Trains, Travels

Another year older today. Nothing profound to say with increased age. Only I note that as I get older it’s increasingly common that people I know are buying houses, progressing careers or having children. I’m quitting my job, heading off to the beach and messing about swimming, biking and running for the next year.

That’s me 3 years ago in what was roughly my first serious race, well first I can find a picture from. The 2005 Taunton marathon, it was my second and I completed my goal of a sub 3:00 marathon with a 2:50:04. Good enough for third place, a little plaque, £40 W H Smiths vouchers and the chance to meet Miss Taunton.

This post is inspired by something one of my fellow Epic Campers has just put up on their website. Steven won the EC pink jersey in Italy and keeps an interesting (because sometimes it’s hard to believe just how much he trains) blog of his training. Anyway, he’s just put up an athletic timeline which I thought was a cool idea. Cool enough that I should do my own for my website, however I’m not going to put in the effort he has right now, so a rough post on my history is all you’ll get.

There is possibly one advantage to having been lazy when young - you can quite quickly sum up your early years. 1976-2000, the first 24 years of my life amounted to next to no athletic achievements. I did learn to swim not really swim, but enough to ensure I was at less risk of drowning. I did run whilst at Secondary school, but largely because with only one teacher to monitor you over the local roads there was plenty of opportunity to walk. I did once run the whole 2.5 times round the school when one of the better teachers decided to spend time with us slackers and get us moving. I have run round my old school many times since and the idea I struggled to get round seems absurd now! Other than this I was not particularly good at Tae Kwon Do for a couple of years, really a result of not doing anymore than the minimum of training and lacking the flexibility. I did nothing during my university years.

2001-2003 the free gym membership years. I can’t recall the exact catalyst, though the fact the membership was a free perk with my job helped. I followed a training routine given to me at the gym and I didn’t eat that much. I easily get obsessed with things so I was pretty dedicated attendee. Net result was I got skinny and I got reasonably fit. At some point in that time I started running and that got me training outside a little. I was pretty happy with that having been neither thin nor fit for most of my life.

So then it was suggested to me that I should have a go at a half-marathon. 2004-2005 are the start of the athletic years. I could have uploaded a picture from that first half-marathon, but it’s too embarrassing. Being obsessive by nature I moved from doing a half-marathon to the goal of completing a marathon and during training transformed in to breaking 3 hours. So Taunton in 2005 I managed that in my second marathon and then I started training for tris. Towards the end of the year it seemed like a smart idea to do a half-ironman in addition to the Olympic distance that was planned. I did ok in the UK Ironman 70.3 (as it had then become branded), well enough to get a slot for the World Champs in Clearwater.

2006-now and it’s just more training and more racing. Roughly I’ve gone from casual gym membership to full time training in a period of 4 years. It certainly wasn’t the plan when I started and I never imagined I’d get to where I am now. Obsession definitely helps, what I’ve managed so far has simply come down to training day after day. Looking forward I have plans now, but it’s still hard to see where I can get in the next year or two.

There we are, I’m now 32 and about to become a full time athlete off the back of 4 years of relatively focussed training. I’ve also managed a reasonably long post despite nothing much happening this week other than a fairly decent amount of training.

Whole week since I last posted, time to recover and think about what came out of Epic Camp. I’ve done a bit of both of those, but I’ve still a way to go I think. It’s amazing to look back on the camp and see how much I can train in the right environment, it’s also amazing to see how much it takes to then come back from that.

It was a shock to the system to return to the real world after camp. Eight heavily structured days of training with no distractions and then back into an office for my last 6 weeks of work. One lesson learnt from this - I can’t wait to switch to full time training. The next lesson I’ve learnt since Epic camp is without a schedule I slip into bad old habits… Watching more TV, wasting time on the internet, later nights than I intended and not enough sleep. Recovery could have gone better than it has and largely that’s down to me. I’m sleeping heavily once I go to bed, but when I wake I could have used a few hours more. Not the smartest of choices.

Following camp I took 2 days completely off, absolutely nothing other than the commute to work. The following 2 days I swam a little and threw in a short run at a nice easy pace. I wasn’t 100% sure about running as there’s more injury potential there, at the same time I couldn’t face cycling yet. The run felt ok, and I followed it up the next day with more running, short and easy in the morning and then again to and from Masters in the evening. Another lesson from Epic camp was I could and should run more, and I need more variety in my run pacing. Not added intensity, but simply I rarely run really easy, instead I run closer to my ironman marathon pace all the time. Masters was probably the first introduction to any kind of intensity in training, but fortunately with people away competing the sets weren’t too hard.

Saturday and I swam again first thing as there’s a new open water venue very local to me and without the off putting 6am start. Good to get some open water practice in at the same time I didn’t feel that great in the water. I’d aimed for an easy swim but ended up pacing with the friend I’d gone with. I’m putting the general poor feeling in the water down to recovery from Epic. Another lesson from Epic was swimming a lot benefitted me, somewhere around 15k into the weeks swim I suddenly felt a lot better in the water. Things started to click and that’s been missing from my swim this year - the travel and training camps have made my training more sporadic and lowered the volume.

Sunday I finally got out on the bike after an abortive attempt to ride on Saturday (motivation and life got in the way). It was an odd ride, I didn’t feel great, at the same time I didn’t feel weak. Strong and gusty winds meant that you could go from easily spinning to grinding gears in seconds which wasn’t ideal. Originally I planned for somewhere around 4 hours, but pulled the plug just after 3. The down side of a powermeter on the bike is that sometimes it’s hard to let go of the numbers and take it easy.

Training guilt pushed me into an hours run at the end of the day, could have been a big mistake, fortunately it wasn’t. I tried out the latest fashion accessory in the form of compression socks. I encounter increasing numbers of people using them so it was time to give them a try. Based on a sample of 1 run I’m a convert, though very self-concious running in public in them. Still only one car full of teenage girls felt the need to comment on my dress sense and I didn’t catch what they said over my iPod.

So this week I’m back into training, the final few days before I taper. Things didn’t start well when I turned up to my gym and again they’d not got any towels in. Back again at lunch time when they do have towels and unfortunately a whole lane given over to Aquarobics. All is going well till I start on a kick set and get told off for splashing the aquarobics women. I struggled a bit to come up with something constructive to do until the pool was too crowded and it was time to admit defeat. At least with some nice weather I could go out on the bike for a solid 2 hour tempo ride. Surprising really, my legs hadn’t felt great in the day, but once out there the effort came easily. Was a nice confidence boost having felt a bit off form during recovery week.

Hadn’t entirely intended such a training focussed post and I’m not going to bother to cover any of the usual tangents. It was a quiet week for blog material after a week spent doing nothing but train it was a week spent mostly thinking about my training and plans. No concrete changes, but I may alter a few things in the 12-18 month plan.

Back home, unpacked with the exception of the bike which I’ve yet to muster the energy to assemble. I’ve put a long, more detailed post on Epic Camp up on the Team blog. I’m not going to repeat myself here, so you’ll have to go over there to see the details.

That’s me doing the final hill run of the camp driven on by the adrenaline of realising your watch is wrong and you’re running late. That’ll be one of many memories of the camp, my goal of completing all the workouts nearly stopped by a dodgy watch. My recommendation to Polar would be to stop the watch changing time zone if you hold down a button for 2 seconds. I can do that by accident riding the bike.

After a week clocking up over 50 hours of training I’m pretty tired so this won’t be a long post. I’m returning to reality, finding out what happened in the world outside of swim/bike/run. It’s a bit of an anti-climax to come back and return to work, but I remind myself there’s only 6 weeks to go and I’m a full time athlete. I’ve spent the past week following a daily schedule of swim training, running and biking, all day, every day. It was almost odd to get up this morning and not have to go out for a 50 minute run or a 3k swim.

The next week is all about recovery, letting my body take on board the effect of so much time training and shift the cold that’s plagued the last week. Then a final bit of training before I taper down for Switzerland. Having worked hard under such levels of fatigued and held my own I’m feeling more confident about my prospects. Hopefully this will all translate into a new PB and maybe that Hawaii Slot.

Fourth post without a photo, too tired to try and find something relevant, may have photos from the camp later. First chance I’ve had to spend the time to write a post, been either training, eating or sleeping. The 4th day of Epic Camp is over and compared to the last 2 days it was relatively easy, it’s all relative of course. I came in with the conservative plan to avoid tacking on and go for completing all the basic workouts and so far so good. Things have been made a little tougher as I’ve brought a cold into the camp and it just won’t shift. Tough to recover when you’re spending about 8 hours of the day training.

It’s an easy day tomorrow, a minimum 60k on the bike and just the 50 minute run and the 3k swim to do, obviously I could choose to do more. With this cold though I think it’s another day on the conservative plan and get the minimum in. Then things get tough again to finish off the Camp so right now my aim is to recover as well as I can tomorrow and be ready for those last days. Whether I’ll get to fit a tack on in there I can’t say, maybe I’ll sneak something in by the end. What I can say is I’ll not play the tactic of pushing hard off the front of the grupetto like I did on Day 3, no points in that and a lot more pain on the hills.

That’s it for now, I’m struggling here and partly that’s because I’m listening to myself on the Epic Camp podcast (episode 113). But I’m 4 days in and something like 29 hours of training done, brain functions aren’t at the best. It’s going to have been a big week by the end.

A quick post as my aim is to finish this in the last 15 minutes of Grey’s Anatomy. Fly out to Epic Italy tomorrow afternoon, not yet packed, but I’ve got the day tomorrow to finish things off. Bike is cleaned and serviced and looking and shifting the best it has in ages. I’m pretty well rested, the result of a bit more post race recovery than planned. A variety of things got in the way of any intention I had to train much this week, not least a cold. The net result is I’m a bit heavier than usual, but I don’t see that lasting the week ahead. My legs are still a bit stiff so more stretching to come, but otherwise I’m as ready as I can be.

Epic Camp has a points game with a pink jersey as the prize this year. There’s points for the minimum training each day essentially a 3k swim, 50 minutes of running and the bike ride. Then there’s bonuses for extra distance or certain types of training, along with a bonus for doing all the minimum training all week. My goal - do all the minimum and get that bonus. If I happen to feel good I may tack on a bit extra at some point just to see if I can throw in an extra point. I’ll also be going for the 1K band swim having been persuaded I should be able to do it I’ve done a test run and it’s ugly, but do-able.

So there we are, apparently my blog is long and I go off on tangents, but today, none of that. Though I did have some thoughts on a completely random tangent on how I don’t get why they bother trying to make Incredible Hulk movies… But I’ve not thought it through and I’ve not read enough of the original comics to really comment well (I’ve read quite a few, but ages ago and I forget). So instead I’m going to throw in a tangent on why the JSA is much better than the JLA when I’m back from camp. I’ll be blogging on the Epic blog if I can summon the energy, but that’ll just be limited to training.

That’s what it felt like this morning and having been teetotal for over 9 years now it’s not something I’m used to. Combination of soreness from the race and allowing myself to get a bit dehydrated later in the day. A simple mistake and I should know better…

Provisional results are up for Beaulieu and put me in 7th place in the end. I’m quite happy with that, room for improvement of course, but at the same time not the best I’ve felt during a race. Can’t complain and I’m now dedicating this week to recovery and stretching to get ready for the trip to Italy and Epic Camp. Many months back wen I first thought about doing Epic it proved a useful tool putting enough fear in me to really get me training. Overall I’m pleased with how training has gone so far this year, volume has been up and I don’t feel quality has suffered too much.

I have to admit at times to being motivated by numbers - logging as many hours or kilometres of training as I can. It makes it hard to properly take a rest week when a part of me wants bigger numbers in my training diary. But I need to be fit and ready for Epic so the smart thing is to step back like last week. Reading the blogs from previous camps if I’m worried about lower numbers I think the camp will compensate. Incidentally a rough calculation makes it 380+ hours training so far this year, not that that’s too important.

Don’t normally try to blog two days in a row, I find two times a week tough enough anyway. However with the camp coming up, links to athlete blogs will get put on the site and I didn’t want that happening when the first thing anyone would read would be comments about post race soreness and badly smelling bike shoes (incidentally I got a hit from someone doing a Google search for ‘race pee’, and with this comment I hope to improve my ranking for that term)! You read some people’s blogs and mine seems far too casual and concerned with the irrelevant!

I have long abandoned hope of regaining anything from my original Blogger hosted blog. I accept that to Blogger the contents of my life seem like spam. It’s a harsh judgement, but I can live with it. My error was probably linking to a lot of different things that interested me. The spambot probably thought my ramblings combined with a lot of links was simply a cunning disguise to sell Viagra or whatever the internet drugs of choice are now. In my defence I started working with web pages, hand building HTML pages on vt100 terminals and back then linking to other things was really exciting. The first time I got access to the internet from a GUI and could put images on my page, now that was really, really exciting! These days it seems the fashion is to link less unless you have fake jewellery from Taiwan to flog.

I’m rambling on the irrelevant again and it’s time to do some stretching and get some life back in my legs. Otherwise I’m pretty prepared for the camp I think, packing list made, know the few things I still need to get hold of, bike being serviced. All gets packed up on Thursday ready to fly out Friday. Bike is booked onto flight with BA and as usual then reconfirmed when somehow they miss the details on size and weight I gave them the first time. No messing about this time.

May be premature as I’m not sure on my times or my final position (6th across the line, but with 2 later waves there might have been someone who snuck ahead). Overall though the race was good, it’s left me walking like a cowboy and choosing my seats carefully, I’ve run out of Bodyglide and my bike shoes stink of pee again.

From the top, I was relatively well planned the day before and very pleased to get off to the event on time. Of course I later realised to achieve this I’d neglected to think about food for the night/breakfast. Tescos saved me from living off Powerbar, though I would say my food choices were ok, but may not have been ideal for the race. I didn’t follow a sensible early switch to low fibre foods on Saturday. I slept well, though having to get up at 4:15 in the morning is no fun at all.

My swim plan was basically position self near front, go off hard with others, get a good draft. I think it worked fairly well, I worked with a good group most of the way round and I don’t think there were masses ahead of me. There were jellyfish as promised which were a little weird as you could feel them in your hands. We were assured they couldn’t sting though something hit my forehead and I was paranoid I’d come out the water with a big red sting mark in the middle of it. My transition to the bike was pretty reasonable, certainly not the comical effort I demonstrated in France.

General race advice is not to try anything new on race day. For the bike I opted to try 2 new things, the Zoot tri kit hadn’t been ridden before and I was trying some new insoles in my shoes. Zoot suit passes fine at this point, insoles may have issues for the right foot, though worked well for the left. Bike didn’t go quite as I hoped to be honest, I wasn’t slow but for the first hour my legs felt very tense and I could feel knots in my quads. I must finally accept that I can’t get away with saving money by skipping massages - this was the remnants of the big training week and 5 days hadn’t properly shifted it. 1 guy overtook me on the bike I then used him to keep pace (well out of his draft zone, a good 20m back) and helped pull myself through tough times. Legs started to fell good at about 2 hours, but I didn’t try to push it any further and kept pace behind the guy.

Remarkably I overtook him in T2, I’m not used to that happening. The run went well for me it was at most gently rolling and if I had one complaint it was the first lap was quite lonely. There were some stomach issues to deal with which I trace back to the previous day’s diet. Otherwise a solid run, I felt comfortable and I’m quite pleased with my run form at the moment. Some adjustments I’ve been working on seem to be clicking in place when I race.

In summary - a solid race, despite my week long fretting about my fitness. Little concerning that my legs weren’t in better shape than that, I’d have expected to have recovered by the race even with such a significant training load. Lesson from that is clearly some heavy massage is needed after weeks like that, something to line up post Epic. Otherwise things look good, my issue is less about fitness than about being recovered and prepared when it comes to racing. Long taper for Switzerland and I’ll not mess about with that. Bike is now in for a service so should be in good shape for the Italian mountains