Braunton 10! Or is it 20?

Well it's been a while but that seems to be the case for most blogs, or at least the blogs of people on my list which seem to be either stagnant, missing or locked.

It's been an odd start to the year and my training seems to be reflecting that. Since New Year my work has been so hectic that weekday training has been almost impossible, this is despite the dreaded letter saying 'Times are hard, we need to tighten our belts and pay you less so overtime has to be cut.'. Since the letter I've been averaging 14hr days from Monday to Thursday so the weeks training hasn't started until a Friday when I get to do a paltry 10-12 hours. There has been another re-jig now though so while I'll still be hitting the clock hard on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday I'll be off work on Tuesdays which means training will be back on - if I can be bothered. Of course all this 'belt tightening' talk from work comes at the same time as our Vacuum and PC all but expire. Typical. It looks as though I might be thinking carefully about the purse strings when I decide where to race this year, a job that should already be done and dusted by now.

Today is the first race of the year and one that I can't really miss out on as the start line is less than 2 miles from my house. It's a 10 mile road race with 2 bad assed climbs in it, there will be no pb's run today that's for sure. I'll be aiming to get round without the excitement of last weekends run where I took a training pal round for a recce and got bit by a farm dog on the first climb. In truth it wasn't much of a bite and looked more like I'd caught the back of my leg on something, but it broke the skin and needed a trip to the quack for a jab just to be on the safe side. One bonus that came out of it was a chat about my everlasting cough and so I'm back in on Tuesday for a couple of tests. Basically I've got to have a spirometry ( if that's how you spell it) test to check how my lungs are working, then I'm off out for a 30-45min run and when I return I'm having another test to see if it's excercise induced asthma. I have my doubts about it, but it's got to be worth a look.

Back to todays race, the question as always is ' Do I run 10 or 20 miles?'

By the time anybody sees this then I'll have decided. It's a bit of a tradition that I run two laps here. As always I've the much bigger Grizzly coming up in March and this is traditionally a training run for it so I do a 10mile warm up lap aiming to get back as close to the race start time as possible, then I do a lap for the race. I'm not really in shape to do 20miles, but then I'm not really in shape to 'race' 10miles either, so do I risk suffering a torturous 2 laps or a disappointing 1 lap? Last year the warm up lap took 1:08:00 and the 'race' lap took 1:06:30, my pb on the course is 1:00:34 but that was from when I could run.

Right, time to get ready I suppose.

I'll edit the post and add my time(s) at the bottom once it's all over, unless of course something interesting happens and it deserves a write up all to itself.

PS - Oi Simeon!! Where's your blog gone?

After the race edit :-

Well it wasn't my finest day of running. I went for the 20, but it wasn't pretty. The first (warm up) lap was just awful. I ran exactly the same was as in 2008 and at exactly the same HR but I never seemed to get going. Finally I got back to the race HQ after 9.6miles (I cut a bit off) I was over 1:10:00 and the race was about to start. The race would have to start without me though (as normal) because I had a toilet appointment. Finally I was off on the race course 2-3mins after everybody else but my legs were actually feeling slightly better than the first lap. The hills killed me but I managed to drag myself round in an official 1:12:45 with a Garmin time of 1:09:40, just sneaking under the 7min/mile mark. It'll do I guess, a lot slower than last years double up and I finished in a lot worse shape. I wasn't expecting to go well but it's still a pig when you don't. Still there was pleasant relief at the finish with a bottle of Devons finest 10% Ale (which has now gone :) ).

I guess this means that race season has started.

Happy New Year

So it's been a while since I posted anything training related, but that's mostly because it's all been a bit quiet. That was until Christmas Day at least when it all kicked off. Training has come back with a bang since then. 8 training days have passed and I've got in 6 runs (3 of them in double figures) and a couple of bike rides. If only it wasn't so damned cold here it would be like proper training. None of this 10% increase rubbish, I just go from lazy git to training machine in one swoop.

Father Christmas was (as always) good to me with plenty of Tri related goodies. Once again I need to thank Mom and Dad for their rediculous offer to pay our flights out to IM Florida. One day I'll get them out there with me, actually that's a lie, getting my Mother on a plane would make the A-Team getting Mr T on a plane seem a walk in the park. Shell also excelled herself by spending far too much on Tri related goodies, 2XU should give her an account.

So it's time now for a year review. I'm not going to talk races because there was only one real target and we all know I screwed that up. There were a few low key wins, some pb's and some decent podium places. I've got a little Excel file that compares my training over the last 4 years and so it's only fair I compare with my last IM season in 2005 at the 2 years inbetween were a lot more low key.

Swim - The swim is neither here nor there really. I'm fast enough to be good without ever tearing the pool up but the ammout of training I'd need to do to get significantly faster is far more than I can justify. On average I train once a week, occasionally I'll miss a week but these hours will be made up by race day swims. I did 55hrs overall which is about average and the fact that I know I can swim a comfortable sub 60min IM swim (55mins in Florida this year) while just ticking over is a great bonus that many people don't have.

Bike - Here I struggled. It's my weakest event and somewhat consequently my least favourite. Also this years Summer was damn awful which put me off a great many of my planned bike rides. That being said I was suprised to see that I was a massive 40hrs (20%) down on my 2005 total, only putting in 167hrs compared to 208hrs in 2005. This may go some way to explaining why my Florida bike ride was the slowest of my 3 attempts despite a pretty new Tri specific bike and aero helmet which in theory should have seem me closing in on the 5hr barrier rather than 5h20m (5h08m was my previous best there).

Run - Just as much a suprise as the bike time was the run training time which was the exact opposite at 173hrs compared to 138hrs in 2005. This means that I actually spent longer running than cycling which is an obvious screw up but easily done when it's so much easier to pull on a pair of trainers than to mess about getting bike ready (especially in the rain). Although this gave me a high when I effectively jogged around Wolves Marathon in 3h08m it all comes to nothing if I still end up putting in 4h33m at my main event. For 2009 the bike/run comparison needs to be much closer to the 2005 percentage split.

Gym - This was the difference maker in my yearly hours as I've never done gym work before. I crammed 33hrs into the first 3.5months of last year which was 33hrs more than 2005, or any other year come to think of it. The result?........ Hmmmmm. Well I was swimming my head off in March/April, no quicker, but with so much more power and stamina that I was bustig 800m+ pb's any time I wanted. Was I any quicker on the bike/run? I've no idea, although I've had far less back problems that previous years, that could be down to the gym core work or it could be down to my lack of cycling I'm not sure. I'm pondering the idea of making once a week appearances again this year, but the accusations that I've suddenly developed 'moobs' in the last 12 months could also be attributed to my slacking off gym work once the weather (sort of) improved, so maybe I'd be best to stay away.

Onto 2009 then.

Today I started the year in a similar way to the end of 2008, with a 12mile run! This morning I ran to Woolacombe Beach (8.5miles) where I met up with my Tri Club for our annual Dash and Splash. You can read about it here
so I won't bore you with the details.

I really need to sit down at some point and work out what events I'm doing this year. I'm a bit of an old skool Triathlete and still believe I can enter races on the day or the week before, this simply doesn't happen any more and if I don't pul my finger out then all the small local races that I like to do every year will be full. Damn!!

Anyway, that'll do for now. If you haven't fallen asleep yet then you can't be far off it.

Happy New Year everyone. Here's hoping you all have a great 2009 and if we ever meet at an event then I'll love to see you finish just one place behind me :-)

Until next time.