Oh boy if you love a graph you are in for a treat this week! Last weekends training was tough due to staying out too late and having a few too many beers – I didn’t have that problem this weekend and it made a huge difference (massive surprise, I know). My Saturday bike ride was a lot of fun even though it pretty consistently rained the whole way round. I tried to spend more time in the drops, which I’m sure contributed to me going a bit faster. My average speed was up at 15.6mph and I had plenty left at the end. I did another sufferfest video on Thursday on the turbo, those things totally thrash me, but i’m convinced they are working.

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My long run on Sunday also felt pretty good, it was windy and cold but handily the wind was behind my as I was coming back which always makes you feel like you are flying along. Once I got back I realised I was – the last 2 miles were sub 8 min/mile pace. It wasn’t long ago I dipped under 9 min/miles. I decided to look back at my average speeds for the training and see whats going on:

My average heart rate is staying the same (I couldn’t get it looking right on google docs, but trust me) and my speed is going pretty consistently up (apart from the weeks where I’ve felt poorly/a bit hungover). I’m really not sure where this is going to end up, but it’s pretty interesting to think I might be training way above my previous marathon pace by the end of this (my average long run pace was about 8:45 min/miles for last years VLM). I wondering what all this training might have done for my 5km, 10km and half marathon times, I’m pretty excited to find out once I finish!

The above graph is slightly skewed because it’s my average across all runs, the recent ones have an element of speed work that is pushing the speed up on mid week runs, but the table below is just long slow sunday runs and they pretty consistently are improving:

[table]Date,Pace,Avg HR
12/16/2012,10:10,156
12/23/2012,10:08,159
12/30/2012,09:20,159
1/6/2013,09:16,159
1/13/2013,09:01,159
1/20/2013,09:20,161
2/3/2013,09:21,163
2/10/2013,08:52,160
2/17/2013,08:46,161
3/3/2013,08:56,154
3/10/2013,08:29,159[/table]

In other news, I am fairly tired of the cold weather now. I have not really done a ride where I haven’t come back absolutely freezing yet. On Saturday my quick change to run was not so quick due to having to defrost my hands and feet in the bath! This is not the first time this has happened and judging by the weather today, may not be the last.

I didn’t get any swimming done this week as it was cancelled at the last minute on Sunday, although that did have another benefit – sometimes I think Pilla must be mad for putting up with all this training, and other times I thing she understands. On Sunday she suggested I wash my very very dirty bike in the bath which made for a very satisfying Sunday afternoon de-gunking my bike. Just another one of the reasons why she is ace :).

As usual the actual details are here.

Argh I skipped a week of blogging, and not seeing the posts line up neatly on my site is bothering me! Anyway, putting my mild OCD aside for a minute it’s been quite a couple of weeks.

One of the things that concerned me when I started this was getting poorly more frequently. I pretty much had two bad colds last year and they corresponded with messing up my marathon training each time. One just before London ruined my race (along with some stupid mistakes), and one during Liverpool training meant I didn’t run for two weeks, and that meant I said goodbye to that marathon. Anyway at the end week 11 I got my first cold and it’s been bugging me a bit ever since. Last Sunday I missed my first weekend session, I don’t find training when you are poorly a particularly clever thing to do. Feeling tons better now, but getting through last week was a little difficult because of the cold and a couple of other things….

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For some reason, 2013 is my year of trying things, firstly the Ironman and now, well now i’m in a band which seems to be playing gigs (so they are gigs we’ve had to organise just so we can get gigs, but anyway…). Total early mid-life crisis (like the Ironman too) I know. We played our first open mic night on Friday which was loads of fun, but meant I only got into bed at 1.30, and because we had plans on Saturday morning I had to set my alarm for 6am. Ouch. I was rewarded for this act of stupidity with a stunning bike ride, which took in a beautiful frosty morning, to riding through the sunrise, to finding myself in the middle of Derbyshire by 8am. The route is above, I’ve done it before and its definitely one of my favourites. Loved it. I especially loved the massive cooked breakfast that Tom and Nic served up afterwards!

Sadly Sundays run was much harder. We went to a birthday party on Saturday night which was loads of fun and involved quite a few beers. I had to get the training done before an allotment meeting so the alarm was set early again. There is only so much lack of sleep, too many beers and late nights you can take and my legs moaned at me the whole way round. It was only an hour but felt twice that long. I stopped after 20 minutes and almost gave up it was that bad. Lesson learned – be sensible with sleep and beer. Despite being knackered I managed a 4.1km swim in the evening which my shoulders are still good and sore from.

The graph below shows what happened to my training. Week 12 was a drop week and should be lower, week 11 was not.

As usual the actual details are here. Let me know what you think!

Ps, I’m trying a few new things on the blog, from the route map to the latest activities from Garmin Connect (on the right if you’re using the desktop version. What? You didn’t know there was a non-mobile version?!)

And the build phase is done! The first phase is out of the way, bring it on!

It’s actually been a bit of a funny week for training. I fancied something a bit different in place of my Tuesday run, so I swapped it for the work game of football. I’ve not played for ages, so I was pretty useless – I missed a lot of autumn because the hard surface annoys my back and I’ve not risked it again since I started training. Still, it made a nice change from the run to work.

My brick sessions on Wednesday are building up nicely, this week it was 45mins on the bike followed by a 30 minute run. This is a pretty big session to fit in before work, so I did a rare evening session. Thursday was by far, the most fun day of the training so far. My friend is in a bike racing team (cool) and they had hired out the velodrome for a couple of hours. They had a spare spot so I got a place. We managed to miss the introduction talk and in our rush to get up there I managed to go flying on the slippy concrete and fall over. Not a great start! So my intro to track cycling was pretty much ‘push off from the rail, and then ride fast’. Which I tried. The bikes are all fixed wheel with no brakes (which i’ve never ridden before) it takes a little getting used to, but very soon you are flying around like you are the next Chris Hoy. Those banks are steep and you have to ride what feels freakishly close to the person in front, if you have never been I would HUGELY recommend it. My bike fitness is not as bad as I thought as I managed to keep up with the fast group although my legs did have a pretty satisfying burn sensation towards the end!

The more observant will have noticed that Thursday was valentines day and my wife gave up a romantic night out to cook me a quick athlete appropriate meal and then came along to watch us and take pictures. This is just one more thing on an ever increasing list of things I need to make up to Philippa after this is done, and one more thing on the list of why I think she’s so ace.

On Thursday whilst looking for some advice on whether one swim a week was enough for IM training (it’s probably not, but currently i’m not that concerned about my swimming, my technique has improved massively since I started the masters sessions) and I stumbled across two sites that talked about common Ironman training mistakes. The number one was overtraining. I’ll probably talk about this more later, but having read a bit more I decided to swap Fridays run session for three hours of wheelbarrowing compost at the allotment. Judging by how tired we were after, this was a pretty fair swap. I also traded the swim session on Sunday afternoon for a walk in the countryside and a pub stop. This isnt going to happen a lot, so I don’t feel guilty about it (too much).

Had an accidentally epic ride on Saturday – I picked a very hilly route from ridewithgps.com, but I didn’t really appreciate how hilly until I had to get off and push on a few ascents. It was pretty tough going and my 3hr ride turned into a 4.5hr ride. I also woke up with sore thumbs on Sunday, which I think was down to having to squeeze the brakes pretty hard for half of the route. I was rewarded with some really stunning views, one of the unexpected bonuses of the training lark is getting to appreciate some really lovely scenery whilst out on the bike.

As usual, the gory details of what I did are here.

And that is week 9 of 30 done. I’m now into double figures for weeks and come next Sunday will be celebrating completing the first phase of the training. Can I get a high 5 please?

During week 9 I learnt a Very Important Lesson, namely the importance of having and following lists. When I run into work I have to plan ahead to take in a set of clothes, wash stuff and breakfast, this is fine and good and I have to do it 2 evenings ahead – if I’m running to work on Friday, I take the bag on Thursday and I get my stuff together on a Wednesday. Following me? Good. This Wednesday I was wearing the jeans I thought I’d wear on Friday, so as I was packing the bag I thought ‘better not forgot to pack these jeans before you go to bed’…. Yeah you know what’s coming next. I arrive at work on Friday, get to the shower room and…. No jeans. I spent to next minute rechecking my bag, like you do when you know you have forgotten something and hope desperately it’s tucked away at the bottom of the bag. Luckily Pilla was off work on Friday and could come to my rescue, but not before I had to spent an hour sat in the office with my run shorts on, feeling like the kid at school who forgets his gym kit.

Since discovering that my old Garmin 305 could be programmed with routes and work like a car sat nav (albeit a pretty basic one) my long Saturday rides have been transformed. It’s no longer just picking routes I can easily remember, it’s borrowing routes from cycling groups and heading into the hills. I found myself on a pretty similar route to last week and rode well into snow territory in the Peak District (ok there wasn’t that much snow left but still going from Manchester City centre where we hadn’t seen any at all in one short ride made it feel like I had gone a long way).

Had a very enjoyable run on Sunday, sometimes you have those days where it just seems easier to run than not, everything just clicks into place and you almost have to keep yourself in check to stop going too fast. I had one of those runs and loved it. Checking my pace for that run, I’m down to 8:52/mile which is pretty much what I was running for my long training runs for the marathon last year. I’m pretty pleased with this and as I add in a little bit of speed from week 10 I think that pace might keep on improving.

Talking to a fellow wannabe outlaw (@nicolaclarefox) on Saturday night made me realise we both already had a list of fears for the day – mine in my head, hers on an actual spreadsheet. I think I’ll blog about it another time but already worries about what might happen creep into my day. I can only guess what I’ll be like the week before! Nic has also managed to get me a spot in the actual velodrome courtesy of her cycling team on Thursday night and I’m very very excited about this. It’ll replace a pretty dull spin session too. It also means I’m missing Valentines day which is another thing I’ll need to make up to Philippa post July!

As usual the actual details, including some more lovely graphs, are here.

This week brought a new fear to the training, namely that sometimes some things break. Towards the end of last weeks ride in the hills I noticed a pretty loud and weird clicking noise from somewhere at the back of my bike. To be honest this noise has existed for a while but i’ve never been able to find the cause.  On Monday I decided to have a proper look, I took off the rear wheel, slightly turned the axle on the opposite side to the gear cassette and within about half a second the gear cassette fell off and liberally sprinkled ball-bearings everywhere around the flat. We are still finding them.

I spent about two hours on Monday evening trying to put the thing together again, getting mad at myself for even going near the bike. I was very grumpy at Philippa when she showed more concern about the mess in the flat than the sad state of my bike. I eventually conceded this might be beyond my limited skills and went to the local bike shop and after looking at it for all of 3 seconds showed me a bit of metal that had sheared off. This made me even more grumpier – my plan doesn’t have days were I can just not do something, every other day is a bike day. Luckily I have some friends who know a thing or two about bikes and after a cheeky request I have borrowed a wheel, training only interrupted for a day (They also loaned me a waterproof jacket, thank you Jerry and Viv!).

… It has made me worry a little about what happens if this happens on the day, but thats an issue i’ll try to put to the back of my mind for now…

Otherwise training has been pretty fun again this week. I discovered I could use my Garmin (which I bought secondhand off a friend years ago and has had a new lease of life as a cycle computer) as navigation tool. I downloaded a route off the Manchester wheelers website and very quickly found myself on some very steep hills in Derbyshire without getting lost once. I was supposed to do 2 hours cycling, but i’m getting concerned the plan starts with you being a decent cyclist – i’m not – and so i’m adding in extra, I did near 3 hours this week.

I also added in a circuit session at lunchtime on Wednesday in the car park at work. It has hurt me. A lot. It was 4 days ago and I still feel sore. I had a good swim session on Sunday night – I got moved up a lane (a very proud moment for me) and into a lane where as far as I can tell, they just try to punish you. I felt like i’d been beaten up by the time I dragged myself out of the pool. For about half the session though I got into a pretty happy rhythm and finally felt like I turned a bit of a corner with my technique – admittedly it fell apart completely in the last hour where I must have looked a little like I was drowning but that’s ok, normally I look like that for the whole session.

As usual, the actual details of what I did this week are here.

Tough week. Looking at the figures it shows I did over 10 hours of training which feels like a milestone. The early part of the week went pretty well. I tried out a way I could run-commute in to work in a morning by taking some spare clothes, changing into them the night before work when I leave, thus leaving my work stuff at work for me to change into the next morning. I absolutely hate running with a bag on, so this method works really well for me. It’s time efficient, it forces me to be organised and I love doing the running first thing because it gives me less chance to talk myself out of it. Which leads me onto my cycling…

I’ve done a lot on the turbo trainer lately because of last week’s snow. Its not that I dont like the turbo, I just find it quite dull. Yes you can watch videos and listen to music, but you’re still not getting anywhere. You are not outside and to me you are not really riding a bike, you are just sat exercising. My least favourite turbo session is the high RPM sping session. My training plan has one of these a week and you sit, this week for an hour, and spin your pedals very fast with little resistance. It improves your cycling efficiency, but my word it’s dull. You also dont move around very much with a session like that so you get sore too. Anyway, on friday morning I got up, got on the bike, all set for an hours boredom. I got to 8 minutes and gave up.

In my head I think I made a deal with myself – I could do more on the ride on sunday to make up, it’d be ok. As soon as I did that it was game over. I posted on twitter i’d had a bad session and one of my friends offered to give me some advice to deal with the turbo. I was busy beating myself up for being so rubbish when I got the advice. Without knowing about the secret deal I’d made with myself, she pointed out ways to avoid the mental deal making and amongst other things told me not to sweat the bad session and checked in with some very good IM types who recommened using intervals more. I took that message, finished work for the day and jumped back on the bike. 52 minutes later my session had flown by and I was done. Success!

I had my long run on saturday this week so I could do an organised bike ride on sunday. It was my first hilly bike ride and what better way to celebrate than by taking on Englands longest continuous ascent – a road without any down bits for 5 1/2 miles. I love hills like that, lots of people struggled but I stormed up it. On the drive back into Manchester I had to stop for petrol, it was only when I got out the car I realised how weird my cycling tights, trainers and fleece top look was when not near a bike, god knows what the lady in the petrol shop thought!

Thats almost a quarter of the trainer done. As usual, the actual details of what I did this week are here.