Post 118 - Tedium and wheels done

I’m starting to get the feeling that these blog posts have become very bland, and I am struggling to think of anything exciting to write about, because there’s not much exciting stuff happening. I go to work, I come home, I force myself to train, I eat, I sleep, I repeat. It’s been like this for years now. It has become pretty tedious. The training isn’t particularly exciting. The same boring running routes around housing estates, and the same boring turbo trainer. Cycling outside isn’t much fun around London, so I am stuck on the turbo trainer.

I have grand plans for April/May/June/July to get up at 6:30am on Saturday mornings and get out on the bike, beating the traffic and getting out to the countryside, riding 100+ miles before midday. But 6:30am on a Saturday?! There should be 4 more hours of sleep to come at 6:30am on a Saturday, not 4 hours (or more) on a bike…! But I think more riding out on the roads will be a good thing in terms of developing better bike fitness. Later in the season, I plan to do at least 4 x 100 mile rides, hopefully 1 x 100 mile time trial, a pair of back-to-back 4-hour rides, and one obscenely long ride (7-8 hours, 200km). I’ll do what I have to do for 18 more weeks…

On Tuesday I did a turbo session. It was fairly dull, consisting of a ten-minute warm-up, an hour going fairly hard, and a five-minute cool down. I averaged 265 watts at 159 heartbeats per minute, which I was a bit disappointed with. I would have hoped for a higher power output for that heart rate. Or a lower heart rate for that power output. It’s still quite cold, and when I open the windows and put the fan on to start a turbo session, chilly and it’s difficult to get going. Initially I’m cold and start to sweat fairly quickly, which means I get even colder as the fan blows cool air on my sweaty self. I do finally warm up and my body reaches a new equilibrium, but I’m looking forward to warmer, brighter evenings and days. And I’m hoping for a warm day at Ironman UK.

On Wednesday I did a longer fartlek run. 5 minutes to warm up, then 40 minutes going hard for 1 minute and easy for 1 minute, then a short cool down. I pushed quite hard for this session, which was all on the roads/pavements, and my legs were a bit sore afterwards. I need to keep pushing myself hard in training if I am going to have a good run at the Titanic 10K in Belfast in 4 weeks. I’m off to Tenerife in a few days, for a week of swimming, cycling and running, and I’m hoping this will give me a big boost in terms of fitness and motivation. It will be a good change of environment, weather, scenery etc, and will hopefully set me up not only for the Titanic 10K but for the rest of the season.

Tenerife is looking good. Might be a bit colder at 2200m up the mountain...

A couple of weeks ago I took the stickers off one of my Zipp wheels and changed them for new white and red ones. It was a massive pain in the ass. This week, I also took the stickers off my second Zipp wheel. It took ages and was another massive pain in the ass. But now I have a matching pair of wheels again. Nice. They will look good on the bike, but I haven’t had a chance to put the Zipp wheels on the bike yet because the bike has training wheels on and sits locked in my room, clamped to the turbo trainer, while the Zipp wheels live in the bike room/garage downstairs, chained to the wall.

I had a rest day on Thursday, and then on Friday I went to the pool as usual. I wanted to do a Critical Swim Speed session. These are very tough: fast intervals, with minimal recovery time. I planned to do 10 x 200m, each in 3 minutes, with 20 seconds of recovery. I’ve done this session a few times before in previous seasons and have been generally able to hold 3 minutes per interval, maybe fading by a few seconds but nothing too drastic.

For some reason I felt flat from the start, and after a couple of intervals, I was questioning if I would make it to 10 at all. Maybe 6 would do? Or 8? I was feeling distinctly below par, not on form at all, and my times were slipping to 3:05, and then 3:10, and then I added an extra 10 seconds onto the recoveries, and by the end it felt like I was flailing through treacle, away down at 3:15 per 200m. This was a poor session, and I should have been better than that.

Going to Tenerife soon means that I’ll be doing longer bike rides around the island. I haven’t done a properly long bike ride for a while. 2-3 hours has been the most I’ve done since August/September last year. So on Saturday I decided I would do 4 hours on the turbo, so that I’d have done at least one longer ride before Tenerife. In this 4 hour turbo, I didn’t go particularly hard, but I did mix things up a bit, riding in different gears and at different resistance levels and at different cadences. It was mainly about getting hours in the saddle. 4 hours on the turbo… torturous… so boring, even with headphones and a laptop and YouTube and iPlayer and whatever else. But I had to do it, so I did it. On the plus side, I weighed myself and for the first time in about 5 or 6 months, I was under 70kg. 69.9kg of me will go up the Teide mountain in Tenerife faster than 73 or 74kg of me…

A completely ridiculous photo

On Sunday the air pollution in London was particularly bad. The air is never good in London but a current high pressure weather system is trapping all the pollutants, poisoning the air and making visibility very bad. Air pollution is the main reason I hate London so much and I can’t wait to leave later this year. I didn’t want to exert myself too much in the filthy air. I jogged for 80 minutes, kept my heart rate as low as possible and hated London every step of the way.

I’ve settled on doing weights/core work/stretching 4 days per week. Twice a week I do leg strength work/core work/stretching, and twice a week I do arm strength work/core work/stretching. I suppose you could say that Ironman training is like studying for an exam: you could spend 24 hours per day doing it, and you could never be satisfied with what you’ve done, you could always feel that you could do more, but you have to draw a line somewhere, and 4 times per week is where I have drawn the line for core work, weights and stretching. I tell myself that this is enough and the law of diminishing returns means it’s not worth cramming any more into the limited time I have available.

For some reason this week I was thinking about all the bikes I have ever owned. I thought I would write a few lines about every bike I have ever owned, and then I realised that this could be a good blog post by itself, and something a bit different to write about other than the monotony and tedium of training. I’m sure I will write about Tenerife in a couple of weeks, and then I will write about all my bikes. A taster is below, written before I realised I should give it a blog post to itself.

“The wee red bike” – I got this for Christmas when I was about 2. It was my first bike, and came with stabilisers, a basket, no freewheel mechanism, and solid wheels, so the ride quality was terrible. I remember always stealing my dad’s sunglasses and then jumping on the bike, thinking I was great, riding it around the house and crashing it repeatedly into things. For some reason I really enjoyed crashing it into the front doorstep, but I would also crash it into the wall, or the pillars, or the fence. After one crash too many, it snapped. But it was taken to be welded down at John Logan’s garage, and I was given a stern warning that one more crash would ruin the bike, and then there would be no more bike…

I also remember being walked like a dog on this bike – my dad tied a bit of rope to it and would take me out, down to the shops, or to the park. No doubt I was straining to get away and pedalling like mad, and no doubt he was pulling back frantically on the rope, trying to keep me in check and pretend that this was normal and that he was happy to have a son instead of a dog... Maybe I should have barked at people… It must have been a sight for sore eyes, and I have never felt more free than when I managed to escape the rope. Any escape was short lived as my 3-year old legs and tiny wee red bike couldn’t get away from a grown adult, and he was always able to chase me down and grab the rope again.

One final thing I remember on this bike is being down at the rocks in a storm, literally within a few feet of an angry sea and massive crashing waves – this must have taken some guts on the part of my dad: he must have been very confident in his grip on the rope, and he must have had faith in my 3-year old brain to know not to pedal off the ledge and into the sea. Foam was flying everywhere from the waves, and collecting against the wall. I must have thought it looked nice and I thought my mum would like to have some brought back to her as a present. So I went and jumped in the manky pile of foam and got absolutely clarried in it, and I tried to put some in the basket of the bike, and I remember being very disappointed at realising that this plan was not going to work and that mum was not going to get any foam, it was all just blowing away and not staying in the basket at all. I settled for some seaweed. That stayed in the basket OK. Nothing like a big bit of bladder wrack to brighten your day. I don’t know what mum did with it, but I doubt it went on the mantelpiece…

I soon outgrew this bike, and it probably ended up at the dump. I'm sure I could find photos of it.

Training done this week was as follows:

Mon 7 March: Rest
Tue 8 March: 1:15 turbo (1 hour at 265W/159bpm)
Wed 9 March: 50 minute fartlek run
Thu 10 March: Rest
Fri 11 March: Swim 2.5km (10 x 200m in 3 minutes, 20 second recovery)
Sat 12 March: 4 hour turbo
Sun 13 March: 80 minute run

Totals: Swim 2.5km, Bike 105 miles, Run 17 miles.