Post 113 - More repetitions and a coffee machine

Another week has passed. It doesn’t look like there will be any travel to Italy before the Northern Ireland/Ulster cross country on 20th February, which is good. I’ve completed a tough but good 2-week training block. It has been very tough. Very tiring. More tiring than I thought it should be. I look at what training I was doing at my peak last year and I think, “How on earth will I get back to that level…?” But hopefully I will. I’ll rest and recover now for a couple of days, then I’ll have a couple more tough days, and then an easy week to taper down.

I planned to do a couple of benchmark tests this week – a functional threshold power (FTP) bike test (20 minutes as hard as possible), a 1500m swim time trial and maybe a 5K Park Run. I’d repeat these benchmarks a few times in the season and hopefully can use them to gauge my progress, and compare results with previous years. I did my FTP test on Wednesday evening. I hit 324 watts last season but I knew I’d be nowhere near that on this occasion. It’s earlier in the season compared with when I did the test last year, and so I know I’m not as fit at this stage, and I am still building up to full intensity this season, because I don’t want to trash myself so early in the season. This time around, I hoped to be able to sustain around 300 watts for the 20 minutes.

I did a good 20-minute warm up and then went for it. I must admit I was quite conservative, and knew I’d rather finish strong than start too hard and fade or blow up. So I started at a fraction under 300 watts and let the pain build from there. 10 minutes passed OK, but the final 10 seemed like forever. I knew I was under my limit because my heart rate only averaged 164bpm, but if I was really going for it, I would be averaging in the mid-170s.

Anyway, I finished the session strong, pushing something like 330 watts, and averaged 307 watts for the whole 20 minutes. You then multiply this by 0.95 to give your FTP – a measure of what you could theoretically hold for an hour. My value was 291 watts. I had to settle for that, and did a good warm down. Later in the year I hope to be able to break 330 watts for the 20-minute test, but hopefully I’ll hit that peak in June rather than April.

The following night I ran for an hour, at a decent pace. It wasn’t a bad session, but my surroundings are becoming less and less inspiring. Hours on the turbo in my room, and lap after lap of the same housing estates. It has to be done though… For some reason I came across a photo of Muhammed Ali during the week, with a quote written on the photo. It’s copied below.

“I hated every minute of training, but I said, don’t quit, suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.” I can empathise with that. I wouldn’t say I hate training, but it’s becoming more and more difficult. My surroundings are not particularly inspiring. A turbo trainer in my room and laps of housing estates. There’s nowhere else convenient to go. Maybe it’s just me struggling with trying to get back to fitness after a fairly unfit winter, but I think I am losing the desire for giving up my whole life to essential destroy myself every day in training. I also wouldn’t say I’m going to be a champion at anything, but I’m training for a purpose and hopefully the training will finally make my purpose become reality this year, because I am losing the desire to put myself through the Ironman training regime and everything else that goes with it, trashing my body and mind every day for hours on end, for months on end, year after year. There is other more constructive stuff I could be doing with my life.

I guess all athletes reach a point when they realise that they don’t want to do it any more, and I think I’ve reached that point for Ironman, and I think that even if I was in better surroundings with easy access to nice roads for cycling and nice countryside for running, I’d still be saying the same thing.

For now, I still have the motivation to do it this year, assuming my work situation allows me to, but as it stands at the minute, the desire has faded a bit and it isn’t going to be there after this year. I’m dragging myself through this year as it is, forcing myself through it, the metaphorical kicking and screaming, the demons doing their things in my head. I still have no idea what will happen with work, but every day that passes is a day closer to a point of no return, whereby if I lose my job or end up with a terrible relocation, then I’ll be close enough to the Ironman and will have got my bonus so that I’d be able to take a couple of months off. There will come a point this season where I’ll have too much invested in it and too high a level of fitness to throw it away and to allow it to be compromised by anything. I’d rather not have time off work, but if that’s what I’ll have to do then that’s what I’ll have to do, because I can’t see me Ironman-ing beyond this year.

I’m getting pretty bored of pasta too, so I’ve started on wholegrain rice and quinoa instead now. I recently read Geraint Thomas’s book about cycling, and he says that one of the few things that cyclists look forward to when training or racing is dinner time, when the hard work is done and all that’s left to do is eat and sleep. He praises the chef who cooks different meals each evening. He’s not wrong!

Not pasta, but wholegrain rice, quinoa, veg, and turkey.
Note the multi-tasking: blogging and dinner at the same time.

Who takes such stupid photos anyway?! 

I planned to do a 150m swim time trial on Friday after work. I’ve found that training has been particularly tiring this year compared with previous years. I went to Italy about 3 weeks ago and caught a lurgy and I still don’t feel that I’ve shaken it off, and I seem to feel drained and unreasonably knackered all the time. Hopefully it’ll pass. But I didn’t feel I had it in me to do a 1500m swim time trial on Friday. Looking at the immediate goal (getting fit for the Northern Ireland/Ulster cross country), if I was to blast a 1500m pool time trial in such a tired state then it would leave me ruined for the training I needed to do over the weekend, and I felt the weekend training (in particular the run interval session) was more important than a pool time trial. So I did an easy swim (for the first time ever I had a whole pool to myself), and then I went home, did washing, ate, and went to bed early.

On Saturday morning (yes, noon was deemed Saturday morning, I was tired and needed a lie-in), I had to go to the post office, which meant I had to take the train. I’ve boarded trains hundreds of times. I know how to do it. The train door opens. It stays open for 30-60 seconds. You step on. Easy. Only this time, as I was stepping on, about 2 seconds after the train door had opened, it literally slammed in my face and also hit my knee (these doors slam really hard) and knocked me backwards onto the platform. Feckin’ broken door. Not good.

I wondered what training to do on Saturday. I knew it was a bike day and therefore that I’d be on the turbo trainer (oh to be able to just get on a bike and ride though some nice surroundings with nice views on quiet roads), and I had thought I would do turbo intervals. But then I thought that doing intervals on the bike would leave me tired and less able to do run intervals the following day, and I felt that the run intervals were more important for the short-term goal. So instead I did an easier 2-hour turbo at 201 watts and 131bpm on Saturday and then watched the 6 nations and ate food non-stop. Despite my insatiable appetite, training has meant I’ve dropped a couple of kilos, which is good for the race in 2 weeks.

Then I wondered what to do on Sunday. I knew I needed to do run intervals. I’ve done quite a few hill repetitions since the start of the year. I thought some longer intervals would be beneficial this time. So I tried to think of a 1km loop that I could repeat, where there wouldn’t be much traffic, or where there wouldn’t be many people or dogs either to get in the way. I thought I’d do 6 x 1km (each kilometre in around 3 minutes) with 2 minutes of recovery between each. Having decided on my route, I told myself to make sure not to run the first and second intervals too hard, and to be able to finish strong.

As it turned out, the intervals took nearly 4 minutes, so I lengthened the recovery to 2:45. The route was a loop. About two-thirds of it was flat, and it ended with a hill that got steeper and steeper. The recovery was a jog back down a short, steep hill to the start of the loop. I have never done this session before so it was difficult to gauge exactly how to pace it. I ran the first lap in 3:40 and felt it was maybe a bit fast. The uphill bit was into a really strong headwind. The second one was in 3:41. OK, not bad. The third was 3:46 and the hill was a nightmare this time. I told myself the headwind was getting stronger – maybe it was, but I was also fading. Any more fading and I may as well call it quits.

Ideally you want to do every repetition in the same time. Perceived effort is a difficult thing to judge. You would think I’d have learned, given my years of training and racing. And I have learned, but when you have never run a particular loop or session, it becomes more difficult. You don’t want your times to tail off by more than a few seconds, otherwise you are doing more harm than good. You want to finish the session knackered but still strong, not knackered, faded and weak. My next interval was 3:52 which was bad. If it got any worse I would have called it quits. Then I did 3:50, then 3:47. Not a great set of times, but thankfully I found something in me to just about lower the times that followed the 3:52. If I was doing that session again (and no doubt I will) I would aim to run the first one in 3:46 (the average of the 6 that I did) and then take it from there, I’d be stronger throughout the session with an easier first one or two repeats.

Bloody repetitions. Not easy. Not particularly enjoyable. Even less enjoyable now compared with years ago. The rest of the day was spent eating, resting and watching more 6 nations rugby. Brutal sport. I wouldn't stand a chance.

My housemates are keen coffee drinkers. Coffee is very popular with lots of people, including cyclists, and more recently my brothers. Not me, I’ve never drank it in my life and don’t really see any need to start. My housemates have always had a coffee machine in the house. This week a new, massive, swanky, expensive, bad-ass, all singing all dancing, no holds barred coffee machine has appeared in the house. “I don’t really see any need to start” - these might be famous last words…

It was described as a "beautiful shiny alien thing."

Apparently you can buy EPO-coffee. EPO-coffee?! What?! EPO, short for erythropoietin, is an infamous, banned, illegal performance-enhancing drug for endurance athletes.

The manufacturer of this EPO coffee is “Paniagua.” “Pan” is Spanish for “bread.” “Agua” is Spanish for “water.” “Pan y agua” is therefore Spanish for “bread and water.” “Pan y agua” is a term in cycling used to mean “not on drugs”, i.e. riding on “bread and water” and nothing else. “Does he dope?” “No, he’s clean, he’s pan y agua.”

I’m sure the coffee from the new coffee machine is nice. In fact, I am told it is nice. But one evening this is what I noticed was sitting under it:

So is it also a urine-test machine?! A machine that will give you doped-up coffee and then give you a urine test to tell you that you’ve tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs? I was struggling to get out of the house on Sunday to do my running repetition session. It was suggested to me that I have a double espresso, then I’d be buzzing and ready to hammer… Caffeine and EPO coffee… Hmmm…

Not for me, I’m clean living, pan y agua… no coffee, no EPO, no drugs, just clean food and hard 

work…

Training done this week was as follows:

Mon 1 Feb: Rest
Tue 2 Feb: Rest
Wed 3 Feb: 50 min turbo (20 min FTP test: 307w at 164bpm = 291w FTP)
Thu 4 Feb: 60 min run
Fri 5 Feb: Swim 2.1k
Sat 6 Feb: 2 hour turbo
Sun 7 Feb: 6 reps (3:40, 3:41, 3:46, 3:52, 3:50, 3:47, with 2:45 recovery)

Totals: Swim 2.1km, Bike 65 miles, Run 16 miles