Who stole my legs?

First things first. I promised pics from yesterdays race. I promised I wouldn't forget my camera again.............. Guess what???? Ooooops, Iain's hopeless.

Today I'm mostly feeling trashed. At the end of my smallest weeks training this year I'm hurting more than I have done for a long time.

On Thursday I had a nice steady 1hr run and on Friday I had my normal swim session. So why am I so tired after a week of only 4.5hrs???? It could have something to do with the last 2 days.

On Saturday it was payback (part 1) for my free VO2 test, a 10k maximal effort run on a treadmill. No time, distance, speed or HR showing, just me and a bit of Guns'n'Roses smashing ourselves into oblivion until I was told to stop. You don't realise how little pace judgement you've got until you remove all of your training aids and stick yourself in a totally alien environment. I've no idea how fast I was running early on but it was waaaay to fast. I felt good to start with and pushed on, but it wasn't to long before I found myself having to drop the pace a little. Soon I was dropping the pace again and again and again........ it was readlly disheartening. Finally I had a card held up which said 9k on it, that was the only indication I'd get all run. It was well needed because I felt on the verge of slowing down to a walk but now knew that I'd only got to tough it out for around 4 more mins. Finally the test was called to a halt and I'd run 10k in 37mins flat which I was quite happy with considering how badly it had gone. Damn I must have been running at a stupid pace early on.

Yesterday was Taunton Aquathlon. From the start we were batttling for 2nd place. The winner swam 70secs quicker than anybody else and never looked back.
First off was the 1k swim. I've been swimming quite well lately so was hoping to get a time quicker than my normal 14mins. I had a good swim, there were 3 in my lane and the other two went off like lunatics while I plodded along at my own pace. After around 8 lengths my lane buddies were a length up on me, they stayed there until half way when I'd settled into my stroke and started to pull them back to me. At the end of the swim I was back on their toes, then I hit transition hard and left it ahead of them. Swim time - 13:38.
I started the 10k (actually 10.8k) run fairly hard to make sure nobody got any ideas above their station and pulled one of the lads along with me until he decided better of it and dropped off. The gap slowly started to increase as I got into my stride and I was feeling good, there appeared to be no hangovers from Saturdays treadmill test. Then all of a sudden, from nowhere, my quads just seemed to seize up. Damn they hurt. Not injury pain, just a big wash of tiredness, it almost felt as though someone had turned a tap on and washed them out with Lactic Acid and there was still 3k to go. Suddenly it was a struggle just to keep moving, within 400m all of the time I'd taken out of my nearest rival in the first 7k was gone and he was past me. Now I just had to get round as best I could and hope nobody else caught up. Thankfully nobody did.
Limping around to the finish I'd managed to hold onto 3rd place and even with the explosion I'd averaged 6:15 pace so I can't complain. First podium of the year, lets hope there are more to follow :-)

Today I just feel beat up. I've just got back from a steady hour in the gym, but it wasn't the best session I've ever done. By a long way!