling hungry.
All of this eating was done in the most horrendous
discomfort. I did some clearing out on Saturday, and got rid of a whole pile of
junk and paperwork that I’ll never need again. I found a couple of sachets of
tiger balm, which I must have got in a race goody bag or something. I’ve never
used tiger balm before, but I know it’s used for muscular aches and pains. The
writing on the sachets confirmed this. So why not put it on my aching and
painful hamstrings and upper right arm instead of throwing it out? After the
hill session I took a shower and then I rubbed the tiger balm into both
hamstrings, taking care not to rub it into my backside or get it anywhere else
where it wouldn’t be needed or welcomed. I put a bit on my right shoulder and
arm too. Tiger balm stinks, which means if you use it, you’ll stink, but who
cares, the aches and pains will disappear…
Ha. Shortly after, everything felt like it was on fire. My
hamstrings were burning. My entire right arm was burning. The heat and vapours
and pulling on underwear and trousers all helped to spread the Tiger Balm where
you don’t want it spread. My arse was burning. And goodness gracious, great
balls of fire. I wanted to jump straight back in the shower and wash it all off
and get rid of the burning. But, no pain no gain, so I flapped around the
kitchen in a bit of distress and considered jumping in the pond out the back, firing
up a hose, making use of the fire extinguisher, or calling the fire brigade.
But the endurance athlete is good at suffering, and good at the “no pain no
gain” mentality. So I stuck with it. I’ll reap the gains tomorrow, even if I
haven’t got an arse left, at least my hamstrings and arm will be fine.
And the next day? Was all the pain worth it? There was no
difference whatsoever in hamstring or arm muscle pain… I’ll never use tiger
balm again…
Training done this week (low mileage but intense sessions):
Mon 25 Jan: Rest
Tue 26 Jan: 40 minute turbo (2 x 10mins: 310w/165bpm, 313w/169bpm, 5 min recovery)
Wed 27 Jan: 40 minute fartlek run
Thu 28 Jan: Rest
Fri 29 Jan: Swim 2.8k (2 x 10 x 100m off 2mins. 1:27/1:30 average)
Sat 30 Jan: 1:15 turbo (1 hour at 251w/151bpm)
Sun 31 Jan: 12 x hill reps (73, 73, 73, 71, 72, 73, 73, 73, 75, 75, 75, 74)
Tue 26 Jan: 40 minute turbo (2 x 10mins: 310w/165bpm, 313w/169bpm, 5 min recovery)
Wed 27 Jan: 40 minute fartlek run
Thu 28 Jan: Rest
Fri 29 Jan: Swim 2.8k (2 x 10 x 100m off 2mins. 1:27/1:30 average)
Sat 30 Jan: 1:15 turbo (1 hour at 251w/151bpm)
Sun 31 Jan: 12 x hill reps (73, 73, 73, 71, 72, 73, 73, 73, 75, 75, 75, 74)
Totals: Swim 2.8km, Bike 45 miles, Run 12 miles
Artsy chain photo
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