Trains, Travels

Ok, so let’s get it out of the way. Back from the training camp and off to the Tour of Wessex. Day 1 and 2 weather was fine, day 3 pissing it down and strong winds. I didn’t take much convincing that it was too much for a ride and pulled out. People did ride, I’d like to think when they headed off earlier the weather didn’t seem quite so bad, but basically I failed to man up on this one. To make up as best I could I did a 3 hour turbo session at home which was a fair strain after all that cycling.

That was the view from my window at Font Romeu, pretty nice to wake up to. You can just see the track in that picture, I ran round it once, then I ran back to my room. It was getting towards the end of the camp and we’d had a mini aquathon at the start of the day. Result was dead legs so when I got to the track and struggled to hold my easy pace round it I decided to save further embarrassment and leave it to the real runners. Similarly at the pool it was best not to wonder what the real swimmers must be thinking.

So rest of week in France went well and I’ve come away feeling pretty confident about my cycling for sure. Flew home on the Friday for the Tour of Wessex, on the plane happened to sit next to a woman who ran the logistics for an adventure racing team. It was interesting chatting to her about the races they’d done and all my plans for the coming year. Always good to meet people who understand the urge to test your endurance. The team has a website, which is unsurprisingly in French, but still interesting even if your French ability stopped somewhere at GCSE. Hopefully though I’ve picked up another contact to help me in my travels and training!

So the Tour of Wessex was mostly good, I don’t really feel too bad about dropping the last day. The first 2 days went pretty well for me, not that I’d have said this had I been asked in the first 3 hours of day 1. Tired legs and fresh friends made for a few hours of hell as I tried to hang on. Then magically the legs came back and I was flying in the last couple of hours. It was great to be riding so strong and really pushing with one of the other guys. Day 2 I felt good from the start, when we did start that is, having planned to get off early I managed to leave my bike shoes at the cottage and a ‘quick’ trip back ensued. It was only fair after putting my friend out like that that when he felt weak on the bike I dragged him round in my draft. I was pretty pleased to be riding strongly again and towards the end it was back to the more aggressive riding of the previous day. I made myself do the turbo on day 3 simply as I’d planned for this 3 day finish to my big training week and I was going to have it one way or another. 3 hours on a turbo isn’t quite the same as a big ride outdoors, but in the circumstances it’ll do. Unsurprisingly my legs are feeling pretty wiped out now…

Book review time! Actually, possibly 2 book reviews. Firstly, before going away I read Flow in Sports as a first step in addressing the mental side of racing. It’s an easy read and I would say fairly useful in terms of provoking thought, but it doesn’t give answers. Essentially the concept of flow cannot be taught - examples of its benefits can be given and of how individuals have achieved or used it, but it’s a personal thing. At the least the book has made me consider the importance of focus and visualisation for me. I have more in the field to follow up with and will see if it leads to anything more concrete. Second book review - Running with the Buffaloes which follows a cross country team. It’s a pretty inspiring read I find, though like many sports books it’s not something to read if quality of writing is a key concern. It’s not going to appeal massively to those outside of athletics, but it’s an insight into the level of commitment at the top end of sports (for similar reading Gold in the Water is worth picking up).

I’m back to a couple of weeks of work before another training camp, I’ve got a race in the middle of all this which I’m starting to look forward to now. I’m replacing some of the nervousness early in the season with a bit of confidence which is good. The urgent tasks on my agenda this week are recovering, getting a bike service sorted out and planning a trip to the dentist. After boasting about 9 years without dental treatment a tooth has decided to start falling apart. Guess that’ll teach me. All in all though things go well and I’m excited to see if I can build a little bit more on the fitness I’ve achieved so far.

Too tired to blog much. Currently at altitude at Font Romeu which has my heart rate up a little. Lots of riding at the front this week, holding power day after day far better than I thought I would. Unfortunately not getting much sleep here, might be the room, the weird little pillow, the noise or the altitude.

So turns out I’m still afraid of needles… Not really a big surprise. After 4 days of hard riding my left ITB and hamstrings were tightened up so I took the offer of some needling and massage. It’s worked, but on the downside accupuncture involves 10-15 minutes of me trying not to pass out or throw up. On the plus I did get fed chocolate brownies and coke and it did an amazing job of loosening up my leg. I wish I didn’t react so badly it seems pretty effective.

Weather has been completely miserable here, really rough days of being soaking wet and cold. More kit changes than I imagined and I regret not packing some of my winter kit. I pushed through though and got some good riding out of it, comfortable over 400K so far this week. My only hope is that the Tour of Wessex will be better as I’m not sure I want a repeat of last year. All that said it’s been a beautiful day here, clear skys and sunny, just a little chilly in the shade at altitude.

The views here are fantastic and the environment great for training, even if the thin air makes you gasp for more oxygen (50m fly was far tougher than I’m used to). You get 3 all you can eat meals a day a basic room and there’s plenty of training facilities and good riding round here. That pretty much covers all my needs. The only odd thing, it’s also a school and whilst it’s still term time you’re surrounded by school kids in the day.

As I’ve been out on my bike in Berkshire and Hampshire I’ve come to think on matters of philosophy. Specifically I have made an update to the Circles of Hell from Dante’s Divine Comedy…

It’s subtle, but I’ve substituted Highway Maintenance Planners for Simonists because I want to put them in close to Hell and I couldn’t tell you what a Simonist was off the top of my head. They might well deserve to be left where they were, but I can’t believe they’re worse than the people who leave my local roads in such a terrible state. There are some particularly offensive routes if I choose to go towards Tadley or the other way to Windsor. What’s most frustrating is these are great roads except for the pot holes. Turns out Simonists are people who sell ecclesiastical pardons, offices, or emoluments. Yep, they can be let off Highway Maintenance, far more serious and relevant today.

So training and as promised I’ll not get too technical - I cycled a lot at the weekend and by a lot I mean about 300K. Pretty happy with how things are going starting to feel like I’m in good shape (with the exception of feeling a bit ill today) and can train pretty hard. With the good weather I’ve been able to get outside much more and have been enjoying the tan lines that come with it. I’m starting to ease off on the training for the rest of the week now in preparation for my trip to France. I’ll head out on Saturday and it’s 6 solid days of training in the Pyrenees, fly home, travel down to the SW and then 3 days riding the Tour of Wessex. Looking at the routes planned it adds up to something in the order of 1100K over the course of 8 days and that’s not counting the running or swimming. All in all it’s going to make May the biggest month of training yet and if it doesn’t kill me should make me a lot stronger. It’s going to be a challenge, but I’m looking forward to it and the end result is I should be certain I’m ready for Epic.

I’ll finish this post with the classic topic of weather. As mentioned, it’s been great this past week, but looks like things are taking a turn for the worse. I wouldn’t be too bothered, but potentially the same thing is going to happen down in France. I was hoping for a warm weather training camp!

Warm weather has arrived and with it the benefits of training in the sun. Also the downside as I become human fly paper, every insect seems to aim for my face. I suppose I can’t really complain I’ve spent so long asking for this weather.

Training has gone well this last week, I did a weekend of lots of cycling, over 400km in total. I felt pretty strong throughout it too, power did fall off after the first day as fatigue took some toll, but still I could hold a solid effort. I’ve followed that big biking weekend with a bit of a focus on running this week, up to around 50k run over the last 3 days and the weeks not over. Whilst the volume is fairly high, the pace has been pretty easy my aim has been to keep the overall daily effort down for a few days before this weekend. More biking this weekend and then a few more days hard work before I’ll take it easy in preparation for Iron CAMP in France.

For my third ride of the long weekend I decided to do an old route I’d not used in well over a year. I headed down towards the town of Alton in Hampshire (not the home of the theme park) and then up the hill in Beech Village. I’ve no idea why I’ve not done this ride in so long, it’s actually quite nice, the hills seem to have got a lot smaller though. The advantage of villages having their own websites is I now know that the climb at Beech is actually “one of the highest points in Hampshire” which I guess is almost a claim to fame. My memory of it from a year or two back was as a tough climb after a long ride. Sure it kicks up at the end and needs a bit of work, but not that much, it’s actually a pretty easy climb. 217m above sea level just isn’t very much…

Now I’m converted to tracking my training electronically I’m starting to discover some useful tools I can use. I’m increasingly fond of the WKO+ performance manager which now has the option to save the graph as an image ideal for adding to blog posts! But it’s interesting to see how the training load has increased over time and the signs that I am improving. The concepts of TSS and CTL and ATL that are used by the chart make a lot of sense to me, but then I like to see things reduced down to numbers and data. The real test is going to be seeing how this corresponds with my training and racing - I’ll be interested to see how the taper for Ironman affects the numbers and how I race off all this. Data is great, but in the end if it tells me nothing about my fitness it’s not much use.

Additionally TSS is now utilised for the run too, so I can get a training load for each run I do. Without GPS and altitude it’s not entirely accurate, but it gives me a rough guide as to how that’s going. There’s also some interesting run pacing divisions based on threshold pace and this training load model. I’ve started reading a little into it and a lot relates to Jack Daniel’s VDOT model which I also liked. I’m keen to try to move to integrating a more data driven system to my run training. I do far too little at an easy to steady pace and nothing much above, as I get nearer to my key races I need to pick that up.

I’ve just finished reading Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear which I thoroughly recommend. Before starting it I was a little unsure if I’d enjoy it or not, the author didn’t necessarily have the credentials to cover the field and I am sceptical about journalistic coverage of science. Overall I’m more interested in the science and psychology of risk than the politics, but a very good job is done to integrate the two. I was familiar with a lot of the science from other reading, but it was well covered and explained. There’s lots of examples of our mistakes when it comes to judging risk and this is tied back to the science and the roles of the media and politics. I come away from it perhaps not shocked by the statistics or examples presented, but frustrated to see the ways our fears are abused.

I was particularly interested to read about the Cultural Theory of Risk and how in tests those categorised as Individualists tend to assign less risk to things than other groups. Interested because I would largely fit in that group and I think it would also be fair to say I don’t strongly assign high risks to things. I’ve generally been frustrated by a lot of the fear mongering seen in the media these days, sometimes as it doesn’t make scientific sense to me or sometimes simply because I do not see the point in living in such a state. Ultimately it comes back to my views on personal choice, responsibility and the need to be self-reliant. It’s not that I don’t fear things (sharks!), but I do tend to recognise or realise that most of my fears are bigger than the actual danger. Of course this will be fine until it turns out I’m wrong!

Still waiting on Blogger to check my blog, decide it’s not spam and open it up again so I can import the posts here. Seems I may have to wait a while on that one though, until it happens things will be a bit sparse on here. Next post I promise less science of training.

Keeping it brief as it’s late. Turns out Blogger thinks my blog looks like spam. Once that happens you then have to potentially wait days before the issue will be resolved. Much as I assume when they do get round to checking it’ll be fine I don’t like the idea of my blog vanishing because of their automated spam detection.

So a new blog, run in WordPress and hosted on my own domain. All pretty basic for now, I will get things in shape at the weekend.

Actually it isn’t. The weather we’ve had tis year means it’s still freezing and I can’t quite face heading off to the lake yet. I did at least get to swim in the sea in Spain which whilst not hot was warm enough. Ideally though I’d be swimming in the lake below.

The local lake where I was staying on the Gold Coast last year. The temperatures were a bit too high for a wetsuit, first time I tried it I pealed it off after 1 lap, you could see the sweat evaporating off me. The only time I managed to do a long swim there in a wetsuit was starting out at 5am! Importantly the lake was also free of these…

Didn’t stop me getting a fright when an eel darted away from me. Of course if I was bored of a lake there was always places like this to swim in…

Diving through schools of bait fish and fighting the currents to cross the inlet was a lot of fun. Of course sharks could technically get there (and assuming there are Bulls in the creek they must have passed through there), but I was assured they weren’t there. Didn’t stop the Jaws theme lurking in the back of my head.

Ultimately that was all just an excuse to look at some pictures from my time in Oz and remind myself why I’m heading back there to train. At some point the need to swim in my wetsuit will overcome my dislike of the cold and I’ll be swimming here. I know that I’m going to go to a swimming session and a trip to the secret lake (can’t tell you where it is) will be proposed. Obviously I’ll have to go if others are swimming, but until then I’ll hope nobody mentions it.

The week’s been a bit mixed when it comes to training, started out lacking in energy and motivation. Hopefully I’ve dealt with one of those now, and my energy is only low from the training I’m doing. May has started and this month for me is all about building on what I’ve been doing up till now. Time to really focus, to put aside the distractions, to get the training and the recovery right. On the training side, I want to keep the volume going and get a bit more intensity in there. Hence the importance of recovering. All being well when June comes around I’ll be ready to take on Epic Camp and in looking to add the finishing touches prior to Switzerland.

I have finally set-up all the training software on my Mac and can properly download and analyse power data. I am fully converted to tracking my training electronically now (well to a fair extent) and all the benefits of the stats it gives me. Of course they’re only worth my ability to interpret them and act upon them. I’ll admit I am still learning in many areas here and generally keep a fairly simple approach to training structure (and have a strong bias to favouring big volume for better or worse). So it’s in part a work in progress and another aim for May. I won’t master these things in a month, but I can improve them.

No reading recommendations this week, I’ve been reading a couple of mountaineering magazines on my commute - Vertical and Alpinist. Both are very well produced and very entertaining. Interesting stories of climbing, typically at the sharper end of the wedge, fantastic photography - it’s all very inspiring even if I’m a long way short of being capable of them. One of the things that I am most impressed with in these accounts is the ability to push yourself right at the limits of endurance. Necessity pushes you outside your comfort zone and you come through the other side better than before. It’s something that seems missing from the world of training and racing, I have pushed at my own limits, but have I ever really been pushed that hard? From my limited climbing experience I remember how the fear of a fall, safe as I was on ropes, pushed me to work harder, endure a bit more and get past problems that in a safer environment I don’t think I would. Even at that easy level a sense of necessity could push me slightly beyond my boundaries.

Perhaps missing this in training and racing is just me. I push hard and try to perform at my limit (when it’s appropriate too), but you always wonder if there’s just that little bit more. I think some of the appeal of bigger endurance events or going off into mountains is the hope that they will really test my limits in a way I’ve yet to achieve. So to finish off before I ramble on forever, two more events (courtesy of the Ran Fiennes biography) that have caught my interest - the Swiss Alpine Marathon and the Transalpine-Run. So many events and so little time…