In the Long Run....

I was lumping around the house most of yesterday morning feeling a bit lethargic. I knew that I needed a run but really didn't feel like it. After multiple snacking sessions and toilet visits I ran out of excuses.

I set out with a 20K target but my mindset wasn't right and I was feeling very tired and tight around the legs. At the 5K line I was 25:32 and although Hedgehog hill wasn't a real problem I felt like I never had any real energy stores.

At 10K I was still OK but I knew my legs were not as strong as usual. The strong westerly wind right into my face for the next 4K didn't really help much. At the turn down the N5 the wind was then just cutting across me but it was certainly much less of a problem.

Straight down the N5 to the farm turn at 1:37. I was down the dip and up the final hill and finished in 1:52:59 so slower than my last run a couple of weeks ago. It was a much colder day and I was happy for a hot shower after the run. This is the first time I've felt this for months as its been pretty warm here over the summer.

However 20K under the belt.

Return to Belgium - 20K

Back home after what felt like a very long week on the road. My run today means I've ran in France, England and Belgium all in the last six days. Have trainers will indeed travel.

Work been pretty hectic recently and I've been travelling a lot but I've managed to keep up a pretty reasonable discipline in my running distance and frequency, naturally with much encouragement from Team Kennedy manager.

I wanted to go long today just to build up my mental toolkit a bit as I've been doing a lot of shorter runs to build up my fitness. Its always good to know if you are feeling the pace in a race or a training session that you've definately got the distance in your legs, if only so you can get your head round it. That way when it starts to feel hard you can pretty honestly talk yourself out of the low point by using the previous memory of running a good half marathon in training.

First 5K was away in 25:30 and just felt like I was loosening up. At 12K I'd dropped off 3 pretty big hills and was still feeling good. I knew though I still had one big hill right at the end to knock off.

16.5K and I'm at the turn at the farm in 1:27 and I'm thinking I'm not so far away from a 1:40 finish which would be close to my personal best for the half marathon distance of 21K in 1:40:55. However with over 3.5K to go its not a reality with the hilly finish that I have. I'm up the last hill but trying to keep the pace up is starting to kill me and I'm finally starting to fade.

My strides get shorter as the hill takes it toll and it takes me about 500M after the top of the hill to get my breath back to something like normal. My legs feel like they've been drained of blood. I try for a sprint finish over the last 750M but its not overly impressive. I finish in 1:46:05 and so just outside the 1:45's.

However a very good session and a nice start to the week. Time wise its not bad with 5 weeks to go till FirstMonster. I've still not been on the bike yet though. I did blow the tires up yesterday and Team Kennedy manager was out on it for a trial run.

Back in the Saddle

First bike training since the big race, nice sunny day and only a moderate wind. I was going to just do a 20KM time trial but there is a village fete in Lasne today and so I thought passage through the main street might be slow. I'm only just ducking under the 40 minute mark on that route by 20-30 seconds so I can't afford setbacks due to big queues of people buying Barba Papa(Candy Floss).

I did a mixed loop round the area of 47km in 1:38 so 28kmph average. Climb total was 1108ft so not flat but not quite Switzerland either. The first 10K were fine but the next 10K were hard hard work and my legs felt tired. I did manage a second wind about the 26km mark and this held out till I was finished. Amazingly I've actually forgotten how hard it was last week and can't really remember anything about the cycle leg apart from snippets and certainly nothing about how my legs felt.

I'm still looking at what to do next challenge wise but will definately take in a marathon before the season is out and also maybe another 70.3 triathlon race(same distance I did last week(1.9km swim,90km bike and 21.1km run).

I'll look to up my swim length outdoors to 4km before the end of the year and so I'll hopefully have marathon distance run and a 4km swim in my armoury before the winter starts to kill off my big training opportunities. I'll of course keep up the bike rides but I need to look at how I do this without boring myself to death on endless loops of the area I live in. I might take my bike on holiday.

Pre Match Nerves

I spent the night dreaming I was bike racing, it was so real I could feel that I had sore legs when I woke up this morning. Its a mix of nerves and the fact I'm currently devouring bike racing books to fill in the gaps due to training less.

I'm starting to get terrors about not training enough now as I'm tapering down my activity to conserve and build up energy for race day. I have expected this as I'd read about it in a few books but since I was aware of it then I thought I would not suffer from it. I was wrong. Its quite a surreal experience, I know its all mental but I still can't shift the worry that I'm wasting away. Surely you can't lose 6 months of training effort in 12 days...

I've been training 6 days out of 7 for the last 8-12 weeks and doing double sessions on some of those days. The last 4-5 weeks I've been training up to 12 hours solid per week. The last week excepted where I've dropped down to a single short session every second day. In most normal people's lives keeping fit with 3 x 1hour long sessions of mixed sport a week would be more than enough. I spent most of my teenage years thinking a 90 minute game on a Sunday and an hours football training on a Tuesday night made me superman.

I did a 20K time trial today round the usual route. I needed to bed in/test the new tyres and chase away my training demons. The tyres were pretty deflated when I checked them this morning, I suspect this is due to using pure CO2 rather than just pumping with air. I know that racing cars use pure nitrogen in their tyres as the molecules are bigger and so don't escape so quickly though the natural gaps in the rubber. As any party animal knows , when you wake up on the couch in the morning the balloons have always deflated overnight as the air escapes through the wall of the balloon. Its the same principal for tyres and tubes , especially at such high pressure of 8bars. I'm assuming C02 escapes easier than Nitrogen as the molecules are smaller than pure Nitrogen and therefore its not as good at keeping the pressure up as a normal air mix which is 80% nitrogen naturally and only 1-2% of CO2(dependent on your proximity to Al Gore).

It was quite blustery so I didn't think I'd be breakng any world records. The new tyres felt very smooth on the good road sections. The gear changes were better but still not 100% perfect and it even slipped off the big chainset to the small at one point. I think maybe more lubricant as I just cleaned it up yesterday.

I finished in 39:29 which is I think is just 15 seconds slower than my previous personal best, its certainly under the magical 40 minute mark which shows me I'm still as fit as I was and am not quite wasting away yet. My heart rate was pretty high throughout and averaged 159 but I did have two double expresso's before heading out. A short sharp session was all I needed to keep my mind at rest and I recovered very quickly apart from feeling a bit sick at the end but that was due to me having drank coffee and eating two croissants shortly before I set off.

Cycle-Run Brick Session

I had back to back conf calls at 17:00 and 17:30. Therefore time was tight before it got dark and I was secretly hoping the second call would run long and I could avoid any training today. Unfortunately it went to plan and I had to remind myself of how hard Sunday was to encourage myself, I therefore went out to do a double training session.

Training plan was 20k Bike Time Trial round the normal Time trial route including Hedgehog hill then a repeat of yesterdays 14.26k run.

The bike leg produced a new personal best and beat the seemingly impossible 40 minute barrier with a rather pleasing 39:14 for the 20K. My new Blackburn Neuro computer says total climb over the 20K was 799ft(243m) which isn't a flat route but it only about 80% of the main climb in Switzerland. I have to do it twice though :O).

I had a 4 minute 27 second transition and then set out on the run. I made this reasonably realistic with a run through the garden/house and getting changed in the garage. I took on 250ml of fluid(not enough), I kept my cycling shorts on and just swapped my top,shoes and then I set out.

The first 5K was really tight on my thighs and it took that long before my legs felt as if they could actually run. Once that was over it got a little easier. The hills were tough especially running the cobbled section up towards Butte Du Lion. My pace was roughly around the 5min per km mark for the first 10K then dropped off to around 5:20/5:30 per km.

I ran the same 14.28km as yesterday in a somewhat slower time of 1:15:37 with an interim 10K time of 53:31. So slower but thats due to the fact I did the cycling time trial before plus I'm running on my own which is less competitive so I can't drive myself as hard. Running time still not bad as I think it would extrapolate out to around 1:40 for a half marathon, my target for Switzerland is 2hrs and my previous PB on a real half marathon race is 1:47. It was an 8 out of 10 difficulty with respect to how I felt at the end. I could have ran onto do a full half marathon in a competitive situation.

On the bike leg my average heart rate was 154 with a peak of 174. Average heart rate on the run was 150 and peak of 162.

I'm not sure if this is a problem but it is something i have noticed in my training over the last 5 months. Essentially as I go longer it gets progressively more difficult for me to keep my heart rate in the higher zone. I think my lactate level is about 166-168 and so I normally run around the 159-165 level anything above this kills my breathing in about 5 minutes. Anything below 155 feels like I'm not exercising at all.

I'm not sure if its normal but I usually find in the first hour I can easily cope with 165/166 BPM without real discomfort but after that my sustainable limit drops to 160 for the next hour/45 minutes and then down to 156 the following hour.

As this happens I obviously slow down and I see the effect on my overall speed and reduced effort. I've seen it in action in my two half marathons when I'm a fast starter but then get caught by people in the last third of the race.

Overall a nice 2 hours reasonably high intensity training session, not at the same pace as yesterday but it was obviously longer.