Week 2. Done.
So far, so good. My total hours have increased slightly and I still feel good. I actually don’t feel as burnt out as I normally do with marathon training at this point. I think there’s something about mixing up the training with different sports means you are working different muscles. I’m enjoying the challenge of fitting it around the rest of our lives and so far it seems to be going pretty well (although if you ask my wife, she might disagree!).
My swimming has absolutely come on leaps and bounds since the last post. I’ve signed up to a ‘Masters’ (their name – i’m in the beginner section) swim session. This was advised in the Be Iron Fit book i’ve based my training on and so far I could not recommend it highly enough. I had to go through a few weeks of lessons to get up to speed, and now i’ve progressed into the main swim sessions. It’s run by www.uswimopenwater.comand to say they push you is an understatement. This evening the second part of our ‘warm’ up was a mile swim. I think we covered about 3.8km in total, which is about the Ironman swim distance. Its far far easier to train when someone else is doing the pushing, this way I can just rock up and know all the difficult bit of swim workout planning is done. I love it.
Saturday’s long ride was courtesy of a route found by a friend, Tom, who also came along on the ride. Saturday was not the greatest day for a ride – to say it was wet does an injustice to wet. We passed a lot of flood warnings, we fjorded a couple of roads and generally got drenched. I’m not sure if I was out on my own if I would have enjoyed it, but having someone there makes a big difference. It was different getting out on the country roads in Cheshire, and it makes cycling a much nicer experience when you don’t have to worry about traffic, junctions and pedestrians as much as you do in town (although having to cycle past the grinding poverty in the Cheshire plains was heartbreaking – some people don’t even have a separate double car garage).
So week 2 went fine, all workouts done, and i’m getting slightly quicker on my running for the same heart rate already. Tomorrow should be a rest day, but i’ve rolled forward my Tuesday run to give me a day off on xmas day (I shall not be reporting on either what I’ve eaten or drunk!).
The actual details of what I did, and what I have done in total are here. Merry Christmas!