Week 1 / 7

I'd forgotten how time consuming Triathlon training was compared to Marathon training. Even "just" for a Half Ironman, there were weekend sessions along the lines of 3 and a half hours on the bike followed by a two hour run. I told Jonathan that I wanted to do the bare minimum (in terms of time) to be able to complete the Half Ironman but without worrying too much about the time. The basic shape of the training is a couple of weights sessions a week, a couple of swimming sessions (that I have decided to make purely technical for the moment), a couple of hard sessions of series on the bike plus a medium intensity run, a long ride and a "brick" (bike + run) at the weekend. So, notably, no running series which I am convinced is what has made me so much faster lately. Given that I am (perhaps unwisely) trying to get a qualifying sub-38 minutes time in a 10K race the weekend after the Half Ironman, I think I will have to slot some in towards the end.

The training went reasonably well this week: I did series of 10 by 4 minutes and 8 by 5 minutes at my anaerobic threshold on the bike. I don't feel safe doing this on the road so I do it on the turbo trainer or on the spinning bike. The medium intensity run was only half an hour after a 20 minute warm up and this I did without too much strain at 15.5 kph. These days I am finding it hard to motivate myself to train outside, especially when I can watch an episode of The Wire when I train indoors. On Saturday afternoon, after the second set of series on the bike, I started to feel quite ill, with no appetite and no energy. I think I was fighting off a virus that has laid half my household ow this week. I felt better when I woke up on Sunday so I set off on my 3 hour cycle ride. But I noticed that my heart rate was some 10-15 beats higher than it would normally be riding at that intensity. If I stuck to my prescribed heart rate of 123 bpm, I would have to go along at a crawl. I took this as a sign that I was still not 100% and decided to bin the session. It's always hard to do this because you immediately feel better and then spend the rest of the day wondering if you should have continued after all. Having said that, I think it was the right decision. Hopefully I will be better tomorrow and I can commute to work on the bike to compensate a little.