I am not doing well at keeping the blog up to date, and before I leave on a skiing holiday I deemed it appropriate to do a brief roundup of what has been happening recently.
Training has been going really well, and the ramp-up in distance and time spent training have left me quite exhausted. Work has been taking its share of my time and energy so I have probably bordered on over extending and inevitably overtraining myself.
Last week I had to make the tough decision not to run the London Marathon on the 17th of April. Physically I can still do it, and finish in a respectable time, but I just do not want to increase the risk of sustaining an overuse injury for the sake of a race that means very little in the bigger scheme. By raising enough money for my charity Asthma UK, I have also been offered a place in their team for next year, so I will make my assault on a solid sub 3 hour run at that even. I will probably end up having a more challenging goal, but as I have not gone below three hours yet I will stick with that goal until I start the specific training next year.
While we are on the topic of running, I have so far managed to run more than 50km in the last 3 weeks, with my longest run of 13km last night in about an hour. My average heart beat was 130bmp showing just how good my aerobic fitness is coming along. I just have to work on my running specific base, and that won’t take long as in January when I got injured I was obtaining some decent pre-build form.
Most of my recent running has been on the treadmill apart from two half hour sessions after the last two Saturday long bike rides. It is incredible how good it feels to start a run after 5+ hours on the bike. Saturday saw us doing a very long and easy ride of 140km that took around 5 ½ hours. My average heart rate for the ride was 124bpm so the run afterwards felt easy and the heart rate also stayed very low although we were doing 5min/km for about 25 mins to complete a 5km brick run.
The ride itself was a great tour of Surrey and Surrey hills (thanks Edo ). It was a sunny day and most of us managed to leave the overshoes and rain jackets at home. The ride’s main purpose was to get in proper base miles under the belt, so we were chatting all the way and only during the last 40km did we do any drafting and faster riding. The increase in speed was only brought on as our bodies and not our legs started to complain.
This week is generally a bit easier as I clocked up more than 16 hours of training from Monday to Sunday last week. The worst session was definitely a masters swimming class where I could not even stick with the faster group during the 500m (!!) warm-up. This was down to a couple of heavy sessions leading into Thursday combined with the inability to keep form when getting fatigued. I will have to work on my general conditioning and technique as my running and cycling are miles ahead in terms of ability at this stage.
My first event (not race) of the season is a 100 mile sportive in April, so for that reason I am very happy that the cycling miles have been building up in my training log. Next week will hopefully be a great week of skiing which should leave me fresh to continue building a solid base for the summer months ahead.