Another good week of training is done. It’s been cold and pretty fun, definitely still enjoying it. I made the decision to move down to one session of swimming a week, i’m struggling to fit in two. I like to get my running and cycling done early in the day and now my runs are too long to fit in my lunch hour something had to give. I’m pretty happy with the decision, the session I am doing is the masters swim one on a Sunday evening and it is tough! I get pushed way more than I can push myself (if you want to know, i find the breaks you can take every 50m in a pool just give me too many chances to think ‘i’m tired, I’ve done enough’. Not the attitude I need). I love it. I’m sat here typing this and struggling to lift my arms. Epic.
This week I had my first ‘I don’t want to run’ moment. Predictably it came after a very enjoyable evening down the pub – walking home I was tired, it was cold and I just couldn’t see myself getting up at 6:30 to get a 10km done. I promised i’d do it in the evening and then it played on my mind all day at work. The weather was freezing, it was windy and snowy – I was treating that like one big punishment, you miss your run and this is what happens. I emailed the ‘Iron Colleague’ who gave me some excellent advice “Don’t treat it like a punishment, treat it like mental toughness training”. Love it, and that’s exactly what I did. After running into the snow and wind for 20 minutes I had a big grin on my face, I honestly think it’s runs like that that you remember when things get hard later on, if I can go out at 7pm on a Friday night in a blizzard, you can run anytime.
The cold did affect my long cycle on Saturday, I just wasnt confident about going out in the snow and ice. I substituted it for a 1 hour turbo session but promised myself to push it. I used an interval sufferfest video and wow did it punish me. I might have only done it for half the amount of time, but I cant believe the outside ride would taken so much out of me!
As reward for a tough week of training i’m now scoffing a massive slab of chocolate bananna cake from Pilla, it’s delicious. This is an obvious advantage of ironman training – guilt free, almost unlimited cake. Nom.
See ya week 6. And that is 20% of the weeks required to turn me into an Ironman done. The actual details of what i’ve done are here.