I Must Try Harder

Enjoying my training again.

2011-08-25T05:53:00.000+01:00

I’m not used to this style of training, and that is making it much more fun and much more motivating to do. For a start, a bike session only takes a couple of hours but I still get that “I can’t walk” feeling by the end of it. And also, if I get to a climb and feel like making it hurt…I can! I don’t have to consider the next 8 hours of riding, or the following days run. If I decide to smack a hill and that puts me on the sofa for the rest of the evening, so what? It’s strangely liberating. However, the sessions are also pointing out some things. For a start, I am not a hill climber. Partly I have too much upper body muscle, but mostly I have too much excess weight. When I look at the leaderboard of a climb in Strava, it shows peoples times, their average heart rate and either an absolute power value if they rode with a power meter, or an estimation of power based on the weight they have put in their profile. I have put my weight in, so I get an estimated power value too. And in a lot of cases my power is either comparable to those people in the top positions of the board, or higher. In some cases it’s a lot higher. But, and this is the point, because I currently weigh a lot my power to weight ratio is piss poor – hence why I have slow times up the hills.

The other thing that the hill climbing has shown me, is that I am MUCH better at suffering a mild pain for hours and hours, than I am at putting up with a lot of pain for a few minutes. I’m still fairly young, and know my maximum heart rate reasonably well, and yet I don’t average anywhere near those other people for climbs. I tend to average about 165-170BPM for a 7 minute climb, and at the time I am making involuntairy noises, breathing through my ass and feel like I am on the limit. But then when I get home and look at the climb on Strava, other people have averaged 180 or more. My max is about 204BPM, so it isn’t even like I am on the limit in terms of heartrate. So is it my legs holding back my heart? Or my lungs? Or maybe it is my strategy for the climb?

Strategy is definitely something I need to work on. Some of it comes down to not having ridden a lot of the hills for a long time. So I have forgotten where the steep bits are, where the flatter bits are, where it ends…etc. The effect of that is that sometimes I am keeping the effort fairly steady, not wanting to go all out too soon, only to find the top approaching – and sometimes I am out of the saddle and dying LONG before the top. That will all get better just by going out and doing the climbs more often. And the other aspect is that I have been doing long, steady stuff for so long, that I have simply forgotten how it is to suffer. I remember last winter, being on the turbo, trying to do a critical power test and then emailing RobM to tell him how much it hurt, and that it just seemed so much worse than I remembered. What we worked out together by chatting it through, is that it was just that I wasn’t used to that sort of training discomfort. That pain felt so bad to me, because it was so far removed from the type of training discomfort I was used to. And so it proved, since after only a few weeks I got much better at the CP tests, and the turbo sessions themselves. The amount of pain I experienced didn’t change, but my mind changed from telling me I was in danger and should stop, to telling me that was the type of pain I could hold for the next 20 minutes. Hill climbing is similar, in that I need to teach my body what different efforts feel like.

Yesterday I was working from home, and managed to get out on the bike in the sun for my lunch break. Something in my left hamstring popped at climbing on Tuesday, which left me hobbling a bit and unsure about my knee on the bike – so I took it pretty easy. But that didn’t stop me taking in some hills, I just took them easy. I pottered up to Farley Heath nice and easy, but could already feel that my legs were stronger. Next I took in a climb called White Lane, which goes on a bit and gets steep at the top. Right from the bottom I had a car an inch from my back wheel, revving it’s engine in anticipation of me letting it past. Only I was on a single track road, with no passing places, and I’m buggered if I am going to lose all of my momentum up a hill and then struggle to get going again, just to save someone 3 minutes from their car journey. If you’re not an ambulance trying to get to somebody dying, your life isn’t so important you need to force me off the road. So, instead, I just plodded on with the climb, keeping a steady-to-hard effort going and concentrating on my pedalling technique and knee drive. The driver didn’t get the message, revved more and then finally hooted. Come ON, Really!?! Pretty pissed off now, I took off my sunglasses and place them on the front of my helmet, turned around, looked straight into the male drivers eyes mouthed “JUST….WAIT”, conjuring up my best annoyed face. He seemed pretty shocked and immediately backed off a bit. When I got to the steep section, I got out of the saddle, kept in the same gear and just stomped harder. I could definitely feel that my legs were much more willing to put the effort in. At the top the car went past, the driver now feeling brave again, flicking the bird before hammering up the road. Are other people’s lives really that busy and important that they need to treat someone else like that? I would have asked him myself only he wasn’t brave enough to stop and talk it though with me.

Despite Surrey’s drivers I was enjoying myself on the bike for the first time for a while, and felt able to climb steep hills easily if I wasn’t trying to race them. My route took me towards the centre of Guildford, and then scooted past the high-street to the bottom of a road called “The Mount”. A mate drove me up there once, to suggest it as a hill to try and cycle up and to show me the view over Guildford from the top. So I knew what to expect, but never having ridden it before, I wasn’t quite sure how it was going to feel. The road is around 1.5Km long but climbs a hundred metres in that short distance, which works out to be about 7.5% gradient average, with the first steeper section being around 15%. So although it looks pretty steep from the bottom, it isn’t really that bad. I enjoyed it, even though I had another car trying to rush around me (I found this guy at the top. He had rushed to get around me….to walk his dog. I almost said something, but in fairness he didn’t hoot at me, and for all I know his dog could have REALLY needed a poo.) keeping my effort fairly steady, and then stopping at the top for a bit to look at the cathedral and the city sprawling around it. After descending back down to the bottom I felt the desire to get on the drops and push a big gear, which I did all of the way home into a headwind. I only rode for a couple of hours, but when I got home I had a nice ache to my legs and a real sense that I had packed a lot into a small ride. I LIKE this type of riding. J

Still no running. Still battling with Achilles pain. Still being sensible for now.

A blurry, hazy focus.

2011-08-23T05:10:00.000+01:00

The end of last week and the beginning of this week saw me reap what I had been sowing for the past 6 months. I had been running quite a lot, at one pace, for long periods of time, and not doing any of my stretching or soft-tissue work. The result was/is large adhesions between muscle groups resulting in tight areas which all ultimately resulted in my Achilles taking a battering. Again. You would think that somebody who has been blighted with leg injuries would perhaps learn the odd lesson and avoid it happening again. Seems not.

I went out for two attempted runs last week. Both ended with sore Achilles, both were not fun and both were of poor quality with no training direction. On the last one I walked back home in a bit of a strop, but determined to change things. I reasoned that I needed to do a couple of things: stop running for a week to let my Achilles calm down, get back into my stretching and soft-tissue work to resolve the underlying issue, build back up slowly. There is no rush. I am not training for anything in particular. This is a chance to do all of the things I feel too time constrained to do usually.

So, with no running to do and continued resolve to avoid swimming all of my training time could be focused on the bike. Yes? No!

Well actually all of my training time WAS focused on the bike….there just wasn’t much of that time. Once again life was more important and training fitted into moments I could snatch. I don’t want to be out of the house for long periods at the moment, so my bike work has been several short, but hard sessions. The rides take the form of: warm up, slowly increase the intensity to prepare the legs, smash myself up whatever hill I have targeted for that day, recover, repeat several times, roll home.

Last night I sped home in the Landy to get out on the bike at a decent hour. I’d worked through my lunch break and forgotten to eat, so I thought I should probably grab something before getting on the bike. Luckily Kim had baked some muffins and left them in the kitchen to cool before she went out. I found them, ate three (yes….I know!) and mooched outside with my bike, still chewing. On with a podcast, start the Garmin and off I go. 16 minutes later I arrived at the bottom of the first real hill, which I had promised myself I would just saunter up at an easy effort. Now, the problem with adding all of my rides to the Strava website (as I have been lately), is that I now ride with an sense of people watching me. I know it’s stupid: A) who really cares what I do?, B) I don’t have to justify every ride, and C) Sod what people think – but at the minute Strava is motivating me to work hard because people CAN see what effort I have put in. So in the middle of the climb, on which I had restricted my effort up until that point, I suddenly decide not to drop the 2 or 3 gears I really needed to, and stood up to stomp on the pedals. By the time I reached the final, steeper, section of the climb I was already suffering. After the first third of that section I thought about abandoning. On the last third I could feel my heart trying to escape through my chest. At the top I stopped, unclipped, rested my head on my arms and my arms on my handlebars, tried to breath and then suddenly vomited. Only fast footwork saved my lovely Sidi bike shoes from a splattering. A car, which had emerged from the dusty car park behind me, crept past slowly, all of the occupants gawping at me with shocked expressions on the faces. When I was sure I wasn’t going to make any more vomit, I painfully dismounted the bike and walked it to the grass verge, which I spotted through hazy, dizzy eyes, and sat down for 10 minutes to recover. When I felt more sure I wasn’t about to die, I got back on the bike and descended the long hill of Radnor Road into the village of Peaslake. I wasn’t ready to face another hill just yet, so I soft-pedalled through the village and along the back roads, lost in some thought or other, until I found myself in Shere. Here I had a decision to make, basically about how much more hurt I wanted. I decided on the lower frequency, higher intensity hurt – or in other words, one more hill before home but smack that hill hard. After spinning to Farley Green I put the hammer down towards Winterfold. Before long I had a car up my backside, but I was climbing a steady gradient on a single-track road with no chance of it being able to overtake. I wasn’t willing to ditch my climbing effort to save the driver <1 minute of driving, so I ignored their engine revving and then hooting, and just concentrated on my effort and the pain in my legs. Going through my head was a quote from Dean Karnazes about treating the pain like a friend, rather than an enemy. Suddenly I went from constantly thinking about how I wanted it to stop, to embracing it and pushing harder. When I eventually hit the top of the climb, I once more had to stop to regain my breath and heart rate, before tracking along the ridge of Winterfold and then dropping down into Ewhurst. From there I took my test-piece of road at full pelt back into Cranleigh. Uploading the route into Strava showed me that I got a personal best on the first climb up to Radnor Road, the climb up to Winterfold and my test-road from Ewhurst to Cranleigh. None of the times are extraordinary, or the best I could do in isolation, but PBs are PBs. I have made a load of private segments in Strava too, so that I can keep track of any progress I make on loops or single hills, without committing those sections to the masses (mostly because they won’t mean anything to other people). Without anything to train for on the bike, Strava seems to be doing a pretty good job of giving me a focus.

More Wobbles

2011-08-15T05:59:00.000+01:00

Following on from last weeks blog entry, where I realised I couldn’t just keep plodding around Surrey and arrive on the London->Brighton run start line feeling confident, this week I think I’ve come to a sad conclusion. I’m not going to be ready, and I’m forcing the issue both physically and in terms of my life/training balance. Almost as soon as I submitted last weeks post, life moved the goalposts again. I’m not going into details here, but life got a whole load more important and everything else rightly went out of the window, including work and training. I did manage a few sessions (more on that in a moment) but they were mostly to get me out into the fresh air, and give me time to think. And all but one of them was of really poor quality in terms of their training effect.

Having had that sort of week, on top of my other worries around being ready for the L2B, brought me to the conclusion that it wasn’t right to keep aiming for doing it this year. After consulting RobM for a second opinion, I emailed the organisers to ask what my options were? My preferred option would be to defer the place a year. Since that way I can still do it (I will one day, it looks cool!), I’ll have time to prepare for it properly, I won’t have the leftover fatigue from an ultra-distance triathlon, and hopefully Kim can be a supporting part of it. But whatever the organisers come back to say, I am not doing it this year (if they leave me no option than just forfeiting the money – I’ll spring to the first aid station and eat all the biscuits).

Which leaves me with more decisions to make. Life outside of training and work is much more important these days, and is only going to get more so. But my training is not a nice-to-have for me - It’s as important as sleep or food… at least it is mentally. However, I’m a goal-oriented person, and I need things to work towards and I want whatever I choose to do to be part of my 5 year plan. So it needs to work for me on a micro and macro level.

Anyway, it’s not a decision I need to make right now. I can leave it to fester in my mind, whilst I take care of the other aspects of life. In the meantime, my heart seems to know what type of training it wants to do right now, so I’m going to follow it and see where I get.

On Wednesday I went out for a run, with the goal of running to a slightly faster pace than normal. Some months ago (around January time) I remember running on the Downs Link trail from Cranleigh to the old railway crossing barriers at Bramley (the village, not the apple) and back, and thinking it would make a really good test route. The whole there-and-back route is 15km, which is nice because you can break that down in several ways to make training sessions with different focus’s:

· There and back as fast as you can,

· 5Km jog, 5km all out, 5km jog

· 2.5km jog, 10Km all out, 2.5km jog

· 3x4km with 1km jog recoveries

So, on Wednesday, I decided to test the idea with a 15km run holding a pace around 5 minutes per Km. I thought that would let me get back into the swing of running to a pace, test the route, gauge my current fitness and be a bit different to the endless slow plodding I have been doing for 18 months.

As it was, I felt pretty comfortable on that pace for 2/3rds of the way, and only mildly discomforted on the final third. I could have pushed the pace a bit more though, so next time I think I might aim to get under 5min/Km for the entire route.

The next day, however…..DOMS! I haven’t had serious DOMS (other than the morning after the double) for ages! Even though the pace itself wasn’t tough for me to hold, the effect of doing it was clear when I walked around the next day. I went out on my bike that evening and just spun around, trying to clear some lactate. I have a feeling the speed was a bit of a shock to my leg muscles, even if it didn’t overly tax my heart and lungs. Which is good! I want that adaption. I want to challenge my body in a different way. As I alluded to last week, it’s time to hurt my body without spending hours of plodding to get to the painful bit. It’s time to get faster again (I once did a 42 minute 10Km, so I haven’t always been so slow) and then think about the longer stuff once more.

Situation Normal

2011-08-08T06:36:00.000+01:00

…I think. I’m in a bit of an odd place with my training at the moment. I keep going out for runs, along the same type of terrain, at the same time of day, in the same sort of weather, but one run will be good and another will feel horrible. It’s the same with my bike sessions too. Last weekend I went out on my own and had a truly terrible ride. This weekend I went out with RobM and Dom, and felt much better. I still wasn’t anywhere near the form I have had previously, and I struggled on all the hills, but it was a 200% improvement upon last weeks ride. I wasn’t any more rested (I ran long the day before) and a week isn’t long enough for my body to have had any real reaction to the previous weeks ride, so it wasn’t just a training effect. Maybe riding with others pushed me on a bit. Anyway, it was a lot better. And it made me feel more like riding my bike regularly again, which is something I haven’t felt since the double. Which leads me onto my candidate cause for my current training oddness:
Speaking to Rob after the ride revealed that he too has been the same: OK riding hills but can’t push on the flat, and some rides/runs feel OK whereas others feel really bad. What do we both have in common? We both did the Double in June. I’ve heard from other ultra-people that something like a double can take months and month to fully recover from. Clearly neither of us are fully recovered.
Rob thinks the London to Brighton run might be a bad plan, since it is going to tap into that lasting fatigue from the Double, and set me back on my recovery longer term. Which I agree with – but I’ve entered now, and I want to get it done. It’s the only thing that is pushing my buttons to keep me out there training at the moment too. So what I needed to do was think how I was going to change things to address the problems I am having in training…..and I think I have.

Two things in the past week have made me think more about how I train, how I like to train and the default mode I drop into when I don’t specifically plan what that training looks like. Basically, I like to plod for a long time. If I go out on my own on the bike, then I just plod around Surrey, listening to podcasts, and enjoying being outside. I don’t exactly freewheel, but I don’t tend to push myself very hard either. Not often, anyway. And it’s the same story with running. I’ve entered a long run….so I should run long, right? Yes, I should….but not exclusively.

When I was speaking to Rob, I (re)realised that he trains in a dramatically different way to me. He is more time constrained because his work life is less flexible, and he has two children at home which he needs to train around. This means he needs to grab the opportunities when they come along, and squash sessions into much smaller slots. He can’t just plod for a long time several times per week. So his week has to have smaller, more spiky sessions in it. And that means that he challenges his body in different ways throughout each week, keeps it on it’s toes and as such his body responds to the stimulus well. In contrast, I feel like I am training a reasonable amount (in terms of hours, it’s much more than Rob) but my body doesn’t seem to react much at all.

The other thing was from playing with Strava. This is a website where you upload your GPS tracks from ride you have done, and it divides them up into known segments, normally for hill climbs. There is a leader board of the fastest times for each segment. Until recently you could only upload 5 rides per week on a free account, which meant I couldn’t upload my past ride files and couldn’t really be bothered to enter new ones. But in the past few weeks Strava removed that restriction, so out of interest I uploaded a load of old Garmin files (not all of them, since loads are for Turbo sessions, or commutes, or easy recovery rides). That gave me some times for various hills around Surrey, a few in Hampshire, a few in Hertfordshire and a handful in Lanzarotte and New Zealand. Initially I was pleased, as I stole a king of the mountain (KOM – the fastest time up a hill) in Lanza. But upon further inspection I was disappointed with a lot of my times. On most of the hills around Surrey, I am in the last third of the leader board. OK, I’m a heavy chap with lots of upper-body muscle, and I’ve never been very good at climbing hills on the bike. I know I am VERY unlikely to be the fastest up any hill, especially one in a popular cyclist area like Surrey. But my times in Strava are not representative of what I can really do. A lot of my ride files, for some reason, have not had segments recognised by Strava (I exported them from SportTracks, rather than them being from the device itself. So I wonder if they are abstracted and miss data points.), so I could be missing my best times for some climbs. Similarly, Strava thinks I have never climbed some hills – which I know for a fact I’ve climbed in the last few years. And to top all of that off, is the fact that I’ve never tried to climb any hills hard other than Boxhill. All of my ride files are from either long lonely training rides for Ironman (or double Iron in the case of this year) or group rides, where I sit at the back of the group to keep my eye on everyone. So my times are nowhere near what I am probably capable of. All of which got my goat a bit, and made me want to address the situation. In an instant, I had bike MOJO again.

So, in attempt to learn the lessons life is presenting me with, it’s time to shake things up. The faster running worries me a bit, because I can be injury prone and lately my Achilles have been bitching again (although, that’s mostly because I’ve been neglecting my legs and not doing my soft tissue work). But, what’s the worst that can happen? The Brighton run is not that important. I’d like to do it very much, and I really hope I am fit for it – but I don’t think I am going to get to the start line feeling very confident unless I change something. Just plodding around Surrey isn’t cutting it. I’m too fatigued from the Double to put lots of running miles in. I need to be smarter, and that means hilly runs, short and fast runs, and just one weekly longer run.
And on the bike, I’m going to use the KOM bait of Strava, and attack some hills. I’m in two minds what to do – just ride around and smack any hill I come to, or target a particular hill and keep going at it. Possibly the best thing to do is target a hill, have a go at it in the week and then decide from there if I want to do it again, or aim for a different hill.

What I don’t really know is if hammering myself on the bike is going to help my running (build leg strength, increase mental toughness, raise lactate threshold, increase V02 max) or hinder it (tire me out leaving me flat for my running sessions). But either way, it’s what I’m choosing to do. Just before the Double, I realised I was sick of not doing things so that I could focus on a particular race and promised myself that in the future I would still enter races, but not make them my sole focus. So the L2B is important to me, but I’m not going to avoid riding my bike hard (or climbing, or anything else) for it.

Onwards.

Some days you’re flying….

2011-07-31T20:12:00.000+01:00

…and some days you’re falling. It sounds pretty obvious when you write it down, but after my 20 mile run home from work the other week, my legs got tired. I say it sounds obvious, implying it wasn’t at the time, because the day after the run and in fact for several days after that, I didn’t feel tired or sore at all. The sheer mechanics of my schedule for the rest of that week meant that I couldn’t fit in another run of significant length, so I didn’t run at all. At the weekend I went climbing in Portland with Kim and some friends, so it wasn’t until the next Monday (a week ago today) that I did another run, strolling out into the warm evening sunshine fully expecting to find my legs rested, strong and good to go. So it came as a shock to begin running and find my legs felt like they were pulling along lumps of concrete for feet. I told myself I would warm up and that it was purely the lack of running for a week that had settled in my muscles like a lethargic soup, and that if I kept going I would slowly work it all out and feel like I could run again. But that never happened. Instead I forced myself to keep running to the hour mark whereupon I walked for a bit, sweating profusely and muttering to myself about my lack of training consistency. When I came to a junction where my trail crossed a main road, I instantly decided to ignore my route and take the road back towards home and cut the session short.

The next day I went out again, onto the same route. And after the same warm-up walk I got running again, and felt the same heavy-legged feeling, the same lack of desire to run, the same hot and bothered condition and had to force myself again to the hour mark where I walked. At the junction I made the same decision and jogged the same lumbering jog back home. As I jogged the last couple of hundred metres I decided that would be my last run for the week, despite my pitiful weeks mileage, and that I would just ride my bike at the weekend and start the next week’s running afresh.

On Saturday I pumped up my flat bike tyres, removed the drink bottles that had sat in their cages since the last Surrey Ride some fortnight previous, and dragged my poor bike outside for a ride. There is no dressing it up, it was a shit ride. The sun was golden and warm, there was a pleasant breeze to keep me cool, the roads were quiet – everything was perfectly set up for a lovely ride…except me. I wanted to ride. I wanted to spend some “me time”, listening to a podcast, watching Surrey drift by as a series of tree-lined roads and meandering hills. But my legs just did not want to cycle. Oddly they didn’t mind the hills much, but felt lethargic to the point of stalling, on the flat. So I guided myself around a route that climbed up to Coldharbour from the short, steep side, up Whitedown up to Ranmore Common, up and down Boxhill, back up Ranmore via the long road past the tip, along Green Dene up to Combe Bottom and then the long, long climb from Shere to the top of Winterfold before descending it home. I managed 3 hours, but never felt very good on the bike.

Sunday I did nothing. Kim had a Swiss cousin staying for the weekend, and it was fun spending time showing her around Surrey. When the chance came for me to go out and train, I didn’t feel like it, I had only just eaten, and the TV was appealing. Such is life.

This week is the beginning of my training for the London to Brighton run, proper. I absolutely MUST get back to consistent running, for longer than an hour at a time and include some navigation from a proper map (i.e. not a Garmin or a phone). I still have 7 weeks to prepare, and I’m sure there is some good fitness still in my body from the Double. But you’ll only find the form your body has, if you keep going out training to find it. ;-)

A wagon with crisps

2011-07-25T06:00:00.000+01:00

With the London to Brighton run (L2BR) on the horizon, and 5 weeks of resting and sporadic training done since the Double, I thought I had probably give the sofa some recovery time of its own, lock the crisps back in the cupboard and find my running shoes. They were to be found sat on the shelves in the utility room, still sparkling clean form the 12 hours of downpour that fell on them in the New Forest.

My first few runs back were too long for my legs, but too short for my head. My psyche still needed to see 3 hours on my watch to validate my fitness and reinvigorate some self-pride. But my legs were caught in a battle between the need for even more recovery, and the detraining effects of the recovery I had done so far. After only an hour and a half, admittedly with a very big hill in the middle, I could feel the familiar gnawing ache of fatigued muscles and impacted joints as my stride rate slowed and my pace followed. Still, it was a run, I enjoyed it and I was back on the wagon. Well nearly. I was on a wagon with a buffet trolley that sold crisps.

Over the next couple of weeks I repeated the same run (I’m a creature of habit when it comes to running) but didn’t feel like I was improving at all. In the back of my mind I thought I probably still needed more recovery, but in the front of my mind was the L2BR and the knowledge that training (especially hard training, involving profuse sweating, some involuntary grunting noises and a war-face) made me feel better about myself. So I persevered.

A breakthrough came when I was sat thinking about the L2BR, and how I would need to practice route-finding whilst running, which would need me to do my training runs on routes I don’t already know. That pushed me to take a map and extra water and head out in new directions, on new footpaths and trails around Surrey. With my focus now on finding my way, I learnt to forget about the actions of running again and just run. Suddenly my runs stretched out past 2 hours again with ease, included countless foot styles, gates and introductions with farmyard animals and got back to being fun periods of exploration. I love using my fitness to get places rather than going places to get fit, and this was definitely flicking my switch.

So, last Tuesday, with a few solid runs under my belt, I went to work with my running stuff. At the end of the day, I locked my laptop up, got changed into my gear and walked out of the office to run home. Home is about 15 miles from work as the crow flies, but between the two points are two ranges of hills. Big hills. One is Ranmore common that houses part of the North Downs Way and the other is Winterfold hill that houses part of the Greensands way – both are significant hills to run over. To make the route as off-road as possible, meant taking a slightly meandering route that totalled up to about 18 miles – and it was on this route that I set off in glorious sunshine. After about 40 minutes of steady running, I got to the beginning of the ascent up to Ranmore Common when the skies opened and the rain fell out in a deluge of fat drops. In just my running top and shorts I was soon soaked through, but unlike in the Double my legs were still fresh and strong, so I could just run harder to keep my core temperature up. The route then took a muddy rut of a byway which climbed steadily and included large sections of loose rocks and flint, causing me to trip and stumble every now and then. But I was happy to be fit enough to be running and smiling at the infrequent people I saw like a deranged man escaping from an institution. The rain then became worse, so heavy in fact that I didn’t dare to take out my map or use my GPS to tell me where I was. Instead I just relied on force-navigation (i.e. “use the force, Luke”) to find my way onto the top of Ranmore, over the road and down another track in the general direction of home….ish. Somewhere along there I took a wrong turning, ran for another hour before realising but not really caring. I had warned Kim I could be seriously late back, and I wasn’t worried about daylight (I had a torch) or distance, so I just happily squelched along in individual foot-ponds for shoes. Eventually I came across a footpath signpost that labelled a village I knew, so I turned down there and plummeted down a steep descent all the way to Gomshall. Here I found a phonebox to hide in for a moment, to use my phone and let Kim know I was fine, just as a flash of lightening illuminated the dull skies and it’s grumbling thunder followed like a tired, grumpy child.
With Kim reassured I wasn’t going to die, I set off again, up more tracks, now running with water like ancient streams and gushing waterfalls. I’d long given up picking my path around it all and instead just sploshed through with looping footsteps and a childish laugh. The trails climbed steepily until I appeared in the village of Peaslake where I found a trail I had once mountain biked, and set about climbing Winterfold. The climb took me about 25 minutes of constant hard running. At the top I was barely running, so slow was my laboured progress, but I had run it all and I now knew I only had to traverse across on the Greensands Way and drop down the other side of the hill to home. These were trails I had run before, so with renewed vigour despite the rain pouring still, I cracked on. In another 20 minutes or so I was jogging down my road and up to the front door, where I was met by Kim, smirking at the sodden, muddy mess in front of her, bleeding from multiple bramble injuries. Whilst I showered, smug with a sense of achievement, Kim made my tea like the little star she is.

What was even better than the run, better even than the fact I ran strongly for 20 very hilly miles, is the fact I woke up the next morning with no muscle soreness and a huge temptation to run back to work again. But I didn’t. I got a lift in to work with my boss, and then went down with some sort of stomach bug which wiped out the rest of my week. One step forward, two steps back.

Ah well….onwards!

The beginning of an answer.

2011-07-21T22:05:00.001+01:00

“So, what’s next?”. That’s the single most common question I have been asked since the Double. And to date the best I have come up with is: “Nothing serious. A bit of running. Learning to be a dad. That sort of thing.”. And that is all true – my priority number one from now until my resting heart rate reaches zero is my family, and everything else has to fit around it. But fit things around it I will.

As a child, I wasn’t particularly sporty or “into” anything in particular. I was never talented at anything, but towards the upper edge of average at most things. As an adolescent I grew broader and more muscly than most of my peers, and found I was relatively better at anything that involved sprinting and short bursts of power. As a young man I developed that further with boxing training before falling into a pit of fatness and lethargy with no fitness of any kind. But throughout my life I have NEVER been any good at ANYTHING involving the word “endurance”. It’s just not me (most people when they first meet me guess I’m either into weightlifting or rugby). Which is why I felt the need to pursue it, and why I’m very proud to feel like I’m beginning to understand how to get relatively good at it. I think I could do a reasonable (sub 11) Ironman if I committed myself to it with the knowledge and experience I now have. But what’s really encouraging is that I was cruising to a top 15 finish in the double, until my body threw a hissy-fit at the rain. I was loving that race MUCH more than any other race I have ever done. So could it be, after months of consistent hard work, that I have finally turned my body into a long distance machine? I think so.

To make that change doesn’t just take a few long runs and bike rides and some boring swims round and round a lake. I mean it DOES take those things (consistently, over many months) but it also takes a change in mindset. You have to live (as well as love) your training plan and BECOME that long distance athlete. You have to define yourself as a long distance guy. I do now. So you can probably see that it’s very, very, very tough to imagine myself siting back and letting it slowly ebb away. Sure I could write myself a sprint or Olympic distance training plan. Or I could drop down to half IM distance and see how fast I could go there. But that would mean months and months more effort to undo all of the things I did for the ultra. It would feel like a backwards step. Some people have suggested that I just keep my fitness ticking along for a year or two, and then target something else. But when you realise I was averaging 18 hours training per week FOR THE YEAR, and peaking in the high 30’s – there is no chance I can tick along and not lose fitness.

So what is a forwards step, that doesn’t prevent me from being the best dad and husband I can be? Well, I think the answer lays in how big you define your steps, and the direction those steps take (i.e. training velocity).

I want to work to a 5 year plan, with the goal being another ultra-distance triathlon. Whether that distance is another Double, or further, is unimportant and largely irrelevant. A double iron distance is a long way. An ultraman race is a long way. A multiple day ultra-distance triathlon is a long way. They all require, at some level, the same mental and physical conditions to be in place for the athlete to succeed. And those conditions can be worked upon during the 5 years of my 5 year plan. A successful ultra-athlete:

Can swim well enough to get around the cause effectively, without expending very much energy.
Can cycle the race distance easily and they are comfortable on the bike for the whole way.
Is practiced, and thus very good, at performing despite sleep deprivation.
Uses their experience to adapt to conditions and situations
Can run all day, even when seriously fatigued
Is very efficient with all their movements
Has a tried and tested nutrition process
Can mentally “switch off” and just get the job done when things get tough

In the coming 5 years, I want to keep learning the balance between an ever-changing family and my own athletic life. And on that athletic side of the scales, I want to enter and complete events that move me closer to the characteristics above. As a starter, I am going to spend some time focusing on my running. It’s already stronger than it has ever been…but I want more. I want to improve my economy, improve my mental strength whilst running and use running to continue to change my body shape. Plus, whilst the family are young, running is an efficient, convenient activity.

To kick it all off, I have entered the London to Brighton run, which is a 56 mile off-road run. I will need to carry food and water and navigate myself with the map they provide. But, more on that in the next post.

Onwards.

The unofficial guide to Enduroman UK

2011-07-08T06:32:00.000+01:00

Race Site

All of the races are held in the grounds of the Avon Tyrell outdoor activity centre – which provides residential and day-visit facilities for groups (mainly school children) to go and try different activities. The grounds are situated near the village of Burley (MAP) are constitute 65 acres of woodland, lakes, fields and a grade 1 listed main building built in 1891.

The Enduroman races take place in the largest of the two lakes, the main field and surrounding woodlands and on the public roads around the New Forest National Park.

I have created a Google Map HERE, which has some prominent race site features marked.

Accommodation

Camping

The camping is on the main field, next to the lake. This is good because it is cheap and because having a tent on the field when you are on the run is handy for clothing changes, stashing equipment, somewhere for your crew to shelter and (if you need it) somewhere to sleep. For Quin and Deca athletes the ability to pull straight off of the run course each day, and into a ready and waiting tent is important when the amount of hours before the next day starts is limited. However as fatigue sets in, athletes find it harder and harder to generate heat, and being able to get warm is a key to success in the longer races.

Campervan/Caravan

Avon Tyrell have recently started allowing campervans and caravans onto the site, providing a limited number of electric hook-ups. The campervan site is at the top of the hill of the private drive (just up from the bike turn-around), which is the first right turn as you enter the AT grounds. On the right-hand side you will find some wooden posts with electric hook-ups on them. This option is good for anyone that either has a campervan already (they can be hired), or wants more than a tent but not the expense of a lodge (or the lodges are all booked). Often these vans come with a heating mechanism and/or a hot shower. For Quin and Deca athletes this could be very important to allow the athlete to get warm after each day. For Double and Triple athletes, if they get seriously cold either in the night on the bike, or if the weather is bad (see any AT 2011 report) then getting a warm shower and somewhere to change into dry clothes, could be the difference between DNF and “got round”. The other plus-points of a camper over a tent, is having a fridge, cooker and microwave for your crew to use to cook your food.

Downsides to the campervan use at AT are: lack of a drinking water pipe should you run out, space for your bike overnight before the race (mine went under the van) and if your hiring – mud!

Lodge

Avon Tyrell has 8 lodges, which can house groups or families. Yes, just 8. You can find details of these lodges here. There are obvious benefits to renting a lodge for the race; much like a camper you get kitchen facilities, heating and a proper bed. But in addition to those, you also get space to dry wet clothes and gear, space to move about, a full-size shower and large kitchen facilities. The lodges are also located 100m nearer to the bike turn-around than the campervan site, and come with running water.

It’s my opinion, and only my opinion, that the lodges should be left (where possible) for the Quin and Deca athletes to rent – as I think it is a huge benefit to them in a multi-day race, where sleep is very limited and getting warm is paramount. A lodge would be great for a Double or Triple attempt, but not anywhere near as important to the chances of success, as it would be to a 5/10x.

Swim

The swim is in a small, shallow lake in the grounds of Avon Tyrell. If you park in the field next to the race site, when you walk to the actual site you will walk around the swimming lake on part of the run route. The lake is normally used by AT for children to canoe around. Due to how shallow the lake is, its temperature is more affected by how recently it has rained than the air temperature or amount of sun on race day. The lake contains water lilies, which the site owners are fond of, and so the actual lap distance is dependent on where they are growing. Obviously the distance per lap affects how many laps each race distance will constitute of. In 2011 the course necessitated 13 laps per Iron distance (i.e. 26 for a double and so on).

The athletes enter the lake at the Northern edge (closest to the main house) via a concrete ramp used for canoe launching. After the initial two laps of the course (in 2011 there were 4 large yellow buoys to swim around) the swimmers are forced to swim, single-file, through a pinch point next to a wooden jetty on the Western edge of the lake (on the athletes right, looking from the concrete ramp). Here each swimmer shouts out their race number, and waits until the counter repeats it back, before swimming on to the next lap. After 6 laps completed a swimmer can ask the counter for the total laps they have completed so far. As they start their last lap the swimmer is told that they can get out after completing that lap.

At the concrete ramp, where the swimmers entered the lake, athletes can leave their drinks and any nutrition (e.g. gels). Marshalls will pass these items to swimmers upon request. Also on this concrete section, the athletes should leave a pair of trainers or flip-flops, for the walk/jog to transition.

In 2011 the Quin and Deca athletes were badly affected by the cold temperature of the lack, and their bodies struggling to generate heat whilst so fatigued. For all athletes it is advisable that their crew are ready with space-blankets, towels, a woolly hat..etc, to try and insulate the athlete on their walk from the lake to T1.

T1

Once a swimmer has completed their laps and exited the lake, they need to join the run course next to the concrete section and follow it up the field and over the timing mat. This records their swim time. After that they can leave the run course and either go into their tent pitched on the field, or the Enduroman marque (large, white tent used for race briefings and meals) to get changed into their bike gear. For this reason, the athlete will need a box or bag of all the things (i.e. clothes, helmet, number belt, chamois cream) that they initially want for the bike section. After that they make their way to the tennis courts by the Avon Tyrell house, to collect their bike. They then walk their bike to the bike turn-around point, outside the main house, change from trainers/flip-flops to bike shoes and start their ride.

Note, it is extremely advisable for athletes to have their own tent pitched in the main field. This tent should be large enough for a cold, tired athlete to be able to completely change their clothes, either as a planned transition such as T1, or an emergency measure to try and get dry if race conditions are wet.Where the tent is pitched is also important, since the athlete will leave the run course at the timing mat (towards the top of the field) and have to travel to their tent and back once changed. A site towards the top of the field is ideal.

Bike

Downloadable 2011 Bike Route

The bike course climbs a steep hill out of the Avon Tyrell race site and onto a private drive, which has speed bumps and a potholed surface. There is apparently a racing line which avoids all of these, although only one athlete has claimed to find it. At the end of the drive the athletes join a public road which carries on over a cattlegrid (StreetView) to a T-junction. Turn left and descend a long hill (SV), through some barren moorland, where you will encounter ponies and cars. This road has several traffic calming pinch points. Cars will often not stop for athletes on a bike, so if you are headed for a 50-50 situation with a car, brake and let them have priority – it will cost you almost no time and might save you from a crash. This section of the road gets very cold at night as the cold air sinks into the dip. It also exposes riders to blustery side winds.
This road then climbs some small lumps and then a shallow hill past the Burley Club (SV) to the village of Burley. At the junction opposite the bike shop (SV) turn left. The road then exits Burley and climbs three short hills towards Burley Street (SV), all under the cover of trees (gets very dark at night). At the top of the third climb is a turning to the left (SV), take it into more open moorland, onto a slight descent (SV). This section of the route can be very windy, from all directions. At the bottom of the shallow descent it can be very cold too, especially at night.

Go past Smugglers Road car park (SV) and up a long but gentle rise, straight-on at the Bagnum junction (SV) across the second cattlegrid of the route (SV) and up a short but steeper rise. At the top of this is a long, twisty but fast descent on good road surfaces. After negotiating the S-bend, and riding over the hump (SV) go past one turning on the left and take the second one (SV). I personally found this next section, from the turning until a Y-junction, the most lonely. I rarely saw any other cyclists, ponies, people or cars here. Eventually you will come to a steep right hand bend (SV) and then the Y-Junction (SV) turn left. You are now following the road through Sandford (a collection of houses) through a section of road surrounded by Rhododendrons (SV) past a collection of houses called North Ripley to a crossroads (SV)where you turn left towards Avon Tyrell and pass some houses on your right (SV). This road is Braggers Lane is the long hill that people talk about in their 2011 race reports. It is under the cover of trees, multi-levelled, goes past the car park entrance (SV) and eventually tops out and meets the private driveway the lap started on (SV). Turn left, over the speed humps and around the potholes, put the bike in your lowest gear, descend the steep hill and go around the turn-around point and over the timing mat. That is one lap. At the turn-around point is some racks to put your bike if you want to stop for a bit, your crew to feed/water you, some aid station drinks (in 2011 it was High5) and some marshals. If you have a crew they should be prepared here with seating, clothing and your boxes/bags of food, equipment and clothing. Some people brought gazebos to pitch here, although there is a limited amount of room.

The bike course is 10 laps per Iron distance (i.e. 20 for a double…etc). It is not hilly, but it is not completely flat either. If you ride the course before you race at the New Forest (recommended) it would be better to either drive to the site, or ride a shorter distance to the site, and complete several laps of the course. Each lap is around 19 kilometers and on the 3^rd or 4^th lap, especially if you rode a reasonable distance to the start, you will begin to get a feel for how the hills begin to feel during the race itself. Eddy Ette told me at the start of my bike ride “this game is all about pacing. Take it steady out there.” and he was spot on.

For this bike course, if you are going to be riding in the night (doubles and triples) you will need some decent lights (in the order of >700 lumens – INFO) to see with, a flashing white light on the front, a flashing red light on the back and a constant red light on the back. The brighter the light you can afford, the more you see and the less lonely you feel on the bike in the night.

It is imperative that the athlete eats “real” food, based on fat and salt, and tried/tested in training. Anyone who attempts this course on gels and energy drinks alone, will probably find themselves searching the bike course for emergency bush visits. Also, the athlete should consider their strategy surrounding caffeine and when to start ingesting it. During the night or early morning sections of the ride, both Double and Triple 2011 athletes went through patches where they were falling asleep whilst riding. Some people could only get past this by stopping for some sleep, whereas others (myself included) negotiated it by holding off of any caffeine during the race until this happened – and then having a coffee of a coke. I used a metal Sigg bottle (with an “active cap”) for hot coffee, which I kept in my back jersey pocket as a hot-water bottle until it cooled a touch, and then fitted in a bottle cage OK whilst I was drinking it.

Psychologically it is important to view the whole race as small steps, rather than one huge event. And similarly the same can be done for each sport too. I broke the double bike down into 2 laps at a time: on the first lap I would roll through the turn-around point and tell my crew what I wanted next, and on the second lap I would stop to eat what I had requested. When I stopped I ate savoury foods, and whilst I was eating my crew would put sweet things into my pockets and bento box. They would also replenish any empty or half-full drinks bottles, to ensure I always started the next two laps with two full bottles. This allowed me (and them) to easily monitor my fluid intake, without having to remember what I started each 2-lap block with. I used the sweet things to break down the 2 laps before my next stop, such as “I’ll eat the Mars bar after the 3 hills, then the rice krispy square before the long climb”…etc. This help me to get into a routine of eating the food (you won’t fancy food at points) as well as breaking each lap down into even smaller sections.

It’s also worth noting that almost everyone will reach the point on the bike when they don’t fancy eating anything at all. However it’s pretty obvious that the athletes need to constantly be taking on calories. For this reason, the athletes crew should know to keep forcing their athlete to eat, and the athlete should get into a routine of just eating whatever they are given.

T2

Once the athlete crosses the timing mat on the bike for the last time, one of the race directors will confirm with the timing people that they have completed the correct number of laps, and then take the bike away to be racked. The athlete can now change into their trainers, and (in their own time – no rush) join the run course at the bike turn-around point. They then follow the course all the way around to, and over, the timing mat where they can leave the run course (the same as after the swim) to get changed for the run. Again this changing can take place either in the athletes own tent (recommended) or the Enduroman marque, and will necessitate the need for a bag/box of run stuff the athlete initially wants. Bear in mind that when the athlete put this bag in place, ~20 hours have passed and weather conditions (especially in Britain) could have changed multiple times. For that reason this run bag should have a variety of clothing options.

Run

Downloadable 2001 Run Route

Until I can get back to AT and take pictures (or better still, a video) of the run course, it’s going to be hard to describe – but I’ll do my best:
From the timing mat, which is towards the top of the main field, you head right to a prominent tree, which has a muddy track around it like a hairpin. Follow that around and head along the flat grass, crossing the field adjacent to the steps. You will then find a mud/gravel path which climbs a steep hill to the back of the tennis courts (the opposite side to the court entrance), alongside the court and drops down a steep hill into some woods cover onto a main path. Turn right and follow the path up the hill, through the gateway to the bike turn-around. Circumnavigate the centre turn-around point, hugging the main building, through the same gateway the bike course uses and up the same steep hill, the bike starts on. At the top of the hill turn right and go past the toilet block on the right, past the archery centre on the left and all the way down the long, muddy, stoney hill to the lake at the bottom. At the lake follow the obvious trail round to the left, around the outside of the small lake to the big lake, past the gate to the car park field on your left and round the big lake back to the bottom of the field. The follow the gravel path around the outside of the lake, to a tree on the right where you cross the field back to the timing mat.

In 2011 there were a few people who ran all of the hills as well as the downhills and the flat bits (of which there is little) – but they were few and far between. Almost everybody employed a run/walk strategy of some kind, either running when they could, just running the downhill and flat, or running for a set amount time and then walking for a set amount of time. Whichever, athletes should practice whatever strategy they choose in training, and attempt to find a similar course to train on in possible. The run course at AT is almost designed to break an athlete down. The route is forever changing from climbing, to flat, to descending, to climbing…etc, and the route twists and turns constantly. This breaks up any rhythm and quickly fatigues muscle groups.

Aid is provided on the run both from the athletes crew, operating out of their tent, and from an Enduroman aid station handing out High-5, water and some other drinks. The optimum place for a crew to pitch their tent is alongside the run course, as close to the timing mat as possible. This would save the athlete running far off course both after the swim (pre-T1) and to get food/drink/clothes from their crew.

Crewing

It would be possible to do any of the races at AT without a crew – but not only would it be much, much tougher, but if you end up needing support you will end up stretching the resources of Enduroman and other athletes crews, since people won’t just leave you to fail. If you have nobody that will help at any point in your race, I strongly suggest you find the race thread on TriTalk and ask if anyone would crew for you. Someone definitely will – and you will be very pleased come race day, that they did.

Crewing is no light undertaking. If your crew are made up of just the 1 or 2 people, then they are going to be busy helping you every 45 minutes on the bike section and every 13-ish minutes on the run section – with no sleep for 30 odd hours. For Quin or Deca athletes, they need to be able to do that for multiple days in a row. The more people you can rope into helping, even if it is just for a couple of hours one day, the better. Those few hours could be enough for your main crew members to have a power-nap and come back refreshed.

The job of a crew is to make sure the athlete has the right kit at the right times, have the right food and drink prepared when the athlete needs/wants it, support and encourage the athlete throughout the race and to make the right decisions that either keep the athlete in the race, or pulls them out when it would be dangerous to continue. This last point is key – the athletes themselves sometimes cannot see the woods for the trees in the middle of such a huge undertaking. They might strongly resist having a sleep during the bike section, even when they are crashing their bike because their eyes are closing whilst they ride. The crew, with a clear head, can tell them that 30 minutes of sleep is going to make the slightest of differences to the athletes time, but could well save their whole race. Or the athlete might be crawling on all fours around the run, dangerously cold and not making sense – but that desire to cross the finish line is too strong for them to quit. A level-headed crew, sometimes, has to make the harsh but correct decisions for their athletes.

Crew members do not have to be ultra-athletes, or even athletes, themselves. Sometimes family members make great crews and fellow athletes make terrible crews. The keys to being a good crew are organisation skills, an upbeat nature (or façade) and good decision making abilities. Crew members get involved in everything from tent-pitching, food cooking, bike mechanics, clothes drying, lights-fixing, pom-pom waving and much, much more. The best crews are cheery, resourceful, organised people that the athlete trusts.

On the organisational front, the whole race can be made much slicker, if the athlete has thought through their whole strategy for the race, and briefed their crew. Even think about writing a “care manual” including what to do in case of rain/cold/sickness…etc.

Other Stuff

The course at Avon Tyrell is, what I would call, honest. It’s not Norseman-hard (in terms of terrain) but it’s not a flat Euro-PB-course, either. The absolute key is pacing.

Take every single piece of clothing and kit you could ever, ever need. Do you NEED 4 bike jackets….in June? Ask someone who was there in 2011.

Buy the brightest lights for your bike and running that you can find/afford (or borrow some). You will need enough battery time for 7 or 8 hours of riding, and 5 hours (possibly) of running. Both the bike and run courses are technical in places, under tree cover and need serious lumens pouring over them.

Go to Tesco/Sainsburys/what-ever and go wild in the aisles. Buy 2 of everything you could, possibly, maybe fancy – and then buy a spare. You cannot predict what you are going to fancy at 2 in the morning, when it’s raining, and you’re knackered. So take everything, see if anything tickles your fancy in that moment, and if nothing does just eat whatever your crew give you.

Have fun – it’s an amazing experience.

What happened next, and what is to come?

2011-06-21T06:40:00.000+01:00

I’m not going to dress this up, what came after the double was/is a bit of a rollercoaster. Physically I felt a bit stiff and sore in some specific muscles (mainly around my ankles and glutes) but otherwise fine. I was obviously a bit physically fatigued, but nothing that a couple of zero days and some world-class eating wouldn’t sort out. However, my physical state actually got worse, and not in a way I was expecting…but more on that in a minute.

Mentally I took a real turn for the worse. Immediately after the race I was very positive about the DNF, I knew it was the correct (and only, given my bodies shutdown) decision, almost entirely out of my control, and came as a shock to anyone who saw me racing strongly over the weekend. But then, on the Monday night, I started to descend into a very dark mood and I was plagued by constant mental re-runs of the race and a morbid sub-conscious search for something I could have done differently so that I could have finished. I slept no more than 3 hours for the next 3 nights. When I tried to sleep, even though I was increasingly shattered, I would be back at Avon Tyrell on the run, in the rain, trying to work out how to get warm and dry so that I could run those 16 miles. Nothing I did could distract my brain from this single tracked record. It drove me fecking nuts!

Then I started plotting how I could enter more races, or make my own unsupported Double, so that I could slay the demons and stop the thoughts. But I knew that my body would need rest, Kim needed/needs a break from me constantly pushing for the next thing – and that I had to just let this run its course. Finally I decided to write my race report, even though I found it a painful thing to do, plan what I was going to do for the next 5 years (yes, really. It’s just how I work.) and only then could I think of other things and sleep. Lovely, beautiful, deep, long sleep. J

There was also another reason behind the mental problems, too. On the Tuesday I drove to work, survived a few hours before almost falling asleep at my desk and driving back home again. I worked at home on the Wednesday in between naps, and tried going to work again on the Thursday. On the way to work, people beeped me alerting me to the fact I was driving on the wrong side of the road!! I hadn’t even noticed. At work I then failed to remember the security codes to the door I have opened every day (almost) for the last 4 years. Then I forgot how the safe worked, which I have also opened for the last 4 years. Also, any hint of cold or splash of rain, and I was shivering, shaking and my teeth were chattering again. After an attempt to walk the ten minutes from my house to the village, on the Wednesday, where I was caught out in a rain shower, I ended up back in bed for the rest of the afternoon until I stopped shivering. Clearly something wasn’t quite right, so I drove back home (almost crashing into an earth-mover as I straight-lined a corner without thinking) and rang the doctor.

To cut a long story short, there are lots of things that can happen as a consequence of getting hypothermia. Some of them can affect your brains ability to regulate your temperature and your ability to think clearly. In short, my brain had a very bad day on the Sunday in AT, and it was going to take a while for it to right itself. But right itself it should – and as I type now, I feel 99% recovered physically and mentally. I had 7 completely zero training days, ate everything in the house, twice, and then managed a 2 hour run last night over the North Downs. Onwards and upwards!

So what constitutes onwards?

I have a five year plan of where I want to get to and what I think I need to do. But the details are subject to change dramatically, unimportant to anyone but me and Kim, and for now private. What is important is how I go about organising my next five years. With a baby due in November, clearly life is going to change and I whole-heartedly commit to making those changes. Becoming a father is a challenge in itself, and I want to be the best father I can be, and the best husband to Kim I can be too. But to do both of those things, I have an obligation to keep myself physically and mentally fit. I cannot simply put my training kit in the loft and give up anything that isn’t parental duties or work. I know that would eventually see me become depressed again, like I was in 2001. And a depressed Phil won’t be a good father or husband. There has to be a balance, Kim fully supports me finding that balance and I am determined to nail it.

My preliminary thoughts are that I want to concentrate on getting my running really strong, and ride my bike in a more ad hoc nature. Running is a very time efficient activity, requires little kit, little expenditure, little planning and can be done whenever there is the glimpse of an opportunity. I’m hoping to keep my long runs ticking over by running some national trails and local race routes – hopefully balancing them with meeting Kim somewhere for picnics and pub meals. There are some running races I would like to have a stab at, too, which won’t require more than a day to go and do. And if I don’t get enough training in to do them, or I have to pull out of the race, or I don’t train enough and just turn up to have a go but fail….so what? They are cheap to enter and they don’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Races will still give me something to focus on and work towards, but unimportant races don’t take over our lives.

As for the bike – if I can ride around Surrey with my mates once a week (or even once every couple of weeks) then great. If I can ride to work a couple of times per week, then that would still be 6 hours of riding just there. It’s a nice route, it gives me time to think, I can catch up with podcasts and I will be happy. Once the family begins to get a bit older, then maybe I can adjust the balance a bit. But until then, and until Kim is ready to crew an ultra again, it’s time to try and become the best/fastest nappy-changer, sick-mopper, jogger-pusher and wife supporter. ;-)

Double Enduroman 2011

2011-06-15T14:30:00.001+01:00

It’s so hard to know what to write about this race, for lots of different reasons. For starters, an ultra-endurance race, like no other race I have experienced, is about so much more than just the actual race itself. There’s months of planning and preparation and training to get fit enough for the real training. There’s nutrition practicing, crew assembly, sleep deprivation training, equipment research and hours of wondering what to expect. So to simply sit down and type out a list of the things that happened to me on the 11^th and 12^th of June 2011, seems so shallow. And yet that is what a race report is.

Swim:

The owners of Avon Tyrell, where the race centred, had grown fond of a patch of Lily pads in the small murky lake at the bottom of the field, and asked Enduroman to change the swim course to avoid them. With lake space at a premium they had no choice but to decrease the lap length, and up the lap count from 20 to 26 laps. The disgruntled murmur than rang around the marque that us Double athletes had collected in for a race brief, suggested this was an unpopular alteration. I, however, was pretty ambivalent. My hate-hate relationship with swimming meant I really didn’t have any desire to swim a single lap of the lake, let alone 20, and this was purely an exercise of enduring the boredom of my own thoughts and constantly counting laps. So to count another 6, was not really that big a deal to me.

The swim itself was fine. I put as close to no effort into it as one can and still move forward in the water. All my effort went into lifting each arm out of the water and letting it flop back in, in front of my face, the momentum pulling me closer to the next turn buoy. And whilst I put this minimal effort in, I mentally counted the current lap I was on over and over, again and again: “1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1…2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2” etc. After each lap we swam through a single-file filter lane, past the lap counters, where we cocked our head out of the water and shouted our race number. Each time I heard the lady helper call back “Eight Nine”, and I let my next arm shoot back into the water and off for another lap. So when, at 20 laps done, I asked for confirmation of how many laps I had completed and was told “19 laps done”, I was immediately pretty pissed off. But an extra swim lap, I quickly reasoned, was a drop in the ocean for a race like this, and arguing would be futile and take longer than just getting an extra lap done. So I did a lap for fun.

Eventually the helpers heaved me out of the water, like an up-ended elephant seal, unzipped my wetsuit and gave me a push in the direction of Bob, one of my crew, who had outstretched arms and a towel. As I walked around the course, over the timing mat and into Bob’s tent, I felt wobbly from being laid down in water for so long (2 hours 50, including the 500m walk over the mat) but utterly without fatigue. Target number 1, nailed.

Bike:

The bike was 20 laps of an 18.76km loop of left turns and hills, back to a roundabout in Avon Tyrell outside the main house where all the crews stood behind metal barriers. You could either stop here for a pit-stop, or just push on for another lap. The plan for me was simple: every odd lap I would shout out what I wanted next and go straight back out, every even lap I would stop to eat. The initial nutrition plan was to eat something savoury, put an omelette in my bento box (don’t forget I’m wheat-free, so I have to make strange choices) and something sweet in my back pockets, both to eat on the next 2 laps – and two bottles of High5. However, it soon became apparent, that my bike pace was too high for me to eat all of that in two laps –although I had a bloody good go. So after lap 4 we switched down to something savoury to eat whilst I was stopped, and something sweet to eat on the bike after lap 1. And that worked perfectly! Kim and Bob stopped asking me what I would want (you stop fancying anything) and just handed me things and I ate them. I turned my brain off, took hold of whatever they handed me, and just forced it down my throat. Even the marshals commented about how well I was eating (always with the fat jokes!).

On the bike itself I felt strong and completely in control. The first 4 laps were a bit quick, which I knew but couldn’t really throttle back much more, but after that I made sure I plodded and barely pushed. Up the hills, of which there were several, I used small gears and spun tidy circles, never lifting my heart rate above 140BPM. I drank well, pee’d often, smiled and chatted to other riders, played dodge-the-donkey (sodding things!), constantly schemed new ways to make cattlegrids less horrific to ride a race bike over (bunny hop the whole thing – it’s the only way, although a risky manoeuvre 17 hours into a ride) and tried to keep myself entertained by singing, telling myself shit jokes and trying to unwrap rice crispy squares with one hand and my front teeth.

The highlights were getting back to the turn-around point each lap and laughing and joking with my crew and the Ashwells (plus I had visits from Scott, my sister, brother-in-law and nephews, Kim’s parents, and Ron Feeney – a coach from my Lanza camp who came to say hi, and ended up crewing for RobM and me all weekened!), reaching halfway feeling completely fresh apart from a sore arse, turning my lights on, seeing dawn breaking and turning my lights back off…and the last lap. As I went around, now knowing every ripple in the road, I shouted goodbyes to the donkeys, that pothole on the apex of that corner, that “Burley Street” sign, that branch I try to brush my shoulder against each lap, that twisty descent I straight-line, that house with the bright security light and those bloody, sodding, shitty potholes and speed-bumps on the driveway to AT.

The lowlights were few and far between. At one point my crew lost my leg-warmers, which wasn’t their fault, but it meant I had 1.5 hours of riding with freezing legs and a slightly shallower grin. During the night-shift, when my crew was down to just my mate Szaf and Ron (who I remind you, wasn’t even meant to be there) I started to close my eyes on the bike for a second at a time, before opening them again quickly and looking around me startled, raising my eyebrows to the sky to try and hold my eyelids up. When I finished the lap I asked Szaf for a bottle of coke, my first of the day as I had been holding off, drank it in the first few miles and then proceeded to stomp around the course like a crazed man on drugs, setting my lap PB in the process. The next lap, however, was a death march as I fell into the energy trough left by the, now spent, coke. On the penultimate lap, still having avoided having to have a sleep, I had the heavy eyes again, and so stopped in the middle of the lap, stretched, washed my face in the rain water laying in the bushes (it rained off and on through the day and night, and again in the morning), gave myself a slap and then carried on feeling refreshed.

And then I was done. I handed my bike to Eddie, one of the race directors, sat in a chair behind the barrier and began to sort myself out for the run. Bob removed my cycling shoes and put on my trainers, whilst I readied my top half, before standing and beginning to walk around the run course. My first job was to walk, still dressed for cycling, around the course and over the timing mat, before turning off into the main field and into Bob’s tent to get changed for the run. On my way around I found someone already into their run, and asked them for advice on the course and what to wear. I told him I had trail shoes and skins, or race shoes and shorts. “Oh, you won’t be needing the trail shoes, and it’ll get too hot for Skins”, he said.

Run:

Right from the word go I was upright, on my toes and running well. The course was unbelievable. I’ve done tougher run courses, but for 10Km at the very most. This was almost as hard a course as I have attempted to run, and I had 52 miles of it to do. Even so, with a strict routine of walking the climbs and running the downs and flat, I made good progress. I decided to eat something every 5 laps, which worked well and I felt full of running. At around 13 miles I found RobM (well, he found me) and we settled into the routine together, running, walking the climbs and chatting about this and that. All the time the rain got harder, and harder, and harder. It was that type of rain you wouldn’t risk running in to get to your car from your house. And it did that for almost 12 hours. Along with the rain was such strong winds, that tents were being folded up and crumpled into wrecks of material and metal, out on the field. The Enduroman banners were ripped from the metal barriers. Signs flew off and at times you couldn’t make much forward movement. I was seriously cold by the end of the first marathon, but Rob and I were still sticking to our routine, so I wanted to keep going while I could. As I mooched past the crew each lap, Kim wrapped up in 3 coats and several blankets, I felt so guilty for them. At least Rob and I were moving, albeit not as fast as we would have liked.
At 28 miles I was pretty dangerously cold. I’m very prone to problems in the cold. During the winter I have to have 4 pairs of gloves, just to ride my bike – so I definitely have circulation issues. And I was beginning to worry. I had stopped talking back to Rob, even though I wanted to, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say. My teeth were chattering and I was shivering strongly. At the end of the lap I made the decision to go into the tent, and see if Kim could help me change my clothes. Like a pro, she managed to strip me, dry me and cloth me in everything she had that was dry (almost nothing), which saw me back out on the course in fresh socks, trail shoes, skins, leg-warmers, a winter-weight cycling jersey, a mountaineering jacket and a cap. In the time it took, however, my legs had stiffened and cramped to the point I couldn’t run very well any more. Carrying on for so long, whilst so cold, had also meant I had damaged my quads and they didn’t want to do any more work. That left me plodding around at a painfully slow pace – but I was prepared to do it for the remainder of the course.

At 33 miles I had slowed to a walk, mainly by the cold that was now biting into me again. The weather was just as bad, if not worse, now and all of Kim’s hard work was already undone. I was shivering again and felt unable to generate any heat. But even so, I knew I was going to finish. It was just going to take me a long time.
At 35 miles I was still determined, but my mood was pretty sour. The shivers were now so violent that it was affecting my walking, seeing me taking short, unbalanced, stuttering steps. Then, as I was in the forest, on my own, at the furthest point from any sort of help, I lost the vision in my left eye. It was like nothing I’ve had before, I could see there was something coming from the eye, but my brain didn’t seem to be able to interpret it. It was a blur, and I had to concentrate on that blur for my brain to even notice it as a source of light. I was instantly scared. My teeth were chattering loudly, my body was shaking with the cold, and I was now down to just the one eye, through which my vision had no depth. Then my right eye began twitching left to right, several times a second. I was reduced to holding onto trees, and searching with my next footstep, out-stretched in front of my body, like a blind person using their stick to find obstacles.
It took me a long, painful, scary time to get back to the field (where I knew I would find help) and up the hill to Kim, where I DNFed.

I don’t remember much of the rest in all honesty. I remember crossing the timing mat for the last time. I remember being in the tent and Kim stripping me. I remember being in a sleeping bag. And then I remember realising I was in a red jacket (Ray’s) at the bike turn-around point, with Kim, Ray and Szaf helping me walk. For a moment I thought they were walking me around the course, and then I realised we were headed for the camper. In there, Szaf had to help lift me into the bed and get me into two sleeping bags. Kim gave me hot drinks and hot food, and very slowly I began to come around. It took me a further 4 hours to stop shivering violently and I was still shivering slightly by the morning.

The Aftermath:

This is where we came in, at the top, talking about how shallow a race report is when it reports merely on the 32 hours you raced. Clearly one thing missing is the last 3 or 4 hours it would have taken me to jog 15 miles to the line, and walk across it with my arms aloft. Or the 10 seconds it took to receive my medal and race T-shirt. And I’d be lying if said there wasn’t part of me that is completely and utterly gutted that I didn’t get to do that. Obviously, when I entered the race, the point was to finish it…and I didn’t.

But, there is so much more to an ultra. A report misses out the months it took to get to the start of those 32 hours, too. Not only did I nail every single bit of that race, until my body failed to cope with the extreme weather, but felt great doing it. And that is because of the 9 months I’ve spent preparing. There are the hours of swimming, hundreds of hours of cycling and tens of hours running. But then there are also those things I listed in the opening paragraphs that take time to research, obtain and practice. No I didn’t cross the line, but I got 99.9999% of the way when you view the whole journey.

And what a journey. I’ve completely and utterly loved it. I’ve loved the training. I’ve loved learning how to push my body further and further, and still get it to recover for more. I’ve loved finding a nutrition strategy that works for me. I’ve loved Kim being involved, helping me train and then helping me race. And I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know and spend hours and hours training and discussing training with Rob M. I’ve made a real friend for life there and that’s worth so much more to me than anything else about that race.

Thank you to Bob, Szaf, Ray and Dom for helping crew me in the race – you simply cannot race an ultra (well) without a crew to support you, push you and feed you. Thank you to Ron, who came to cheer for a few hours, and ended up staying the whole weekend, you’re a legend! Thank you to Mark for supporting me throughout the year, and helping out my crew even when he was crewing someone else himself. Thank you to Rob for putting up with me on those loooooooong training rides and very short lake swims. And as ever, mostly, thank you to Kim for putting up with me in general, for smiling and hugging when I came in from training in the middle of the night, for feeding me when I was too tired to feed myself, for going swimming just to make me feel guilty enough to go, for turning a blind eye to the things I’ve bought, for spending her weekend freezing cold and wet through just to hand me another potato cake, and for being my best friend.

Time for taper.

2011-05-30T11:25:00.001+01:00

The hard work is done. Well, apart from the race that is. The hard training work is done. Well, a lot of it anyway. I mean, there was the odd session missed or quit early. And then there were all those months when I physically went to the pool, and convinced myself I was training, but actually achieved almost as little as if I hadn’t even gone. Oh, and during the winter I thought I was training when I was just pissing about on the MTB, instead of doing the hard miles on the turbo. And my running has been a bit “on, off” during the last 5 months. So apart from the swimming, the biking, the running, the aqueducts, the sewerage and the roads, what training has been done?

This all feels familiar. I remember in June 2009 I emailed Mark Ashwell to ask if I should do some last minute cram-training before Ironman Switzerland. He very wisely told me to chill out and that I had done enough already. I also remember before IMNZ last March, thinking I should do one last long bike, as I was packing it up ready for the flight out there. And here I am, once again, looking at my numbers, wondering if a big weekend of running would help or hinder me in two weeks time (TWO…..WEEKS!)? If I asked the people who’s opinion I trust, they would say not to do it. My legs are telling me not to do it. One of the voices in my head says not to do it. My under-confident consciousness is shouting “DO IT! YOU’RE NOT FIT ENOUGH. DO IT!”

My numbers, my gut instinct and RobM all think that I peaked in Lanza, and since then I’ve been walking a tightrope of fitness, an oblivion of fatigue and burn-out on one side, and diminishing fitness and MOJO on the other. I won’t lie, it’s been seriously tough. On my run up to Lanza, life was easy. All I had to do was just go out there, run a bit, cycle a bit and swim some, and I would build fitness and arrive at the camp ready to rock. But since then I’ve been trying to hold onto the fitness I gained, despite the fact proper training has often pushed me too far, and recovery has an immense gravity. It has been a continuous yo-yo’ing of feeling behind schedule and then over-cooked.

Tiredness and a chronic neck problem saw me do very little riding after the long ride to the New Forest and back with Rob. I did some 6 hour rides, but nothing longer. And that saw my brittle confidence crumble a bit, leaving me needing, mentally, to do another long ride. Just to prove to myself I could, and that the fitness WAS there. Rob had asked if I fancied another full day of riding, which initially I shunned, but now it seemed like a good idea. So we settled on a route to Canterbury in Kent, and back, for a nice round 300Km of riding.
The ride there was OK, although I never felt strong and often felt really tired as I pedalled. I did some pulls on the front until we hit East Sussex, kept it steady through some local lanes and found the A-road that was to take us to Canterbury itself. Here Rob got on the front and dragged my tired ass into the university town, with it’s city centre castle and cobbled streets. We arrived just as the lunch-hour rush hit (it was a weekday), struggled to find anywhere we could just nip into for bike-friendly snacks, got told off by a seriously under-utilised police woman, and then queued for far too long in a Costa Coffee. By the time we got back on the bikes to head for home, we were cold and our legs were stiff.
The way back was much less fun than the way down, if truth be told. My new Assos shorts performed flawlessly, so I was never in much saddle discomfort. And my legs only occasionally felt painfully tired (normally when standing and accelerating at junctions). But the knowledge of what is to come, on a long out-and-back route, plays havoc with your mind. We had stopped every 2 hours at service stations on the way down for food, and each time it felt like we had gone a long way since the previous stop. So to now retrace those loooooong steps, each time setting off with a certain hill or busy town on our minds, was mentally pretty taxing. Rob did the lions-share of the work back to Tunbridge Wells. I did try to take my turns on the front, but my legs were working overtime just to stick on his wheel at points. Then after stopping in East Grinstead, suddenly, my legs came good. I knew Rob had been dreading a certain section of road from there to the Surrey borders, so I hit the front and repaid him for his work by dragging him all the way. Once back in Surrey we stopped for one last wee before home, got back on the bikes and BOOM my legs were gone again. It was so odd how the strength came and went for both of us.

That was 300Km in 12 hours exactly – which isn’t too shabby considering the route was never, ever flat, and had some fairly chunky hills to climb. I fuelled the whole lot on High5, peanut M&Ms, a yorkie bar and some coke. Not ideal, but what can a wheat-free athlete get to eat from an Esso?
I’m also pretty pleased with the ride considering I went into it feeling in pretty desperate need for some rest and recovery.

So what now? Well I spent a couple of days attending to family problems, which required zero training days. Which was fine as I needed the recovery. And then I tried a couple of runs, which were fun as I took a different route to the normal plod up and down the national trail, but I was SO slow. Both runs really brought it home to me, that whatever my numbers say, I need a solid period of rest now. I also had a swim in the lake, which got cut short because I felt so tired.
From here the plan is to rest until I start to feel like some training again, and then just do a single sport per day, completely to feel. If I want to stop after 10 minutes, I’ll stop. If I want to spin my legs around for 3-4 hours, then I will.

You know your training for an Ultra’ when…

2011-05-18T06:41:00.000+01:00

You get to your desk 4 hours late for whatever personal reason and everyone there, including your boss, just assumes you were out training.
Your partner doesn’t think anything of you being missing from the house for hours, even after dark.
Two hours seems like a reasonable duration for a recovery run.
You think of 6 hour bike rides as being a “short session”.
When you tell someone you just did 40Km, they have to ask “in which sport?”.
Your partner doesn’t bat an eyelid when they enter the kitchen to find you stood eating out of the fridge, cheeks bulging.
You use your running gear, wash it, wear it and wash it again, all in the same day.
You have to take food and drink to the lake, to have between laps.
You run until you can barely walk, go home, eat something and then go and run that same route again.
You plan your weekly long ride as a number of laps of a course, rather than in time or distance.
You spend at least 4 hours a week staring at webpages about bike lights.
Once a week, at least, you will catch yourself wondering if the distances are even doable.
Once a week, at least, you realise you are going to be racing for more than a whole day.
Left-overs from your evening meal stop becoming tomorrows lunch, and start becoming fuel to eat between bike laps.
You forget people actually eat energy gels.
People normally considered “super fit” or “nuts” like Ironman athletes, describe YOU as “super fit” and/or “completely nuts”.
Those same “super-fit nutters” ask YOU the “why?” question.
Your race kit-list more or less lists everything triathlon-related you own.
Your nutrition plan for the race looks more like the food menu for a university house party.
You wear a permanent 1000 yard stare.

One last almighty push

2011-05-09T06:33:00.000+01:00

My last post detailed that I found a training block a bit tough, and that I wasn’t sure where to go from there. Well what I decided to do was to push on as planned with the final week of that block, and claw my way to the recovery week. My reasoning was that you cannot accurately predict how you are going to feel and cope from week to week when you are training for an ultra. Sure, you’re going to get tired, but there are so many other factors that influence how you feel. Work stress, life stress, poor sleep, nutrition, illness and your recent training decisions. All of these things affected that week, now that I look back on it. I was tired physically, but really I was most tired mentally. So my decision was to keep going, listen to my body and only pull the plug on the week if it really was too much. And it wasn’t. I had another solid week of training, with a little swimming, some reasonable cycling and a good bit of running. The bike sessions were not as long or as good quality as I really wanted, because I had one eye on my run-legs, but I still got some decent hours in the saddle. The most encouraging thing about the week, though, was my running. Nothing fast but the split session (run long one evening, straight to bed, out of bed next morning and straight back to another long run) was 2x2.5 hours and I felt reasonably strong the whole way. Those split sessions are great for building a bit of confidence in my ability to just keep plodding.

When I got into the recovery week I found that mentally what I really needed was a couple of days completely off. I felt reasonably tired physically, but nothing major. But mentally I had had enough of constantly thinking about when to train, what to eat, how to compose my week…etc. So I decided to recover aggressively (i.e. do nothing) and then see how I felt. Also in the back of mind was the fact that the recovery week was falling in between two bank holiday weekends, which was a good opportunity to get decent training done without work. I didn’t really want to be off for the whole week, and miss out on that bonus time off work. So I decided to completely rest for a few days and then get back on the wagon for the second of the holiday weekends.

After a few days of gardening (read: gutting) I went for a 2 hour run and felt fresh. So I had another day off and then went out on the bike for a spin on Royal Wedding day….where a fat, posh woman duly knocked me off my bike. She “didn’t see” me and was “rushing to get home to see the wedding”, pulled out of a driveway and clipped my back wheel. I couldn’t correct the bike in time and landed heavily on my left hip. Luckily no damage was done and I told her to go away.

Saturday was the main event, part one. RobM and I met at my house at dawn, and pushed off onto a 50Km loop. As we nattered and cycled, about an hour into the ride, a deer came out of a hedgerow suddenly, fell over in front of Rob and tried to get back up hurriedly, hoofs scraping on tarmac. Rob had nowhere to go and ended up riding over the animals legs, somehow managing not to fall off. The deer scrambled to it’s feet and darted over the road and into the opposite hedge. It was one of the most surreal things I have ever seen.
At the end of each lap we filed into my kitchen, ate something, refilled bottles and got back out for another lap. After 4 laps in 7.5 hours we called it a day and went our separate ways. Considering the course had several hills in (one very steep) I was pretty pleased with an average speed of 27km/h, very pleased with the fact I wasn’t too tired and could have run, but cognisant that I needed to recover for Tuesday.

On Tuesday Rob and I again met on my driveway, but this time pointed ourselves South and settled in for a long day. We carved a solid route down to Petersfield, where we stopped at a fuel station for supplies. Whilst Rob was in buying something, I guarded the bikes and checked my phone, to find a message from Kim. It said that a carbon monoxide detector in our house was going off intermittently, but she was going to work anyway. I decided that if she was out of the house, I would continue with the ride and try very hard to get home before her, to sort whatever it was out. After a quick snack and bottle refill we got going again, taking turns on the front, pushing down country roads and dual carriageways until we finally rolled into Lyndhurst at the top of the New Forest. We stopped again there for food before rolling down to Avon Tyrell, the site of the Double Ironman. I changed my Garmin over from navigating to AT, to leading us around the double bike course, and off we went to have a look. The driveway to and from the pits was horrendous – potholes, speed-humps and a cattle-grid. After that was some open roads with vicious sidewinds, a small hill, a longer hill and some rural sections under tree cover. Overall I think the course is nice, with plenty of landmarks to pick out each lap. I am concerned about the driveway and two cattle-grids though.

With the course biked we sped back up to Lyndhurst, stopped again for coke and food and then settled in for the long drag back to Petersfield. Not long after setting off we found that my front wheel had actually been damaged either by the car knocking me off, or the cattle-grids (or a combination of the two) and was now creaking. A quick look found some slightly bent spokes, but since the wheels are pretty solid we decided to keep going and see if it got any worse. If I didn’t get out of the saddle they just seemed creaky but OK, so I resigned myself to a painful route home with no option to stand up to relieve my backside.
The route back to Petersfield dragged a bit, especially when we were on busy roads in a single file, so we couldn’t even talk. It taught me, though, the art of disengaging my brain and just turning my legs over without keep thinking about how much I want to be doing something else. With 10 miles to go until Petersfield my phone rang twice in my back pocket, within a couple of minutes. I pulled over to check it, and had enough service to find out it wasn’t a number I recognised, but not enough service to check the answerphone message. In my mind it was someone ringing to say the house had burnt down, or had a gas leak, so I was pretty keen to find some service and check the message. Rob exclaimed we were only 10 minutes from Petersfield and should push on, and even though I knew it was longer than that, I agreed. So I got on the front and pushed a bit harder to get there – knowing I was causing both of us a bit of pain, but very keen to hear what was happening. When we finally got to Petersfield I checked my phone to find out it was someone from work asking me a question. :-\ Rob was just pleased to hear me say I was pushing hard, as he was worried it was his legs giving up on him. J

From Petersfield we kept the pace pretty steady, through Haslemere in rush hour and then back onto the Surrey lanes. When we knew we were within touching distance of home we felt both fatigued but elated, arriving back at my place (which was fine – it was a low battery warning alarm) with 11 hours ride time and an average speed of 27km/h. Considering the amount of hills (even rolling hills take it out of you, and interrupt your rhythm), the strong winds, the navigation and residual fatigue from Saturdays ride, 27kph is huuuuuuge for us! I’m very, very happy with that effort from both of us. What’s even better is that (apart from my push to Petersfield) neither of us were pushing particularly hard. We just kept the pace honest and swapped turns on the front. A great couple of bike days!

Now it’s time to keep the bike ticking over, add a little bit more to my run fitness, but mainly: sort out my swimming. It’s not pretty and it feels like hard work. So I now have about 5 weeks to get it sorted. The swimming pool just doesn’t flick my switch, so I think it’s time to admit that to myself and concentrate solely on the lake (with the occasional Lido trip, maybe). I’ve had a couple of tentative open water swims in the past couple of weeks – but nows the time to get in there and not get out until I’m impressed with how far I can swim. I need to get my swim confidence up to the levels of the run and bike. ;-)

Slump

2011-04-15T06:53:00.000+01:00

By the end of last week I was hanging on, a bit. I got 6 hours on the bike on Saturday but then on Sunday I only achieved a crap swim. I didn’t think my legs needed the hour run I had scheduled, and since it wasn’t a key session it was fine to drop it. But I had hoped that would mean I was full of beans for the swim. Instead I had one of my worst swims ever. Monday then didn’t happen at all. I spent the evening on the sofa with Kim, which was lovely and I don’t regret it a bit. So that brought me to Tuesday, and I woke up feeling much better. I met Scott on the bike near my house and we set off for work together, on an elaborate route towards Gatwick to make the time up to 2 hours. As it was we both felt OK and kept the pace pretty honest, arriving at work in 1:45, averaging 28kph for a rolling course. That’s fine and I certainly wasn’t redlining at any point, but it’s still faster than I currently train at for the double. On the way home I promised myself I would keep the pace a bit lower, and arrived home averaging almost 29kph for the same route. Again I felt OK and enjoyed the ride, but in the back of my mind I did wonder if riding faster than normal was a clever thing to do with regards to the rest of my weeks training.

I didn’t have long to wait to find out. On Wednesday night I walked towards the National Trail as the sun was beginning to set, for the first part of a split long run. I was due to run 2.5 hours that evening, go straight to bed and then get up for another 2.5 hour run on Thursday morning. When I got to the start point of my run I took a deep breath and stepped off, almost expecting to feel tired and crap. But actually….I felt OK. Good even! With an enthralling IMTalk podcast nattering away in my ears I fell into a steady plod, turned my consciousness off and progressed down the trail in my own small world. When the podcast finished, handily lining up with a scheduled walk & eat break, I found something else interesting to listen to, and set off once more, merrily bouncing from one forefoot to the other. Some time later I looked down at my Garmin to see if I was close to my 1:15 turn around time, to find it was 1:30 already. Oops. With Kim in bed already (it being night and all) and with good legs it didn’t seem too much of an issue, so I turned around and ambled back home again. When I hit Cranleigh I was beginning to feel a bit laboured with my running, but I was pretty happy to have had a good run the day after a solid ride.

The next morning felt a bit like daja vu, walking along the same roads to find the trail at the same point, get to the same start point and suck in some oxygen before pushing “start” and stepping off once again. This time I didn’t feel good. I felt very much “not good”. If I had closed my eyes I would have assumed someone had replaced the trail with tar. After 5 minutes I stopped to stretch and think about my options. On the one hand, if I really felt this bad, was it worth doing the run at all, or should I go home and rest up until I felt like I could train effectively. But on the other hand, I wasn’t injured, I was just tired. In the double I won’t be starting my run feeling fresh. That 373Km of cycling through the night may just leave me feeling a little bit tired. So maybe this was EXACTLY what these split sessions are about?!?

I decided that I would run until the half-hour point, have a quick walk break, have something to eat and decide how bad I felt. In the back of my mind I thought I would probably turn around there and run home, and convince myself an hour was plenty. But when I got to that point, and honestly asked myself how I was running, I had to admit I was OK. Sure it hurt like a bitch, but my pace was OK and nothing hurt like it was falling off. I was just simply leg heavy and aching all over. So I decided to run on to a specific road crossing that I would probably find around the 50 minute mark. When I got there it was closer to 55 minutes, so I thought I may as well carry on until the hour, and when I got there I asked myself if I would regret not going until the 1:15 official turn-around? Of course I bloody would! I wasn’t going to hurt for an hour and then turn around for an hour back, only to finish feeling annoyed at myself.
At the turn around point at 1:15 I had a sit down. I had a rub of my knees, ate some oat cakes, drank some water from my (now fixed) Camelbak and smiled to myself. My body was telling me to stop. Quite loudly. But the individual components, my knees and my quads and my ITBs, etc, were not telling me they were at risk of injury. I was mentally struggling with the idea of another 1:15 home, but I knew it was all in my head. So I stood back up and got on with it. During the run home I learnt that stopping every 30-ish minutes to have a very quick stretch and then walk for a couple of minutes whilst I ate did me a disproportionate amount of good. It was a struggle to initially get running again, maybe for 20 steps or so (and normally eliciting a loud “uuuurrrr” noise) but after that I would be running better than before the stop. It also meant I was always looking for the next walk break, not thinking about how far I had left to go in total. I also had time to play with different ways of running, by changing my foot strike and stride length, to see if I could make better progress or reduce my various aches.
Anyway, obviously I made it back to Cranleigh, but by the time I got there I was smashed. Truly smashed. It took forever to walk home, leaving me with just enough energy to shower, shove food in my face from the fridge before passing out on the sofa.

Today I would describe myself as “hammered”. Proper tired. As such I am seriously debating whether my planned night ride just before bed (the same as last weeks split long ride session) has much value or would be particularly safe. I don’t think I am going to wake up on Saturday feeling as fresh as a daisy if I don’t do it, so the risk of falling off the bike asleep or pushing myself too far physically and cocking up Saturday morning’s long ride feels too great. I think a safer strategy would be to go swimming, treat that as a key swim session and then get up early for my long ride in the morning. As I say, I will still feel tired and heavy-legged, so I will still be training in a race-specific kind of way. Kim and I are going out to a friends birthday party on Saturday night, so I should probably get the ride done early and leave time for a midday nap, or I am not going to be a great deal of fun in the evening.

I’m not entirely sure where I am going to take my training from here. The split long rides, I feel, are valuable sessions physically and comforting to think I will be used to riding through the night when June comes around. But the split long run, I’m just not completely sure about yet. I wonder if there is a massive amount of benefit from doing a very long run over 12 hours with a sleep in the middle, rather than two medium runs split by several days. The only real benefit is a mental one, running when you are very tired just as race day will be. But is that something I need to push myself to do every week?
I’ve got a bit of thinking to do.

My own worst enemy

2011-04-11T06:28:00.000+01:00

I made two mistakes with my training a few weeks ago, both of which I had time to think about prior to making, both which I knew would be mistakes and yet both of which I still made. The result was that the whole of last week was been a battle to stay the right side of disaster. Let me explain:

At the end of March (27^th-ish) I was due another recovery week, simply because working backwards from race day, including a taper period, made my recovery weeks land on certain dates. The Lanza’ camp did not slot into a scheduled training block, and being a Thursday-to-Thursday holiday it didn’t even fall into a whole week of anything. In actual fact it straddled the end of a recovery week and the beginning of the next work block. So, to try and make everything line up I had an aggressive rest in the four days before the camp (Monday to Thursday) and planned another four days rest after it (Thursday to Sunday) and then two work weeks before the next recovery in my race plan. However, after my 4 days rest post-camp I was still tired. So I did the sensible thing and took another weeks recovery. That left me one week of proper training before the scheduled recovery week…which is where we came in. I did that training week, felt good, enjoyed the training and arrived at the end of it REALLY not wanting another recovery. I was in the groove and didn’t feel tired at all. But, being a sensible boy, I took the recovery week with a heavy heart. And it was all going well until on the Friday I went out on my bike for a long ride (only 4 hours because it was recovery), felt amazingly strong, loved the sun and started to push the pedals hard. I knew it was bad. I knew I was doing wrong, and yet I just couldn’t stop myself. I was absolutely flying around my 2 hour loop course, revelling in my new-found strength. When the four hours was up I climbed off and walked indoors feeling happy but a little bit tired. “Never mind” I thought “I’ll literally spin my legs on tomorrows hour ride and take the rest of the day off. I’ll be completed recovered by Sunday.”
Now that may just have worked, if I did indeed do my own ride on the Saturday morning….but I didn’t. I had sort of agreed to meet up with a bunch of guys from TriTalk for a ride around Surrey. And because I wanted to catch up with a mate on that ride, I agreed to spin out to a point on their course, meet up with them, do no work on the front, sit in and suck their wheels and then peel off home an hour later. And that started off going well too: I got to them at the top of Combe Bottom having put minimal effort into getting there. I granny-ringed all of the hills, coasted down the descents and arrived feeling warmed up but completely devoid of any fatigue. I felt good! When the others arrived, however, my mate was frothing at the mouth and in the process of being rather ill. He had no choice but to limp home, asking if I would lead the group around the hills for the rest of the ride, since none of them knew where they were going. What could I do, abandon them?

We set off at decent pace, me on the front chatting to Boondog, feeling comfortable and in control. At the bottom of Green Dene we turned up Crocknorth hill (a steep little bugger) and I got out of the saddle to climb, a South African called Jerry (or at least that was the version of his real name that he used because it was more pronounceable) alongside me. As we climbed we chatted, and I was aware that I was putting in a decent amount of power to stay alongside him, but I wasn’t maxed out. I felt pretty good so I was happy to push a little bit to keep the conversation going, but in the back of my mind I knew I was doing the wrong thing for my recovery. At the top Jerry and I pulled over and it was several minutes before the rest of the group caught up with us, so I knew we had done a good climb, but I still felt OK as we set off again. Through Dorking I was fine and up to the bottom of the Coldharbour climb I was still feeling OK, chatting to Jerry about his upcoming A race in Nice, and then suddenly BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! I was out of the saddle happily dancing on the pedals when as if I had been shot in the back, my legs lost all power. It was like a car suddenly going into limp-home mode. I was off the back of the group and literally crawling my way up the hill. From pace-maker to back-marker in under 10 seconds.
At the top of Coldharbour I tried to regroup, making full use of any descents to let my legs recover and wheel-sucking on the flats. We wound our way to Hombury hill road, and hit the climb up to the top of Radnor road where again I off the back. 100% effort kept me within touching distance of Boondog, but it was hurting me badly. At the top we descended Radnor (only the 2^nd or 3^rd time I have descended that hill since I was knocked unconscious at the bottom of it by a Peugeot in 2009) into Peaslake. This was the point I had agreed to guide the lads to, since they knew the way home from there, so I said my goodbyes and peeled off towards home. It took me about an hour to do 35 minutes worth of normal easy riding, and when I got home I was smashed. I fell asleep on the sofa in my bike gear and it took Kim feeding me a fry-up before I had the energy to shower and get out of the house with her. I had another sleep in the afternoon too, and still went to bed early and slept like a log.

By the next day I felt more human but still tired, so I did a very easy hours run which felt OK. Unfortunately Monday was the first day of my last big 8 weeks of hard training. This is the money shot, the 8 weeks of training that make or break my double race. So to start it feeling fried….I was pretty pissed off at myself to be honest. So I changed my plan slightly, so that I only really focused on the key sessions (long run, long ride, all the swims) and everything else was optional filler. That meant missing the first session of the whole block (a run on Monday morning) partly because I felt crap and partly because on Sunday night I had twisted my left ankle. But I picked my way through the week, getting most stuff done, and most importantly all of my key sessions done. The long run was a 2 hour run last thing on Wednesday night and then another 2 hours straight out of bed on Thursday morning. The night run felt like someone had attached an elastic cord to my back and was pulling me backwards. And the Thursday morning run was physically better but still hard. My Camelbak broke in the first 10 minutes, spilling all of my water over my feet and leaving me with almost nothing to drink. And then 2 minutes later I tripped over a rock (tired legs = little/no foot lift) and smashed my elbow into the hard ground. When I got up my arm was locked in a funny position and raging with pain. I tried to straighten it and it clicked and suddenly released in a jaunty motion, sending a shock of pain up into my shoulder. I think I was millimetres away from a dislocation! It hurt to hold it normally, so I tucked it up into the arm loop of my running rucksack and tried a tentative plod to see if it was game over for the run. And it could easily have been enough reason to sack the run and walk home, but the test showed me it wasn’t painful enough to stop me running normally (although slightly off balance with only one arm moving), so I plodded on. The sun got hot, I got thirsty, but my legs kept running and I got it done. That’s a session to remember when I am plodding around the double course, wishing I was somewhere else.

The elbow is recovering OK, but it did stop me swimming for the rest of the week – which is annoying since it’s swimming I really need to get going with. Riding was OK, and I completed my first split-long-ride session: Friday night I waited until it got properly dark (about nine o’clock) and then headed out on my 2 hour loop, with the exposure Maxx D I have borrowed from Scott. The light was absolutely excellent. I can really see why they are so expensive, now I have used one in anger. I was able to ride at normal pace, including going full-pelt down the hills, all on “Medium” brightness that lasts for 10 hours on one charge. That’s perfect for the double. The “Turbo” mode should be illegal.
At the end of that ride I went straight to bed, got 5 hours sleep before I was up pre-dawn and back out on the bike for another 6 hours. This is going to be a regular session now, with the Friday night rides getting longer and longer, and keeping the Saturday morning rides at the 6 hour mark. I have ridden several times over 6 hours already this year, and I don’t think there is much of a physical pay-off for doing them. RobM and I are planning a BIG ride at the start of May, which will make a 6 hour ride look like a warm-up, but apart from that I will build the long sessions up purely by adding to the Friday late ride, and then adding a Friday morning ride as well. This split-session system will mean that I can keep individual ride lengths down to sensible numbers, but still get a decent amount of volume packed into a small space. The trick, I think, to making these sessions work is to try and simulate the conditions of a continuous long ride, between each session: so don’t eat lots, don’t sleep much, keep active. I will aim to start each ride fuelled and rested only as much as I think I would be if I had continued to ride steadily.

Here’s to a better second week of the big block.

Why?

2011-03-28T11:14:00.001+01:00

It’s the question I get most often. I’ve tried answering it in lots of different ways, but each and every time I fail to find the right words or I take the explanation down the wrong path and lose the audience. Most probably the problem with explaining why, has been a lack of a totality to my own understanding. How can you explain something you don’t fully grasp yourself? “Because it’s there”, “Because I can”, “To see how far I can go.” are at best wrong, at worst lies. It’s not just there, you have to find it. Yes “I can”, but I can also figure skate and base jump, and yet I don’t. To see how far….when do you know how far is far? You only see boundaries looking back, and for once I don’t want to exceed certain boundaries just so that I know where they are, or were. Physical boundaries, yeah fine. But some of life’s boundaries divide healthy and ill, love and hate, happy and sad. Becoming lonely, ill and sad isn’t a worthy payout.

In the last few weeks, however, I’ve started to see things with slightly more clarity. Life has changed in a number of ways and as a symbiotic reaction I have changed with it. Some people simply call it: growing up. In my athletic life these changes have altered how I train, how I rest, how I think and how much I listen. In Lanza’ I spent a week living the role of who I wanted to be. I played the part of an ultra-endurance guy, people treated me like that guy and I felt like him. I trained like him. I thought like him. I went out on my bike, on my own, knowing that I had only my thoughts for the next 6,7,8 hours and relished the challenge. I pedalled and ran with determination and utter confidence. I learnt that my inner thoughts are OK. I learnt most boundaries are simply in my head.
Since I booked that training camp, I have known that the real challenge would be coming back home and getting back into my own training. But this new me planned for all possibilities, listened to my body and did the right thing. The difference between me now and Phil Wilson of March 2010 was exemplified in a single minute this week just gone. As I ran along the Downs Link, 30 minutes into a 2.5 hour run, I took the decision to turn around and jog home. I wasn’t injured, I was holding pace and I had all the time in the world to get that run done. But when I asked my body if that run was training or over-reaching, I listened to the response and went home. The effort I was having to put into my running, that early into the session, was too much for the pace I could hold. I wanted to run, I had made the commitment to get out there and run through the initial few minutes, but I knew I was doing the right thing.
The next morning was supposed to be the second part of that session, another 2 hour run. Again I went out without any music or podcast, so that I could listen to, and hear my body. I ran for three hours and felt strong the whole time. The following morning I cycled strongly for 6 hours, only stopping because of a sore knee ligament.

The best answer I can find to “why?” is because I have a thirst for learning, and I believe learning about myself must come first. I’ve been very unfit and very lonely and very sad. I’ve felt utterly incapable of doing anything worthwhile or impressive or to be proud of. I’ve known almost nothing about my own body and even grown to despise it and make excuses for it. And then I began to learn about it, and learn about me. I’m addicted to learning lessons about the very things I have owned my whole life.
The weight loss and the athletic events are merely vehicles for the learning. Sometimes I want to learn something physical, anatomical or chemical, and sometimes I want to learn something behavioural and mental. I don’t pre-plan structure to this learning, or create mid-term goals to guide it, but sub-consciously I’ve steered a path towards things that enable it. An Iron-this or a long-distance-that are simply mechanisms to put myself into a reality where it’s imperative I learn in order to succeed. They also push me into communities and sub-communities that support and infuse that learning.

“Where’s this going?” and “What’s next?” are the other two questions I get a lot, and ask myself, too. I don’t know, is the absolutely honest answer. Don’t be fooled into thinking “half, full, double” is a trend you can use to predict what is to come. There are infinite vehicles to choose from, and as long as I am learning, I’m moving in a good direction.

Richard Hobson Long Distance Triathlon Camp–Lanzarotte

2011-03-12T09:24:00.001Z

From January the 5th until March the 1st my training has been all about getting fit enough for this camp. Kim and I booked the holiday to Lanzarotte so that we could go back to Club La Santa and so that I could get a training camp done. When I looked through the options there were several different camps that might have fitted the bill. However when I looked through the proposed schedules and the coaches personal websites, Richard Hobson’s stood out to me. For a start his schedule highlighted in red the weeks key sessions. That spoke volumes to me.

January was all about getting back into consistent training in all three sports. And it was a job done well, with no massive sessions, but not a single zero day.
February was designed to continue the consistency of January, but add some bigger sessions in both cycling and running and really fatigue my body and get used to training fatigued. Again, a job really well done. One zero day in the whole month and plenty of big run days/nights and epic multi-looped cycles through storms, gales, sleet and darkness. The weather has been truly awful but this camp has been in the front of my mind, and I wanted to be ready for it.

I won’t detail every minute of the camp, rather describe the highlights and the lessons I learnt, and what I thought of the camp and “Hobbo” himself. In a nutshell though the camp was structured to swim, bike and run every day, with one of those being designated the key session of the day. Even on a long distance camp there was a variety of levels of athlete amongst the 40 attendees, from slower, faster, longer and shorter focused people, and so Richard outlined the sessions as a guide and empowered people to choose their own path through the camp. I think that was a masterstroke since everyone optimised, with Hobbo’s help and support, every session and the week as a whole to their level, their race schedule and their ambition. I had emailed Hobbo before the camp to make sure it was OK for me as a Double-Iron wannabe to attend, so he knew what was coming, but it still caused continued amusement to him, the other coaches and my fellow camp attendees that I wanted to go further than Iron. With the other athletes I went round and round the same conversations, mainly whilst rotating around a cycling group chatting to the person next to me, which followed the general script of “You’re the bloke doing the double, aren’t you?…Why?”. Only a no-nonsense Welsh speed-machine broke the mould with: “You’re the double guy, are you?…What the fuck are you doing that for?”. It took me 5 minutes to stop laughing before I could answer: “Why the fuck are you doing an Ironman? It’s the same question, isn’t it?”.

On Day two we were scheduled to do a repeat-brick session, where you cycle around a loop of your choosing, then run off of the bike for a distance of your choosing, and repeat that process for however many turns you fancy. I was keen to have a solid day’s training, but also aware that I didn’t want to hammer myself too hard on just the second day, nor be seen to be taking the piss out of what other people were doing. Like I said above, there were lots of different levels of athlete there, and to some people just one brick session of a couple of hours would have been tough and a real achievement. So I was very quiet about what I was planning unless directly asked. Whilst most people did some 40Km bikes and 10 or 5Km runs, for a couple of goes, I wanted to test myself early on. I went out on the first bike, got lost, found my way again and got back to the transition area with 50Km on the clock. Initially I thought I was going to try and find the more official 40Km loop, but after speaking to Hobbo whilst changing into my run shoes, he was happy for me to do my own loop if I knew where I was going. So I changed my mind to sticking to the 50Km bikes. With that decision made I got out onto the paths around the lagoon for two 5Km loops of running, and then back onto the bike. On my third 50Km bike I rolled into the transition area to find only my run stuff still out on the floor, and the coaches sitting in the sun cheering my arrival with “here he is!” and “Machine!”. I was feeling fantastic already but their encouragement only spurred me on further. Whilst they went to go and find some shade and eat, I got out for my 3rd 10Km run of the day, in the blazing sun, finishing with my fastest of the day (50min, 50min and 48min – not bad!). As I walked back to my bike to clear up, Coach Ron was there to meet me, weigh me (I lost 3Kg in sweat despite drinking 5 bottles of water and a can of coke bought from a non-English speaking bar using ring-pull charade actions) and congratulate me. As he joked in the background “You’ve got 4 minutes to make the swim session.” I picked up my bag of swim kit I had knowingly taken to the brick session in preparation, and wheeled my bike straight to the pool. It was worth delaying my recovery meal just to see the look on Hobbo’s face as I carried my bike down the steps to the 50m outdoor pool, stripped into my jammers and dived in to start my set.
What I learnt that session was:

I’ve grown much, much better at being alone for long periods of time in my own thoughts
despite being able to stop whenever I wanted – I WANTED to keep going and going and going. I wanted to train hard.
That my winter of consistent running, steady and often, has served me very well. I felt strong and in control for the whole day, despite sweltering heat, tough cycles up a hilly course and 30Km of pounding on my own.

Day Three the main focus was the “long” ride, which we did in 4 groups with a coach per group. There wasn’t really much of an option to add extra miles onto the ride really, so I decided to ride the mountain climb in the middle of the ride quite hard, do as many pulls on the front as I could (get on the front of the group, push through the wind of which Lanzarotte has a LOT, and physically pull the other group members along as they shelter in my wake.) and then run off of the bike, having already run that morning. The climb was the islands infamous climb from the village of Tabayesco, up switchbacks and long grinds for 10Km of an average 6% gradient to a cafe at the top. I didn’t want to race anyone or blow myself up, but I wanted to push fairly hard for the whole climb and see what my legs could do. I set off towards the back of the group and settled into a steady rhythm, climbing alongside Matt, a Speedo employee and all-round nice chap. As the climb went on and the sun shone the effort started to bite, Matt and I now up to the front group with coach Ron looking strong at the front. Suddenly Ron stood out of the saddle and accelerated off the front. Without warning I was out of the saddle too and hammering to get onto Ron’s wheel, which I did, for a brief moment before Ron was off again. This happened 3 or 4 times before suddenly I felt out of my depth and suffering and let Ron and the 3 cyclists still holding onto him go. Matt and I then worked together to pull ourselves up and up the seemingly never-ending climb. At one point we got caught at a STOP junction by two other English guys whilst we waited for traffic, and we then worked as a 4 to the top, up the switchbacks where I eventually found some final spurts of power and hit the front of the group to take 5th spot on the climb. At the top I down’ed 3 Cokes and readied myself for the pull home. When the group had re-formed at the bottom of the fun descent I sat on the front the whole way back (~50Km) through very strong winds and towed the group home steadily. Once back, whilst everyone else sauntered off for some well-earned food and rest, I got my running shoes on which I had taken to the bike station, and got back out onto the paths of the lagoon for another 10Km run.
Lessons learned that day:

That bike training I did with RobQ at the end of 2009, along with the “ride every day for 3 months” I did in the summer and this recent spell of riding consistently is still in my legs. I’m never going to be a climber, but I’ve turned from a weak cyclist into a solid rider.
I like long, straight, grinding roads, into a headwind. I enjoy that suffering.

Day five was long run day. Hobbo had organised for us to run in the weekly half marathon, but right from the start I had other ideas. Ron described the route to me, including the climb through La Santa, the short and hard climb up to the ridge and then the run along the ridge to Soo and back down to the club. It sounded good, but I knew if I did that run, at MY race pace, I would be last by a very long way and I wouldn’t likely be in any sort of state or mood to run any further. So, I ran the 4 loops of the track with everyone (at sub 5 minutes per Km, my calves about to explode with pump) and then stopped to stretch as soon as we got out of the track enclosure. I waited until the last guy was out of sight, so that I couldn’t change my mind and chase back on and run someone else’s race, and then did my own thing. From the word go I set my mind on 42 kilometres, all of them made up of loops of the same 5Km lagoon path. I wanted it boring and I wanted the option to stop whenever I wanted to, and then not let myself.
By the 5Km mark I thought it was game over already. I just couldn’t get my calves to relax and they were getting so tight I physically couldn’t run. I stopped dozens of times to stretch, but nothing was working. Out of frustration I kicked the floor hard and then sat on a low wall overlooking the lagoon in a sulk. I thought maybe if I just sat for a bit the pump would subside, and so it seemed. Within a few minutes I could feel the bloodflow returning to my feet and my calves go from solid lumps to loose relaxed muscles again. A tentative jog seemed to show I was back in the game, so on I went.
I then seem to get to the 21Km mark pretty quickly, happily running along in my own thoughts (I didn’t take any music on purpose) occasionally seeing people I knew and even finding Kim out on her daily run. After each 10Km (two 5Km loops) I went back to the track, topped up my running water bottle, had a quick stretch and got back out for another few laps. Like the dream of a wife she is, Kim had gone back to the apartment and then down to the running track and put my tub of vaseline with my drinks, which relieved the terrible rubbing sore which had developed on my gentleman region. That was bliss!
At 37Km my pace was dropping and I felt like I had gone from quality training miles, to suffering/damaging/pounding miles. In my mind I knew that if I was in Surrey I would stop, justify my decision as the correct one for long-term consistency, and walk home. But being on the camp, knowing people would ask how far I ran, I let my ego push me to complete the 42Km. By the time I stopped I was achy and my knees felt very impacted, and I was thoroughly pissed off with myself for being so stupid. As I mooched down to the plunge pool to cool my legs, I met Hobbo and the other coaches who were sitting drinking cold drinks in the sun. They showered me with praise and encouragement, but inside I was angry. I didn’t know if that act of ego was going to scupper my plans for the next days long ride.
Lessons learnt:

All those miles up and down the same section of disused railway, in the freezing cold, in the night, in the thick fog, on my own – they work! I did a 4:02 marathon, on my own, on a repetitive course in windy but hot conditions. I had no music or company and I could have quit whenever I wanted to, but I didn’t. Up to 37Km I ran strong and when I made the (wrong) decision to push to the 42 mark, I could.
I don’t need cushioned, structured shoes. I ran the whole way in my racing flats and never once had any foot pain or soreness.
I still make the wrong decisions from time to time.
I still let my ego push me into doing the wrong thing.
When my legs don’t feel like they can/will run, just taking some time to let them come round can do the job. When I get off the bike in the double, if my legs feel tight then I should have a sit down for a few minutes and eat some food.

On the final day we had the opportunity to ride the Ironman Lanzarotte bike course. There were options to make it much shorter or 150/160Km missing some of the less scenic sections, but I wanted to see 180Km on my Garmin. Not knowing the course at all, and having only a poorly photocopied map I was reticent to try and get around on my own, so I joined onto a small group of three. My plan was to ride with them if I could, and if the pace got too hot, drop off and try to find my way, and just cycle around lost for 180Km if I couldn’t find the way. As it was I stayed on the group, despite feeling thoroughly terrible, almost to the bottom of the big climb (the descent from the long ride on day three) where I lost contact with them and settled down to a big day on my own. My legs had no power AT ALL. Nothing. I just couldn’t push at all, so I left the bike in the small chainring and just span to the bottom of the climb, and started to ascend slowly. Some German cyclists came past me at about 1/3rd of the way up, but for the most I was on my own, again in the blazing sun just spinning along and doing my best to raise my spirits. At about halfway I looked back down the mountain and saw the familiar colours of “Belgian John” and his partners in crime, two English brothers. Belgian John was off the front from the others, and I could tell from his riding style that he was chasing me. That broke me out of my sorry trance and suddenly I was pushing as hard as I could, and out of the saddle when it got steep. I kept looking back and John was gaining, but I was limiting the damage and I thought I could make it, so I gave it everything to the top, past the cafe and hit the descent hard. I overtook the Germans halfway down like they were stopped still, looking down the switchbacks for cars, spotting the apex of the corners and leaning the bike round them, caught up in the thrill of it all. By the time I hit the town at the bottom I was grinning from ear to ear and I had caught the group of three I had set out with, and a group of two (Doug and Jimbo) who had set out 5 minutes before us. I let the three go, thinking I was still struggling for power, and tagged onto the back of Doug and Jimbo. They were happy to have me along and said they weren’t out to smack the pace, more just enjoy the day and learn the course for their attempt at the IM in May. Immediately I could feel my legs were coming round, so I hit the front with Jimbo and helped us to the top of the island and the spectacular views over smaller islands to the North and the deep, deep blue sea.
The point at the top was a short, steep climb and then a fun descent onto a long flat road. During the descent Jimbo and I caught a couple of girls from the camp, and they latched onto the back of us, me on the front now pulling a little train of 5. We hit a dual carriageway, which was long, straight, dull and by now it was raining – so I put my head down and just pulled. Slowly I caught and overtook another 3 camp members, who latched onto my train, and we smoked along into the wind and rain. A couple of the others did some turns on the front allowing me to recover a bit, but in the main I felt very strong and happy on the front. Eventually Gary had a long turn on the front, pulling us back up to Belgian John and the brothers who had got in front of us when we stopped at the point. From there we worked together as a sizeable group stopping at petrol stations for water, allowing John and the brothers to navigate us, whilst I took turns with them to pull on the front. Down to the picturesque El Golfo we went before turning to the fire mountains, my favourite road on the island. It’s a road up a mountain of lava. It’s like nowhere else I have ever seen.
Most of the group was really suffering now as we hit 120/130Km, but I was still full of beans and loving the ride, so I stuck to the front, kept the pace steady and pulled along happily. Eventually we got back to Club La Santa, but because we had missed a 30Km section into a busy town, there was only 150Km on the clock. The group already knew what I would do, so I waved them goodbye at the roundabout just outside the club and headed back out for some more miles. Thankfully two others (Doug and Gary) came with me and we just spun along in our small chainrings chatting and suffering together. My arse had taken this “extra” loop as it’s cue to kick up a fuss, but still I wanted to see 180…and we did. As we descended from Soo to La Santa, the club resplendent in the late afternoon sun, we had a little group celebration, slapped each other on the back and wheeled back to the running track. I had a little run off of the bike, because I wanted to make myself run a bit on tired legs, but my left knee was hurting from the previous days marathon, so I only did 2Km. I had semi-planned to try and run 21Km, but I learned my lesson from the previous day, took my bodies messages on board and walked back to the apartment.
Lessons learnt:

Sometimes my legs feel terrible and I sack the ride before I’ve given them a chance to come good. It took nearly 1.5 hours for my legs to feel good this day, but from there until the 7 hour mark when I climbed off the bike they felt amazing. I had power on tap, I could burst to find a wheel when I needed to, I could grind out a rhythm on the front and dance up little climbs when they came along.
I drank mainly water with some weak energy drink, and a can of coke at the 130Km mark, and felt in full control all day. My hard work to move my bodies reliance on carbs to happily burning fat for fuel, has worked.
My new saddle works.
The key to riding long is all in my head.

In quick summation I think the camp was absolutely brilliant. I loved every single second of every single session (I did 37 hours of training in 6 days). I had to keep reminding myself that Richard Hobson is one of the finest triathletes Britain has ever produced, because he is just so down to earth and fun. He has a lovely mannerism and is really interested in people and what they want to achieve. Throughout the camp he would enquire what I was planning, listen to my responses and give that key, killer piece of advice I needed. No overload of information or complete countenance of my plans, just the exact single thing I should consider. On day two, the brick day, I ALMOST did another 30Km bike and 12Km run, just so that I could have done an Iron distance in all but the swim, and Hobbo simply said “Don’t put yourself in a bin on day two”. Simple and bang on the money. All week he said just the right things at JUST the right time. It’s a skill, neigh a talent.
Ron and Richard Smith, the other coaches, were also brilliant and fun to be with. All of the other athletes were friendly and inspiring to see attack each session and their week as a whole. I would simply love the opportunity to do that camp again. I really hope one day I can.

For details of Richard Hobson’s training camps, gite holidays in France and coaching services, go to his website here: http://www.triliving.co.uk/

Like an old glove. An old Titanium glove. With wheels. And a saddle.

2011-02-02T06:11:00.000Z

Having spent most of the winter on a mountain bike, and then the odd short session on the turbo, I got to a strange point where the road bike felt a bit alien to me. Those cyclists amongst you will know that when you spend literally hundreds of hours aboard a bike per year, it becomes as familiar to you as your bed, or your sofa, or your favourite pair of shoes. Everything feels right and seems to be in the right place. You slowly become more and more “at one” with the machine and it feels just as normal to ride it as it feels to be driving your car or lounging on your settee. So to climb on and feel a bit wobbly and awkward, took me back a bit. However, the adage of “it’s just like riding a bike”, seems entirely true if you are applying it to the actual activity of riding a bike. I hadn’t completely forgotten how it worked, and within 30 minutes it felt like I had never been away from it. Other than the lack of bike fitness, of course.

That was a few weeks ago now, and although I haven’t been setting any weekly mileage records, I have been getting progressively more consistent about my bike training once more. The focus between the New Year and now has been two-fold: become a proper triathlete again, and build my running. So I wanted to get back into the habits of training consistently in all three sports, and in particular put an emphasis on the run mileage. The week of training and DIY saw objective number one achieved and setup to be continued, and in general my running is going well. Sammy Wanjiru doesn’t need to be worried about me just yet (nor shoot me, or drive his car into me, or whatever other violent pastimes he may have) but in the under-subscribed sport of plodding, I’m making headlines. For the past couple of weeks I have been plodding 4 times per week, including 3 shorter (1 hour) plods and a long plod (2 hours) – and the best bit is, none of them felt hard or particularly long. Last weeks long plod was done the day after my 4 hour ride to work and back where I first punctured, then sprinted to get to meet point I had arranged with Scott, and then without time to recover stuck on his back wheel as he carved a determined path through Dorking and into Leatherhead. On the way home we took turns on the front to the bottom of Ranmore, climbed it and descended via Combe Bottom, before he left me to trundle back home in the darkness. It was a bloody cold evening, as well as wet, so by the time I got home I was pretty wasted. So (this is where we came in to this particular branch) to then go out the next evening and plod for 2 hours, in the dark up the National trail, to the next-but-one village and back, and it not feel particularly taxing…that has to be good news. Well, it’s good news for a bloke with legs of glass. Thin glass, like the type you get on cheap lightbulbs.

So running is good, what about swimming? The week of training saw me in the pool every day but one. And all of those sessions were around the 1-1.5Km mark. Again, that isn’t going to worry any proper swimmers, but I went for a conservative, consistent distance I could hit each day, over a few bigger swims and then burn-out. Last week saw the swimming fall back disappointedly to just the 2 sessions again, but I supplemented them with a kayak session – more on that in a moment. My swimming technique still feels OK but quickly gets lost as soon as I fatigue. And I fatigue quickly. So for now I am sticking to multiple steady 800m reps focusing on good technique. It’s about the limit of my concentration and it breaks the session up enough in my head to get them done.

And cycling? This is the one that worries me. In the past I have found the bike the easiest of the three sports to motivate myself for. I enjoy being on my bike, largely, but currently the poor weather is really testing my bike MOJO. I am allergic to icy roads and I suffer quite badly with poor circulation in my hands and feet, which I can’t sort out with any available gloves or overshoes. Nothing really works for me, so I just have to grit my teeth and put up with it.
So the consistency is lacking, but the work I have done has been honest and steady, and I am slowly getting used to being back on the bike again. In the past month I’ve had several 3+ hour rides, a 4 hour commuting day, a week of 1.5 hours daily on the turbo, a couple of mountain bike rides and some bit’s and bats between. However, like I said above, the focus has been running, so I am not panicking about bike miles now. After this weeks recovery focus, it’s time to keep the running where it is, and focus on the bike and swimming. There’s only 4 full weeks of training left until my Lanza camp, and I want to be somewhere near bike-fit by the start of the camp.

On Sunday I did my first adventure race with RobM and Dom. I turned up to have a bit of fun, but it seemed as though the other two were more intent on doing well. Despite repeated instructions to keep together as a team during the race briefing, Dom smacked off the front in the run. The run took us through dense woodland, jumping ditches, running through bogs and eventually over very rough ground back to the starting field where we did a loop back to the transition. I had worked reasonably hard to keep with Dom through the crowds and obstacles, but Rob has taken a much more sensible approach and came in a few minutes back, in time to grab his MTB and follow us out. On the bike, immediately, Rob went off the front. I stuck with Dom, losing him on any downhill and working hard to bridge back up to him. On the uphills, however, I was on tick-over keeping with him. As the lap wore on, Dom was obviously struggling with a heart problem he has been dealing with, so I decided to stick with him until the pits. However he soon got bored of my company and shooed me off to catch Rob up. I tried. I REALLY tried. I tried so hard that I took a descent with a drop, far too fast, ran out of skill and somersaulted over the bars into a muddy bank. The bike danced down the hill for a bit and then planted itself on my legs. I seemed OK though, so I tentatively brushed myself down and got back on the bike, taking a rather more cautious approach. That meant I didn’t manage to completely close the gap between Rob and myself, and found him in transition chatting to Dom, when I finished the bike. After a quick change back into my running shoes, Rob and I jogged out onto the running route…which was strangely like the bike route. As we jogged along we discussed Dom’s plight and agreed that we weren’t really in the mood to now push hard, when we were presumably already disqualified for having killed a team member, so we agreed just to jog it out and use it as a training session. As we chatted we crossed a stone bridge and ran alongside the canal, Rob’s usual run training area. This seemed to either energise or annoy him as he bounded off with an injection of pace. With a bit more effort, though, I was able to sit on his heels and cruise behind him until we crossed a lock and found the site for mounting the kayaks. It took a while to find a gap to put the large, inflatable craft into the water and then load Rob and finally myself about. Both of us elected to kneel in the boat, instead of sit, and that proved to be a good move. It allowed us to get leverage over the large sides of the kayak, and we quickly made headway. We were passing teams almost constantly, sometimes more than one team at a time, as they zigzagged down the canal, and we pushed a steady path. At the turn buoy we affected a surprisingly good handbrake turn and powered back to the start point, where we failed to fall in dismounting the boat, and jogged off. We also took this run very steady, chatting as we went, eventually arriving back in the main field. All that was left was some obstacles: planks to tie our feet together and necessitate a mincing gait to negotiate a short course, a scramble under an unnecessarily long cargo net pinned close to the muddy ground, and lastly a 6-7 foot high wooden apex which had been oiled for extra fun. I was in no mood to be faffing about on it as several other teams in front of us seemed to be doing, taking run ups and failing to latch the top. So I sprinted at the obstacle, dyno’ed to the top and pulled myself up – where I stayed to give Rob a helping pull under the armpit before sliding down the other side and crossing the finish.

It was good fun, and I would probably do another one for a laugh, but I wouldn’t want to take one too seriously. The next morning, however, I ached like I haven’t ached in a long time.

The BIG week

2011-01-24T09:06:00.001Z

Worst title ever? Well I didn’t know what else to call this week gone. Back in December, when I booked the week off work, all I was thinking was that if Kim was going skiing for a week, there was no chance I was going to keep going to work. It would be soul destroying to keep getting up and going to work, knowing she was off having fun slipping down a mountain. So instead I planned to take the week off, and have my own training camp from home. Then, when we booked the Lanzarote holiday with a training camp, it seemed the perfect way to boost my fitness in preparation for my preparation for the Lanza camp, which is preparation for my preparation for the double. If you scan back over all of that, I think you’ll find it makes perfect sense.
Then it dawned on me that Kim not being in the house for a week would be the perfect chance to do some work in the kitchen, without her constantly needing to be in there for a drink or an emergency carrot. Nothing major needed doing: trim some cupboards to make a 50cm cooker gap into a 60cm cooker gap. Fill and paint the wall where a radiator used to be. That sort of thing. So my plan morphed slightly into training camp + a bit of DIY in the evenings.
Then, things got odd. To cut a long story short, plaster was in a bad way and needed re-doing. Tiles had to be individually taken off the wall carefully, soaked, cleaned and re-set. The whole kitchen had to be painted…three times. By Wednesday I didn’t have a kitchen and the list of jobs to do was growing, not shrinking. By the end of the week we had a new cooker, a new cooker hood venting outside, new fridge freezer, a splashback, re-set tiles, new paint, new plaster (not in that order) and 21 hours of my blood, sweat and tears.

So, I didn’t quite manage the training week I had initially wanted, nor the compromised version I planned after deciding to attack the kitchen. But, I didn’t lose the whole week either. What I decided to do was swim, bike, run every day Monday to Thursday, then a big swim day Friday with an evening run, a long run Saturday and a long bike on Sunday. And it was mission accomplished. I managed a minimum of 1Km swims, with most of them coming in at 1.5Km (short, but consistent), a minimum of 1 hour bike rides with 2 outside and 4 on the turbo (saved time, which went towards DIY) and a minimum of 30 minute runs, several of which were an hour. The only downsides were my long run on Saturday got to 2 hours, but was really slow and painful, and my long ride on Sunday which WAS slow at 22.5KmpH. Tired!

So, scores on the doors: 18 hours training, 21 hours DIY. Done.

Just found this

2011-01-24T06:21:00.000Z

It seems I wrote a blog entry on the 13th, but didn’t post it.

Anyway, here it is. Just imagine it’s the 13th of Jan:

“
Tuesday night I confidently strolled to where the village centre intersects a national trail, and pushed “Start” on my Garmin. Within a minute I was walking again. I’ve already run on this trail tens of times since moving in, and most of the runs have been in the dark without a headtorch. But this night was different. Looking up I couldn’t see the sky for dark clouds, and subsequently the moon couldn’t see me or the trail. Whereas before I could turn my torch off and run in the moonlight, this night I could not….and I hadn’t brought the torch with me. I had two options: either walk home to fetch the torch and then walk back, or try and use the torch on my phone.
Seconds later I was running along the trail, holding my phone out in front of me and low to the ground, so that the dim glow from it’s camera flash LED could light some of the terrain. It was enough to see there difference between the bushes and the path, and it was enough to spot obstacles moments before I needed to hurdle them, but it wasn’t ideal. Also not-ideal was the fact the light couldn’t be on when the screen was turned off, so blinding my night vision further was my Android homepage shining from my out-stretched arm. And to make matters EVEN MORE interesting, my shoulder hurt after a few minutes of running like this. But, having booked the Lanzarotte holiday and training camp earlier that day, motivation/dedication levels were at ionospheric heights and I wasn’t about to quit or cut the run short purely because I couldn’t see or run properly. Instead I set my mind wondering about training plans and what to do with my impending week off work, and ignored the constant stumbling on hazards unseen and searing pain in my right shoulder.
30 minutes later I arrived safely at the turn-around point, did some windmilling to relieve my protesting rotator cuff, before setting off again back the way I had come. By the time I arrived back at the village, my shoulder was in cramp, but I was pretty pleased with myself to forcing out a decent run in less-than-ideal conditions. And whilst I audibly congratulated myself, whilst doing more windmilling and some chicken wing movements, I further enforced my growing reputation amongst village locals as the mental guy who runs a lot.

Speaking of locals, the next night I braved my new swimming pool, and met some. As I glided into the pool wall, mid-set, I had less than a second to make a decision. I had just spent two laps tapping a bloke on the ankles to ask to be let by. This was the 4^th straight lap I had been stuck behind him, and for the 5^th straight time he had just pushed off in front of me again. Now, do take a second to adjust my goggles, give him some room and try again? Do I swim half the lap and then turn around in the middle of the pool and jump in front of him? Or do I swim over him? A big push, two big arm pulls and I feel his legs underneath my torso. He realises he is about to be drowned and stops in the middle of the lap, as I glide by taking powerful armfuls of water.
A few laps later, and I am on the toes of the other bloke in our lane, and he isn’t letting me past either. I tap his toes…nothing. Same routine: big push, two big pulls and he stands up too, only this time blocking my path. “What’s your problem?” he asks angrily. “I’ve been on your toes for several laps, right behind you each time you turn and tapping your feet to ask to pass, but you don’t let me by. So I’m swimming over you.” My honest response didn’t go down well, but before he could protest I duck-dived back into my swimming position and hammered off up the pool.
Now I’m not trying to start wars or stamp authority, or anything else. I just want to be able to swim laps in a pool, with people who understand some sort of pool etiquette, so that we can all swim in unison. There was a slower lane they could use, and I tried my best to ask them to let me by. There was never an appropriate gap for me to overtake at the pace I was swimming, and having to sprint for a lap every 4 laps wasn’t in my session plan. This should work. It’s not a hard concept. When I swim in the Lido or Surrey Sports park, where there are lots and lots of people much faster than me, I am very diligent in letting people by me. I’m pro-active about it. But that level of respect isn’t afforded to me in local, council-run pools. And if I interrupt every swim in which this happens, and ask nicely if I could be let past, I won’t get any swimming done, and past history has shown that men don’t take that conversation well anyway. It’s some sort of personal affront on their manliness. It seems I’m basically saying “listen-in limp dick, I’m bigger than you so go and swim in another lane. Actually, I don’t want to share a pool with you.”

Other than the biff, the swim went well. Considering I haven’t been in the pool (again) for a month, after only completing a handful of swims since March, I didn’t completely suck at swimming. I easily swam my play-it-safe target of 1Km, even having enough oomph to push the pace on the last 200m. I didn’t time anything, so I could have just been mixing paint, but it felt reasonably strong and my feel for my catch on the water felt good. For the first time I can remember in years, I got in, swam and got out. Apart from the argument I didn’t stop, I didn’t stand around chatting, I didn’t take eleventy-four swigs of my bottle or adjust my goggles once a lap. I just got in and got it done. Nice!
”

Get Phil on it

2011-01-10T06:30:00.000Z

My only aim for this week just gone, was to be a proper triathlete again. But, as someone once said, a target without goals is merely a wish. So I had to have some goals for the week, and they were 3 sessions of each sport, no zero days and a long run over an hour. Coming back from a chest infection and my second zero WEEK in three weeks, meant I wanted to keep the number of hours in the sensible range, and just have a consistent week of moderate training. The three hour ride on Monday kicked it off well, backed up with a good hours trail run Tuesday and the swim on Wednesday night. Thursday night brought another hour run along the national trail in the dark, which brought me to the weekend since I took the day off work to babysit a plumber.
My initial plan was to watch Mr Plumber fix the heating quickly, and then get out on the mountain bike for the afternoon, eat and then hit the pool for a swim before Kim got home from work. Unfortunately sometimes life gets in the way (SLGITW) and I found myself climbing on the turbo at half three to complete some Sufferfest videos and missing my pool slot completely. I climbed off the turbo 2 hours later and ran around the house trying to hide the evidence before Kim came home and lost her sense of humour. The kitchen floor needed mopping due to the amount of sweat I had produced, and since it was hammering with rain outside, I had to carry the bike and turbo through the whole house to put them back in their temporary home in the conservatory. The session itself was much better than I thought it would be. I always struggle on the turbo because my brain knows I can get off at any time, and then spends it’s time creating very plausible reasons why I should in fact stop. These reasons are so plausible and so frequent in their creation, that often I find myself involuntarily turning the Garmin off and unclipping. I think I have turbo-specific-Schizophrenia.

On Saturday I got a CP20 done (hell) and walked to my friend Colin’s house, 5 minutes down the road. We then ran from his house, onto the National trail towards Horsham. The trail was quite muddy and full of big puddles, which challenged Colin in his road shoes, but didn’t impede our steady progress. My body really wanted to go faster, but I tried my best to stick to the 6:00/Km pace limit I have set myself for DIM training. There really is no point me doing my long runs at 5:00/Km pace, despite how good it feels, when I am training for a 52 mile run after a 224 mile bike ride. Colin was chomping at the bit to push the pace, but was kind enough to play along with my schedule. At 40-something minutes we found a natural point to turn-around and headed back. On a long, steep hill, my Garmin alarmed to tell me I was over 180BPM, which surprised me since I felt OK. My legs were heavy from the CP20 and the previous days Sufferfest, but I fell well in control of my heart and lungs. After some more easy plodding, we saw a runner in the distance who we were slowly reeling in, but approaching the end of the trail (for us). Simultaneously we both wondered if we would catch him before our turn off. The pace upped to something nearing 10Km pace as we caught and passed the bloke, but again my Garmin was alarmed at my heart rate. Again I felt well in control. Clearly something wasn’t right with me.
We finished the run together, back in Colin’s estate, and I jogged home to round the time up to 1.5 hours, feeling a little leg-tired but otherwise good.

On Sunday I got up with intentions of another 3 hour road ride, only to open the curtains to a white, frosty world. The roads glistened with ice and the low morning sun bounced off the surface in a dazzling display of power. With the sun out I decided to wait and see if the ice would melt, but by 10AM I could tell it wasn’t going anywhere fast and changed my decision to a MTB ride up the National trail. It took almost an hour of faff to get out on the trail, but when I did I was happily pushing a big gear up the frosty path. However, my heart rate was again far higher than I expected or felt. At times I was pushing 160BPM, when my effort level felt nearer 120. I decided to trust my body rather than the Garmin, switched it to map mode so as not to keep seeing the HR reading, and ploughed on. At the point where the trail leaves the obvious path (Kim and I went wrong at this point some months previous) I stopped, removed my gloves and looked at my phone to make sure I was about to head the correct way. In removing my glove, the liner section came away from the leather outer, turned inside out and would not go back in. When I tried to push my hand back in, the liner would go halfway down the fingers of the outer, and wedge. Nothing i did could make it resolve and I was left with no option but to ditch them in a back pocket and proceed without them. That left me with the latex gloves I use (the only thing that works for me) as my only protection from the cold, and little protection it was. I carried on, piecing together bits of tarmac, bridleways and byways, trying to find the trail’s route to the North Downs Way, but I was fast losing contact with my hands, and finding more and more technical sections of riding. The combination of the two pushed me outside of my comfort zone, so I turned around and headed back home. That meant the ride was considerably shorter than intended (scraping 1.5 hours), but then again my targets was based on getting back into training, and I had at least been on the bike.
The day was rounded off with a swim with Kim. I felt tired, heavy and laboured in the pool, but again, at least I got in there.

So, a summary of the week:

4 bike sessions

Long ride was good to get done,
Turbo sessions were shorter than they should be, but better than nothing
Short MTB due to gloves, but at least I got out there

4 Runs

Happy with all of them.
Still struggling with my left foot and ankle since Leatherhead 10K

2 Swims

I should be doing at least 3 a week really
Felt better in the water than I imagined I would
Attitude towards swimming is getting better again

This week my targets are:

4 runs, 3 bikes, 2 swims
Build long bike to 4 hours
Other bike sessions on the turbo, probably more sufferfest for now
Keep long run at 1.5 hours
2 other runs at an hour
Last run leave at 30 minutes for now
Plan proper sessions for both of the swims, based on SwimSmooth SwimTypes plan.
Meet all sessions.
Get all sessions done at the first oppurtunity

I’ll bust a catch in yo’ ass.

2011-01-07T06:08:00.000Z

Tuesday night I confidently strolled to where the village centre intersects a national trail, and pushed “Start” on my Garmin. Within a minute I was walking again. I’ve already run on this trail tens of times since moving in, and most of the runs have been in the dark without a headtorch. But this night was different. Looking up I couldn’t see the sky for dark clouds, and subsequently the moon couldn’t see me or the trail. Whereas before I could turn my torch off and run in the moonlight, this night I could not….and I hadn’t brought the torch with me. I had two options: either walk home to fetch the torch and then walk back, or try and use the torch on my phone.
Seconds later I was running along the trail, holding my phone out in front of me and low to the ground, so that the dim glow from it’s camera flash LED could light some of the terrain. It was enough to see there difference between the bushes and the path, and it was enough to spot obstacles moments before I needed to hurdle them, but it wasn’t ideal. Also not-ideal was the fact the light couldn’t be on when the screen was turned off, so blinding my night vision further was my Android homepage shining from my out-stretched arm. And to make matters EVEN MORE interesting, my shoulder hurt after a few minutes of running like this. But, having booked the Lanzarotte holiday and training camp earlier that day, motivation/dedication levels were at ionospheric heights and I wasn’t about to quit or cut the run short purely because I couldn’t see or run properly. Instead I set my mind wondering about training plans and what to do with my impending week off work, and ignored the constant stumbling on hazards unseen and searing pain in my right shoulder.
30 minutes later I arrived safely at the turn-around point, did some windmilling to relieve my protesting rotator cuff, before setting off again back the way I had come. By the time I arrived back at the village, my shoulder was in cramp, but I was pretty pleased with myself to forcing out a decent run in less-than-ideal conditions. And whilst I audibly congratulated myself, whilst doing more windmilling and some chicken wing movements, I further enforced my growing reputation amongst village locals as the mental guy who runs a lot.

Like a Phoenix from the flames.

2011-01-04T06:53:00.000Z

I’m back! Again! But this time I really am back. Look, I’ve been at the bottom of a very dark place, underneath some heavy stuff, tied up with some pretty sticky threads of life. This blog isn’t the place for writing about anything in detail, but the current state of play is this: Kim and I moved house to a little village in Surrey, and that act of moving has removed a lot of stress from our lives. The move itself was about as stressful as a move can get, but that was SO last year and I’m determined to look forward and not back. Fresh year, fresh start.

So, I’m not going to review the year, or put up the number of hours or kilometres I trained, or anything. The only recap I’ll do is to say that I gave up on training when I was fighting every day to get the move to happen, I kept away from it when we were in the act of moving, I got back to some running the week after we moved, and then I got a chest infection and laid on the sofa for a week. Where I am now is inside some fat, unfit blokes body with a mountain to climb to get to where I need to be. The double happens in 23 weeks, whether I have got myself fit or not. There is no margin for error or excuses left, it has come down to 23 weeks, me, a bike and some running shoes. Oh and swimming togs (I must remember to do some of that soon).

The basic plan is this: in 8 weeks time, Kim and I are hoping to go to Lanzarotte and whilst we are there I will do a training camp. If we book that now, then it is something that I need to get into shape to be able to do, and it is not something I can just decide to back out of later. It is a tangible goal that presents me with a challenge, and one that is going to motivate me to train solidly through the rest of this winter. The village is right next to a national trail, which I can both run and mountain bike on all the way to the South coast and back, so there are literally no excuses not to get some good work done. The swimming pool is a 5 minute walk away, plus Kim went there last night in the middle of resolution week, and was one of only three people in the pool. So even if it isn’t the nicest pool in the known universe, it is full of water and it is not full of people. So that is all three bases covered despite what the weather can throw at us. This means I have no excuses not to get some consistent training done for the next 8 weeks.

Then the camp itself is organised by the ex-British triathlon champion, Richard Hobson. I emailed him a few nights ago to check availability and to see if someone going longer than Iron distance would still fit in. And despite it being a camp for sprint-Iron people, he thinks I’ll be fine. He also said he may make me add on some extra volume to the others on the camp, to make it even more applicable to my needs. After looking at the proposed week plan, I’m not sure that’s going to be so needed!

I’m hoping I can do every step of every run, every stroke of every swim and pedal every inch of the bike sessions, and come back to the UK with a tan and a heap of recovering to do. Then take a week easy and hit training hard as the spring erupts over here.

Yesterday I got onto the road bike for the first time in months, and the first time on any sort of bike for 3 weeks. The cold wind blew, I quickly lost contact with my hands and feet….and face….and legs, but steered myself slowly and fatly North-West, and then a long way South into Sussex. At that point the snow fell on me. But, with my new-found positivity I told myself it was character building and would give me a positive memory for when I was struggling on the bike in the double, and pushed on stoically. I only managed 3 hours, which felt like 3 lifetimes, and my average speed was so pitiful I refuse to type it, but it’s miles in the bank. Afterwards I died on the sofa, fell asleep in my dinner and woke up this morning with sore quads and a bruised arse. HOW bloody quickly does fitness go?!?!?

Positive mind: I might be far from where I want/need to be, but I am on the right path to getting there. That was one small step on a long road, but at least I am on the road. Time to push, hard.

Gorrick Brass Monkey–Race 1

2010-11-30T18:55:00.000Z

Crashing the mountain bike by failing to jump a fallen tree, at slow speed, the day before the race didn’t leave me with any physical injuries, but I would be lying if I said it did my confidence any good. Yes, to a certain extent falling off is part of mountain biking. And the often touted adage of “if you don’t fall off, you’re not riding hard enough” or similar, is true to a degree. But my issue with crashing, is that I am predominantly a road rider, with average-at-best bike handling skills, and I have built up a sizeable loathing for falling off. On the road bike I have fallen off 4 times in 5 years of regular riding: the requisite failing to unclip manoeuvre, the day I discovered black ice on a bend, the day I avoided a fallen mate and met a mud bank, and the day I wrote off a Peugeot and ended up in hospital. That later one, although not chronologically the latest, has left the biggest impression on me. From that moment on, I realised I was not infallible. From that day on, whenever I descend a hill and hit 50, 60, sometimes 70 Km/h it occurs to me I could crash, there could be a car on the wrong side of the road, and I know what that could would probably feel like. I never had that before the prick in a Peugeot parked sideways across a downhill road.
Descending something muddy on a mountain bike is a whole world of difference from riding down a hill on the road, I know. Crashing is probably going to result in muddy shorts and an adventure in a bramble bush, trying to find the bike you were just clinging on to. But, and this is the pertinent point, at the point you know you have lost your battle to stay on the bike and you are preparing yourself for the departure, it feels the same as being launched above a Peugeot and staring down through a windscreen at a prick looking scared. To me, anyway, it feels the same. Therefore, even though I know the difference, I can’t quite shake the negativity connected with falling off, which means I cannot try as hard as I could.

So, when I came to ride the Brass Monkey, round 1 – a 2 hour mountain bike event near Deepcut, part of me was, I’ll openly admit, worried about the technicality of the course. I arrived 2 hours early to ensure I didn’t interfere with the earlier departing 4 hour race, and then sat in the rapidly cooling Land Rover literally twiddling my freezing thumbs. That gave me plenty of brooding time.
With 35 minutes left before my race, I built the bike quickly, pulled on all the layers of clothing I had diligently tested out the day before, and went for a warm up around and around the field. Time ticked by, until I found myself in a crowd of people on bikes nervously chatting, on the start line. “It’s fine” said one guy to his mate who was banging his ski-gloved hands together in loud claps, “I mean, there’s a couple of gnarly, shit your pants type descents in there, but nothing your going to die on.”. I made a determined effort to emote “meh!” on my face, whilst my mind screamed at me to go back to the car.

“Go” the starter shouted and in unison 300 MTB’ers, completely unbothered about racing starts, mooched forward and attempted to clip their feet in with varied success. The first 10 minutes was a veritable procession as all of those riders combined onto one thin section of singletrack, all moving at the pace of a slow walk. But after a few moments, the crowd got moving, the track became clearer in front of me, and I fell into the rhythm of mildly technical, fast sweeping singletrack, winding through trees and taking in the odd obstacle. I was enjoying it. With the experience of the Endurance MTB race I did in August, I felt more confident in my skills at this level of riding. I took big drops, easily. Short sections of fast descent, I let the bike run, feathering the brakes to keep everything in check, and running wide on the corners where I could. I was holding my own!
But as the course went on, it became more and more technical. With a hundred or so riders close behind you, there is no chance to stop or even slow dramatically before something, so that you can assess it and come up with your plan. MTB racing is all about your ability to view the route as you find it, spot the line, spot the hazards and hit it correctly at the right speed, in one lucid series of thoughts and calculations. Without developing that ability by riding a lot, and putting yourself in those situations, you are on a knife-edge. And I was. With wide eyes I was hammering down the trail, spotting hazards and thinking “oh shit, this will hu….I DID IT!”, again and again. Big drops, jumps off of tree roots in the middle of fast descents, U-bends with tree-roots along the top edge, fast corners on loose ground – you name it, the course had it. And I was long since enjoying myself, so much as surviving. I was questioning why I had entered this. This wasn’t my sport.

So why DID I enter it? Several reasons I guess; I wanted to use some races to increase my bike fitness, I enjoyed the endurance race I did when I could see the course, and that experience taught me I COULD ride. I only crashed on the course when people got in my way (a girl fell on me, and a bloke crashed into the back of me at a steep climb) and when it got dark, and almost all of those were on one particular section. So I came away realising that crashing was not that bad, and that I did have bike handling skills, I just needed to practice them. So I entered this series of races….and failed to practice.

This course was different. Frozen ground and more sections of gravel and exposed tree roots and rocks meant a crash looked much less appealing this time. At times I was merely holding onto the bike, rather than controlling it. To it’s credit, the bike with it’s new tyres was doing a bloody good job of doing the right thing, in the absence of a rider with any nous.
Then, on a very steep section lined with loose gravel, a spotted a girl two riders in front, fall heavily. The first thing that shot through my mind was that I would also fall if someone else had (although saying that, I had seen dozens of crashes or the after-effects of crashes all race) and the second thought, as I sped towards her at terminal velocity, was how to avoid her. With the kind of external confidence you would expect from one of the race leaders, I controlled my speed, corrected a rear-wheel slide on the gravel and aimed around her. That confidence didn’t communicate though (probably the look of pure terror on my face), and she panicked as I loomed above her, and tried to disentangle herself from her machine. Her jaunty movements, in turn, made me panic and wrench the bars to the right to avoid her, up the sidewall of the rut we were riding, and down into the empty ditch the other side. BOOM! I was still sat on the bike (inwardly thinking “I’m blessed! I can’t fall off today!”) and completely unhurt, so I dragged it back over the mound, checked the girl, who was now at the side of the trail and stood up, was OK and remounted. As I pushed off and clipped in, I heard a creaking, rattling sound from the back wheel. I looked back, and it seemed to be running true with no awkward movements, so I carried on not wanting to stop again on the course, until the singletrack brought me back out into the start/finish area and then on into the pits. I got off, lifted the back of the bike up to spin the back wheel…which promptly fell off. The rear skewer was in 4 pieces and the lack of tension meant the wheel was free to fall out of the drop-outs. A sense of annoyance and relief swept over me. I had steeled myself for another lap, maybe two if I was unlucky, and my inner-determination would have pushed me to finish the race, but to have a creditable reason to quit was a welcome relief. I took 15 minutes, maybe more, trying (weakly) to effect a repair, before wheeling the bike back to the car and driving home. Once there I went out for a run over the common, to lose some energy and to revel in the action of something I could do.

So where does this leave me? I am entered in the other two races of the 3 race series, but is there any point if I didn’t enjoy it?
It’s a question I have been asking myself, and one I think I know the answer to deep down: I don’t like to be a quitter. I don’t like things to beat me, and I don’t like to give up on things. The facts are that I could and did ride the whole course, only crashing to avoid someone else, not through lack of skill. And I do have the skills, clearly, I just really lack the confidence. Those drop-ins and the jumps and the descents and the technical climbs, they weren’t super-easy. This wasn’t a beginners course, and yet on only my 20th or so ride of a mountain bike ever, I was doing it. Yes, people were flying past me for the whole lap, and I was clearly much more pensive than those around me, and I felt like I was living on a prayer, but I was still there, on a bike, surviving around the course. So I cannot truly say it is beyond me, and I should quit through self-preservation. It would be a lie to myself and those around me. What I need to do is put myself in those situations more often, outside of the pressure of a race with other people trying to get past me, take my time, do the miles and build the confidence. I have the network in Scott and the CycleWorks guys. They are happy for me to join them on their bi-weekly rides and I am quite sure will teach me, I just have to bite the bullet and take the leap.
So I am. I’m not going to give up, I’m going to get over the crisis of confidence and learn to believe in myself. At times on that race and the enduro, I found myself naturally doing the right thing, letting the bike run, hanging off the back of the saddle for balance, sweeping wide on banked corners and catching skids, slides and nearly-falls. So somewhere in me there is a MTB rider, a racer even. I just need to man up and find him. Scream if you want to go fast, or you’ve just pushed one out in fear.

A quick change of focus

2010-11-27T22:37:00.001Z

My decision to run in my lightweight racers at the Leatherhead 10K, which included a 2Km steep downhill section, came back to bite me. The following day my left foot was very sore to walk on, in my 5th metatarsal and in the arch of my foot. But by the following day it felt a lot better and by the Thursday I had forgotten about it. Then, after a warm-up jog to the bottom of Rose Hill, in Dorking, where I was going to do some intervals, it hurt again. It also hurt on the 4 out of 8 intervals I managed (Rosh Hill is a 400m circular road on a steep hill) as I ran down the hill back to the starting point, until eventually I was forced to hobble (stupidly) home. The next day I was back to limping, and from then on it just hasn’t felt right. So I decided, almost on the spot, to give the running a break for a week and instead concentrate on the bike.

The “Worlds Worst House Move Ever” is still dragging on, and on Tuesday the current house was having a structural survey, which I wanted to be present for, so I took the day off work. This also gave me the opportunity to get out for a long-ish ride, which I almost wasted by laying around on the sofa geeking about with numbers in Excel. So now constrained by time, I only managed to get out for 3 hours, but I made them count by trying to hit a certain average speed that stretched me. On Thursday I hit the turbo for another CP20 attempt, which once again I buggered up with poor pacing (I WILL learn) and under-did the first 10 minutes and then really, REALLY hurt for the last 10, to end up with exactly the same result as a fortnight ago. And lastly (until tomorrow) I took the MTB out across the common this morning, to test it out before tomorrows race (more on that in a moment). The ride was fairly sedate apart from when I sped down a section of singletrack, hopped over 3 fallen tree limbs, and failed to hop the 4th. To be honest it was more of a thin tree trunk, and although my front wheel cleared it, the chainring didn’t. The result was a catapult forward, a somersault and then a spectacular landing on my face, thankfully covered almost entirely in a helmet, two buff’s and some sunnies, all deployed to keep the cold out. More by luck than judgement I have injured nothing more than my MTB confidence.

But, before I tell you about the race tomorrow, the real news. I thought I was going to have a bike focused week, but then I inexplicably fancied a swim on Sunday. Since I couldn’t run still, and my bike legs were tired from Saturdays long, tough bike, and I didn’t want to just sit around, I fancied a swim! Me! So I went.
It was terrible. Awful in fact. I could barely swim 100m in one go. Seriously. The technique was still mostly there, as much as it ever was, but it felt like the water was thick and viscous and my arms were burning by the end of each 100m lap. I’ve heard of people not swimming for years and then getting back into the pool and setting a 400m PB – but that is not how it seems to happen for me. I think I swim in such a strange, power-before-style way, that I just cannot rely on technique as a baseline swim level.
However, the swim wasn’t at all in vain. It showed me, in a fairly brutal way, that I cannot just pitch up in April when the lake opens and bang out a lap. I can’t rely on my “technique” to get me through the first few weeks, and then just build my swimming up to doing 8Km fairly comfortably (which is what I need to do in June) from there. By not swimming since March, I have taken myself back down to (almost) square one. The only plus point is that I know swimming improves quickly with hard work.
So, on Wednesday I went swimming again. I did drills and a few 200m intervals trying to stick on some fast blokes toes, and then got out with very hurty arms. And then on Friday, I WENT AGAIN! What is more, I loved it. More drills, a lane to myself and a few more 200m repeats. Within 3 sessions I can feel a 200% improvement and I’m back to enjoying the strive for a better stroke. I want to use the winter to improve my swim technique, before I add some fitness work in February and March so that I hit the lake in April with the fitness to make those sessions count straight away. And I want that technique work to count, so that I CAN rely on technique and get out of an 8Km swim feeling good, not dead.

Lastly, I have a MTB race tomorrow. It is only a 2 hour affair, purely for fun, but after todays face-plant and the forecasted –5 temperatures…this could be interesting. Slippery, cold, technical MTB race…talk about playing to your weaknesses. Well, as they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Apart from spinal fractures. Or a punctured lung. Or a chainring through the gut wall. Or a brain injury.