Trains, Travels

Last day at work. That’s it, from tomorrow onwards there’s no more coming into this office, sitting at this desk and typing on this computer. I’ll not have to catch crowded trains every morning and evening and stand the whole way here and back. No more sitting in meetings staring out the window and wondering what I’ll have for lunch. Cheaper lunches too as I’ll not be eating out quite so much. No more gym with the inability to keep a stock of towels. I’ll still be getting up early so I can get my training done and have enough time to do yet more training. I’ll still have to go to bed early to get enough sleep. I won’t have to face squeezing in a session at the end of the day after a long train ride and without having eaten though.

I’ve not said much about my work in this blog, it wasn’t really my aim or that relevant. Having interviewed a number of people over the last few years I’m well aware how careful you should be when it comes to what you put on the internet. At best you’re potentially arming your future colleagues with potential jokes and at worse you’ll not even get called to interview. My initial reluctance to blog was 2/3rds belief that generally most blogs aren’t that interesting and 1/3rd that potentially they’re an embarrassment to you at some point along the line. Going to another country and spending your life training for endurance sports is different enough that I was persuaded that there would be one or two friends who might be interested to read about it. As for the other third, with the exception of admitting to bizarre concerns about footwear I’ll just try to be careful about what I write.

The details of my work are pretty boring, it’s hard to make computer programming exciting. Whilst web development is something I’ve been good at, it’s not something I’m going to miss. To be honest I’ll not be entirely leaving it behind, one advantage of my line of work is it lends itself to contracting and there’s always the odd piece of web development that’s needed. I’m even aiming to use some of the free time between training to do a little bit of ‘career development’ read up on a few areas and skills, perhaps even some certification in them. As I haven’t really decided what happens once I’m back it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. Wordpress interests me and if I can think of a useful module or widget for this site I’ll have a go at building that. It’s goodbye to the office and regular(-ish) hours, not computing.

I need to spend the rest of my working day busily talking to people I’ll not be seeing so much any more. Then I’m a free man! I’ll post tomorrow on the joys of being a full-time athlete and the upcoming trip to the Alps.

One a day? Whose stupid idea was a post a day this week? I don’t have the time for a proper post today so instead a quick one about shoes…

I don’t know why, but over the past 2 years I seem to have developed a sports shoe fetish… Not in a weird and twisted behind closed doors way. I just find as soon as I’ve got new shoes I find another style I want. It’s not a performance thing, purely aesthetic. And is it wrong that if money were no object I think I’d have different style shoes for different moods?

So my latest pair of bike shoes are the Adidas Adistar Pros. They’re very white which is great (as long as I keep them clean) given my irrational love of white kit. Fortunately as well as looking great they’re incredibly light and very stiff in the sole. Riding in them has been a pleasure so far, my previous shoes the Specialized S-Works were great, but I feel much more connected to the pedal with the Adidas pair. I’ve been racing in a really nice bright red pair of Adidas tri shoes for the bike too, the same lightweight sole, but a quicker entry and fastening system. Again I used Specialized tri shoes before Adidas and they just lacked the feeling of directness and connection to the bike.

On the run I use Saucony, having switched from Asics. I’m currently racing in the Saucony Type As which have worked pretty well for me and more importantly are a nice bright red. That said the Saucony Fastwitch shoes are even nicer, they just feel so fast and light, but should be used with caution for training. The latest version comes in a bright orange, which isn’t bad, but I’d prefer red. I’m training in Saucony Omni 6s at the moment which seem to work well for me (they look dull though), so far no injuries when I’ve ramped up the volume.

I apologise for the pointless nature of this post. It only goes to show I’m a little vain in my race kit choices. In the end however much I like the look of kit if it doesn’t work for me I won’t use it. It took a while to adjust position and get used to Adidas bike shoes coming from Specialized. The latter is a bit more comfort focussed and I had to slightly adjust the bike position because of the thinner sole on the Adidas shoes, it took a while and a bit of discomfort to work that one out though. Tomorrow I will come up with something more interesting.

Three days to go… With my workload being, well pretty much non-existent, I thought I’d try a post a day till the end of the week. It’ll make up for the fact that whilst I’m off in the Alps I’ll not be posting at all.

Not written much specifically about training recently, partly because it’s fairly unstructured right now. Post-Ironman recovery has been quick and I pulled a 14 hour training week as a gentle return to training. Plenty of running in that, mostly short, a couple of double run days too. A bit of swimming that wasn’t at my best to be honest, but what with having 2 weeks off all sports coming up I’m not worrying too much about that right now. Some quite reassuring cycling where I’m putting out the same quality of workout I was 2 or 3 weeks before Switzerland. So generally I’m happy with how things are going for this period, my aim isn’t to build anything right now, just to maintain fitness up to my trip and worry about build when I come back.

Over the past 6 or 7 months I’ve structured my training largely around the principle of a basic week. Sticking to an idea of ensuring as much consistency as possible and not getting too hooked up on issues like periodisation. I do periodise with some specific focussed weeks and an increase of volume from the start of the year. Along with the introduction of a few key tough workouts as I approach the Ironman. It’s worked pretty well for me I think, I may not have had the race I wanted, but I believe I have a better fitness than last year. We’ll see how Western Australia goes before I start making any serious adjustments to the way I train.

The structure of my basic week has always been fairly flexible, I focus on a set of key workouts I want to get in each week and the exact days may vary a little. Generally this has proven to be the best way to deal with fitting training around work and a commute. Each week I’ll look to fit in a long run, long ride, masters swimming, a small amount of hill or interval work amongst other sessions. Work means that a large portion of that training happens over the weekend, the long rides being the obvious ones. What I’ve tended to monitor throughout the year is weekly hours starting from light weeks in January to heavy ones come May/June. To a lesser extent I track the nature of the key workouts and shift focus on what I’m doing.

I’m not an expert on training methodologies, though I’d say I’m well read in the area. I go in part on what I’ve experienced and in part on what I feel most ’suits’ me. The risk with the latter is that what I feel suits me may not be what’s going to deliver the best results. If I assess the year so far I’d say that whilst I’ve done well to develop the volume of training I can do and have improved fitness there’s a few areas I can work on.

Swim training has been very inconsistent for me this year, partly caused by travel breaking up attendance of masters sessions. The quality of facilities for serious training outside of masters is an issue, it’s hard to get to good pools, but aside from this my own ability to motivate myself on sessions away from the squad is a weakness. Run and bike frequency has generally been good, I would like to increase the time spent running which has been difficult to achieve with work. My weakness here is a mix of motivation meaning at times I cruise workouts without too much focus and also poor recovery. I’ve gone into a few workouts with fatigue that stopped me completing the initial goal and forced me to have an easier session. Whilst standing on a train for a couple of hours a day doesn’t help, factors like sleep and nutrition were entirely in my control.

Now that commuting and working are being removed from the equation and the issue of facilities should be eliminated fully once I’m in Oz (if I’m complaining about the training facilities there, I’m never going to be happy) it’s up to me to address my internal limiters. I’ve scrapped my old basic week and started to plan the new one. It’s built around 8 hours sleep a night, good nutrition, and all the time I need to complete a workout. It relies on me having built up the fitness and endurance to start tolerating regular weeks hitting the 30 hour mark with some going up towards 40. It’s still flexible so if I need more rest or to change focus I can shift timing, volume or intensities about.

I started with the key workouts I felt would make up my training.

Swim

1. Squad training – ideally swimming with a club, at the least a structured session covering all strokes.
2. Open Water – with a wetsuit as much as possible, the objective is to focus on endurance and technique in a wetsuit.
3. Endurance – pool or more open water with the focus on distance or maintaining a pace for greater distance.

Bike

1. Endurance – the long ride looking for 4 hours through to 7 hours. I like to do some over-distance as it gives you confidence when it comes to just 180K
2. Medium endurance – I need a better name for this, rides in the 3 to 5 hour range, sometimes incorporating particular focusses like hill work. Volume has helped a lot with my cycling, so I’ll stick to it.
3. Hill/Interval work – shorter sessions with a focus on some intensity. I’m considering looking into crits and road racing to work on this.

Run

1. Long run – 2 to 2.5 hours, continue to develop my run endurance.
2. Medium run – some runs around the 60 to 90 minute mark to help work on volume.
3. Tempo/Track runs – intervals and harder work to develop my ability to perform at faster paces. An area that’s been absent from my training so far this year.

Along with those I’ll always have the option of recovery and easy sessions where suitable. Easy brick runs off the bike to help boost run volume for example. My aim will be to ensure I get a good set of quality key workouts in, along with easy to steady sessions to develop overall fitness. I need to be recovered and prepared to hit the goals for each key workout I do which may require me to adjust other sessions to achieve that.

I have built a rough weekly schedule around these workouts, but I’ll save it for another time as this post is already very long.

Four more days of an office job, though at this point it’s hard to describe those 4 days as work. Then it’s the life of a full time athlete! I want to stress though that this isn’t a vacation. In fact when I get the impression that people think it’s a long holiday it just slightly annoys me.

I’ll admit it has a lot in common with a vacation. I’m going away somewhere with a nicer climate, there are beaches there, I’ll probably spend sometime on them too and will even get a tan. OK, I’ll not have an income to speak of, nor any serious obligations to others to worry about. If I want to I can go out to a coffee shop in the middle of the morning and spend a few hours drinking, eating cheesecake (in moderation of course) and reading the paper. I’ll likely do the grocery shopping at the same time as pensioners, housewives and the unemployed… And I will be travelling about quite a bit too.

But really, it’s not a vacation. Vacations don’t have weekly training schedules to be planned. Most people have no need to measure their progress throughout the course of their holidays. Generally the metric of a success for a holiday is simply, did you have a nice time? Though I can see an argument for that being a better success metric than the many that we normally apply, but generally you don’t ask whether you had a nice time in the office. I’m almost trapping myself here, because I want to be able to look back on my year and say I had a nice time (hopefully something a bit stronger than that).

It’s not a vacation because vacations don’t have goals and objectives. It’s not truly working either because my schedule and free time is my own. It’s some halfway point which probably has a name, but I don’t know it. I certainly don’t like the term ‘career break’ as it makes me think of self-righteous middle-class people rushing off to the middle of nowhere to do something worthy. Which has its place and is a positive thing, but in my mind is linked in with the image of vacant trustafarians getting excited because they spent 5 days building a hut out of twigs.

On the other hand I can’t help, but enjoy the jealousy inducing power of mentioning I’m taking a year out from work. It somehow comes up in conversation quite quickly, in my defence because people often ask me what I do. Generally the answer to that question works better with other athletes, there’s an appreciation of the motivation and what’s actually involved. With those who don’t do a sport it’s harder to explain, sometimes to the point of not bothering. Visiting a financial advisor at my bank recently was a bizarre experience. I just wanted to make sure my money was in the right accounts for my plans, instead I spent half an hour talking about going to Australia before he noted down the 2 things he thought I should do with my money. I didn’t mind that so much, except for the assumption that the trip simply involved drinking on the beach for 365 days.

To contrast with that I tried out another newly opened local lake (they all seem to be coming at once) at the weekend. Seems like a nice set-up and starting out along the right lines. Chatting with the guys behind it there was that hint of envy that I’ve got the opportunity to do this, but they got it entirely. A good 15 minutes was spent discussing how restricting office work and commuting is and how little time it leaves you to get on with your life. They didn’t see it as a vacation, it’s just ordering your life around what’s important to you and what you enjoy. I’m fortunate to be in a position to do this now without having any real burden or significant cost associated with the change. If anything makes this seem like a vacation it’s that circumstances mean I’ve had to work less to achieve this than I would have expected.

At the start of the year I spent the first month or two training and being very controlled about my diet. The result was I dropped below my previous race weight. As the months went on and with big training camps the amount I was eating justifiably increased. The problem comes when you have easier weeks, recovery and tapers and you don’t adapt your diet enough. So this post is at least partly about my favourite topic and not about the sub-mediocre Simon Pegg comedy I was glad I didn’t pay to see.

Standing on the gym scales this week confirmed my suspicion that it was time to revisit my diet and cut back a little. So now I’m avoiding bread as much as possible, no more cheese and low fat options as much as I can. Plenty of fruit and veg, no limits on that, but generally a lower volume of food. The details are something I’ve not always been good at in my training, slacking off on these isn’t an option any more. I’m not setting or stating a particular weight goal, I need to lose a couple of kilos at least. It’s more important to adapt to a sustainable, lower fat diet that can deliver my nutritional needs. Cutting calories is easy when you’re starting back into training with low intensity and volume.

To an extent it’s true that when you’re training all out you can pretty much eat what you like. Calorific demands go way up as does the micro nutritional needs. On Epic Camp I ate as much as I could, more concerned about lacking the energy to keep training than the potential effects on my waistline. Despite the huge amount of energy I expended each day I did gain weight, I wonder in part if this wasn’t to do with the way some of those calories were spread. I tended to binge at meals and eat a minimum throughout the day, better even snacking (just like the dieticians recommend) might reduce the actual amount I ate whilst maintaining more even energy levels. Towards the end of the camp as I suffered more I started to think about the link between energy levels and mood and wonder if I should be eating more. It’s tough to get enough calories when you’re hanging on to the back of the group though!

A period of lighter training is the ideal time for me to sort this out. With the lower calorific demands there’s less impact to adjusting the diet, but I’m getting some sense of what is and isn’t going to work. What I then have to do is take the good practices forward into my heavier training periods. No more junk calories to meet my daily needs. I’ll allow the occasional treat, at the very least I can’t entirely go without an occasional slice of my favourite New York Baked Cheesecake. Last year in Oz this almost became a daily habit and perhaps that was taking things too far!

Having mentioned waistlines I’ll leave the topic by stressing it’s not that I’m really fat. By everyday standards I’m in a perfectly healthy weight range, with the way things are going I’m probably considered thin. From the perspective of racing to my best I am not going into my races at my ideal weight and compared to when I was just running I’m a heavyweight! Admittedly a good portion of that is the muscle required to swim and bike to a reasonable standard so I can’t look at my running days as a guide. It’s all about the body composition for racing and training at my best, whatever weight that might mean.

Also relating to the title I’m back to regular training, without too much structure. I’m sticking to an easy run everyday this week, nothing too far just 30 minutes or so. Then mixing in some swimming and biking with that again going by overall feel and not concerning myself with effort level too much. I’ll carry this into next week, but increase the duration a little. Then I’ll have a long ride a week Friday to celebrate my first day as a full time athlete. Yep, just one more week to go now.

Can’t say for certain, but it feels a little bit like I’ve peaked this weekend rather than last. Perhaps it’s just the advantage of several days rest and recovery. My muscles are still sore and hold me back from doing to much right now, but at the same time the rest of me feels fired up. If it weren’t for the race last week I’d be ready to go this weekend. So perhaps I got something wrong there and still had too much fatigue in my system come race day or maybe I’m just better rested right now.

On the positive side of things motivation is here in a way it’s not normally been post-race. I’m ready to train and race again when my body will let me. I feel I’ve recovered mentally and physically from this race far more quickly than my previous two. It’s all good, I’ll start back on a training regime of easy swim, bike and run for the next couple of weeks. I’m also watching what I eat and leaning myself out a bit I was definitely leaner earlier in the season.

Despite a race I’m not too happy with I’m entered into Ironman Western Australia and will be going after the 9:30 goal again. Right now, with the bonus motivation I’m fairly positive I can be ready to do that come December. Going over the figures from Switzerland and comparing them with Austria for both the bike and run my relative position in the field has improved, times may be lower, but I was further up the field than others. What does that mean? Well if I assume that for any of the European fields the range of athletes is effectively the same, so you’ve roughly the same distribution of really fast guys through to pretty slow guys then I’ve moved up that curve. If the assumption is reasonable then that supports the view that I have improved and faced a tougher race. The format that Switzerland puts its results in makes it a bit slow to actually compare athlete distributions so I’ve not gone that far. True or false I’ll cling to the hope that I faced a tougher challenge.

Anyway it’s time to put the race behind me and get on with things, I didn’t reach my goals this time, but feel strangely relieved by this. I was getting far to stressed by things lately and as someone who hates stress it wasn’t ideal. Having got past the race the pressure is gone and I can get on with things. I’ve dealt with the failure and it’s really not that bad.

Training has dominated the blog over the past few weeks, or if not specifically that, thoughts about it and my race. With a week of recovery I haven’t done much training and I’ve gone over my plans so much lately they’re even going to bore me. The downside is that outside of the time training my life actually is quite boring right now! I can tell you I’ve done some pretty good crosswords lately and I’ve also watched some pretty trashy TV.

Stuck in a Swiss hotel resting up for a race left me with little to watch but MTV dating shows that weren’t dubbed into German. I’m pretty bemused by the whole thing, shows involving going on dates with people’s mums, having a friend use a lie detector on potential dates, speed dating with 4 back-up dates if you’re not happy… Bizarrest of all some reality show involving a rock star auditioning girls to be his girlfriend at the point I saw their parents had been brought along. Just plain strange.

I now have just 9 more working days to go and I am free for a life as a international playboy full time athlete. On the day I leave I will have worked for the same company (under varying names and ownership) for 9 years and 2 months. It’ll be quite a change not to be going in and sitting in the office anymore. I hope my fear of wasting my time will quickly get me up to speed with some structure and plans.

So to answer the question from last week, I can’t yet break 9:30 for an Ironman. To answer a second question, writing your aim on your handlebars doesn’t help much, but it stays till it happens. Of course the danger of a time based goal is it makes no allowance for course or conditions. Weather in Zurich on Sunday was far from ideal, rain all morning making for a cold and wet bike. Can’t blame it all on that thought things didn’t go to plan pretty much from the start.

Swim
The plan was to place myself up front and get into a fast group. The reality was I was too far back when we started to go and got stuck amongst the bulk of swimmers. My pace was entirely dictated by those around me and things only started to thin out on the second lap. So straight off I was a couple of minutes off the plan, not really significant in itself, but not a great start.

Lake Zurich is great to swim in, really nice clear water and quite warm. In fact with conditions on the day it felt warmer during the swim than on the bike. The swim course was altered this year to include a run over a small island. The set-up did nothing to eliminate the crowding at the turn around, I think the only purpose it serves is preventing any cheating and doing only 1 lap. Given the way cheating was dealt with later, I don’t see the point in worrying about that.

Bike
The bike was wet. I had to wear a rain jacket, there was no chance of getting away with just your tri kit. The course itself was new for the year with 2 laps including some of the climbs from the previous course, but extending the flat section on the lake. I started out a little hard really, but reigned things back quickly, I was annoyed that my bike computer apparently wasn’t picking up speed. Actually it just decided to show calories instead of speed and on the second lap I discovered I could switch to view my pace.

I never felt entirely comfortable on the bike. Throughout the week leading up to the race I had a lot of tightness in my left leg and a stiff ankle. From early on I felt some discomfort in my ITB and down the outside of my lower leg. The flats were OK, but the climbs weren’t going too well for me. By the second lap this seemed to clear up and I felt my pace on the hills improved. Frustratingly on both laps I managed to drop my chain and lose a good minute each time sorting that out.

Other than the continuous downpour the other thing I didn’t like about the bike was the sheer amount of drafting going on. Packs formed and worked together constantly throughout the race. I was left to either slow down unable to pass or work hard to go off the front only to be swallowed back up. Marshals were remarkably ineffective, blowing a whistle at the packs whilst riding alongside and not issuing a single penalty that I saw.

My overall feeling was that these packs made pacing difficult for me I either had to push more than I wanted, or hold back to avoid being part of the bunch. I will admit that in the last 15k I started to push much harder and was driven on trying to drop a group of 5 riding on my wheel. I can’t help feeling a better swim might have put me ahead of many of these riders and made it less of an issue. Though I also suspect I need to improve my bike some more yet so I am more comfortably travelling faster than the average cyclist.

By the way, helpful reminders on gel bottles do work though.

Run
The slower swim and bike left it all up to the run if I wanted that sub-9:30 and I’d not left myself much room for manoeuvring. I set out and felt pretty good, that first kilometre was a classic case of going too fast so I eased up and dropped my heart rate. Lap 1 was on plan for sub-9:30 and lap 2 was a little bit slower, but still fine. Then things started to go wrong on lap 3 as I clocked in a few slow kilometres and struggled with a dip in energy.

I utilised faster runners to help pick up my pace and keep me going, but there was a limit to what I could do. Watching my pace this closely worked well for keeping my mind in the race and I never slowed due to losing focus. Clearly I was paying for going too hard early on though and better pace control throughout the run would have helped. The final lap I tried to push hard and come the last 5km I latched onto another athlete with 4 armbands and picked up the pace. 2km out and I decided it was time to really push, that last mile was back below 4:15min/km.

Overall
The race didn’t go to my rough plan. On the day I wasn’t in a state to deliver the sub-9:30 I was hoping for and there were external factors that added to the difficulty. I can’t really say how much, if anything, they really contributed, I suspect I’d not have broken 9:30 in perfect sunshine either. I still believe that it’s possible to do that time right now and have to admit my preparation in the last few weeks of the race wasn’t perfect.

Not everything about the race is bad. It was a tough day, not just the distance, but the conditions were certainly some of the worst I’d raced in. I guess all that training in the rain earlier in the year was worth it! I placed 93rd overall and 24th in my age group, both higher placings than in Austria last year. You can’t compare the two races directly, my feeling was that Switzerland was a tougher day than Austria the previous year. Time dulls the pain of these things, but if I’m right then I’ll take home that I am in better shape overall even if on the day I needed to be I wasn’t at my best.

Hawaii was out of the question with only 9 slots in my age group and a minimal amount of roll down I was easily 10 places too far back and a good 12 minutes too slow. Obviously a little disappointing, but to be honest I’m just motivated to get back to work on this. I’ll be switching to my plan to race Western Australia for a second time. There are fewer slots there not making it the ideal place to qualify, but last year I was 12th in my age and if I really am fitter I should be able to improve on this with a well executed race. I’ll also have the advantage of familiarity with the race and just that minor factor that in a bit over 2 weeks I’ll be a full time athlete. I’l be taking another stab at sub-9:30 in December (conditions allowing of course)

What do I think I need to work on? Everything. There’s plenty of room for improvement and once work is out the way no excuses not to try. Specifics – I want to work on the swim and be able to get out of the water faster. I see increased volume and greater focus on endurance particularly in a wetsuit. On the bike I need to plug away at improving the power I can sustain for an Ironman event. If training camps have taught me anything I need to be training with stronger riders more. For the run I will keep working on endurance, but also more focussed pacing efforts once I’m closer to my races. I need to have my paces drilled into me so they’re more instinctive and to stop me going out too hard whilst I’m still feeling good. It’s all in my hands now.

Recovery is going well I feel much better than I have done with previous races. I plan to go to the pool tomorrow and lazily swim for a while just to get things moving. Very easy training over next couple of weeks then I’m off mountaineering so I’ll not sit on a bike or get in a pool for a couple of weeks. Two weeks after that I’ll be in Almere for the ITU World Long Course race. I have no idea about what time I’ll do there, but I hope to put a better race together than I did on Sunday. Then it’s Oz and I know they’re desperate for more rain, but I’m not planning to bring it with me this time.

Not the sound you want to hear when you’re packing your bike for a race in 3 days time. That’s the noise that came from my stem/handlebars though and then as I remove one of the bolts there’s a thread of metal on it. The thread isn’t stripped, the bolt goes in and out fine still and can be tightened up. Still it’s worrying.

Fortunately my father knows much more about engineering than I do and I have some assurance that it’s not a complete disaster. I’m told that with materials like aluminium which aren’t ideal for forming threads it’s common to coat the threading with a different metal to form a better lock with the bolt. So what’s happened is this coating has come unstuck on one of the threads. The bolt will still work though there’s more risk I’ll strip threads if I over tighten it, but it should still be fine. I’ll need to replace the stem as it’s not a good thing to have a problem with. For the race – I’ll be very careful reassembling my bike and I’ll be making sure it’s firmly in place with my test ride. I’ll have a check at the expo to see if I can get some threadlock or similar to ensure things stay in place.

Perfect timing though, I fly out tomorrow in the middle of the day and bike check-in is on Saturday afternoon/evening. I’m not taking the laptop, the hotel I’m in does have wifi, but it’s far too pricey and I don’t want the temptation. So this is my last post pre-race, I’m back Tuesday, hopefully with a positive race report.

Race week just wouldn’t be race week without at least one anxiety dream and I had my first this morning. My recollection of it starts at some point into the run, for some reason I’d decided to stop and chat with the people at an aid station. I was quite relaxed about it all, enjoying the conversation and taking my time eating plenty of food. Things were good and then I checked my watch it was 8 hours 15 into the race! At this point I became aware I was about halfway through the run, clearly my sub-9:30 was out now, but I could at least get under 10 hours.

I set off running the next section of the race back to the turn-around point. This wasn’t too far off and also conveniently was my house, particularly handy as I decided a quick nap would be in order to run my best. So I pop in for a quick nap and stick to the plan of 15 minutes which oddly doesn’t massively impact on the time as it still seems to be 8:15 into the race. Rested I head out for the next lap and my legs feel good, except suddenly my run shoes are killing me. Every foot fall is crushing my toes and as a forefoot runner there’s not much I can do. I’ve no choice but to start walking some of the course, which surprisingly for Switzerland is some of the area I grew up in.

So now I’m walking, the clock is ticking and I realise that I made a mistake on the incredibly twisty run route meaning in the first half I did a section once when it should be twice. A part of me thinks if I cheat and let this slide I’ll still come in under 10 hours. Fortunately I’m more honest than that and have to admit that for this run to be honest I’ll need to do an extra lap of a section of the run course. Which means I’ve got to do more than a half-marathon in the remaining time and it looks like sub-10 might be out of the question… And then I wake up.

I’m generally pretty good at breaking down my dreams and working out the source of the events. What I’ll admit to for this dream is that clearly the run is my big concern in this Ironman, previously I’ve had anxiety dreams involving mechanicals on the bike, but entirely skipped that stage this time. Also I looked at the run course yesterday and at the time did think the route was a bit convoluted. 10 hours has become an important marker in my mind, I am more anxious about breaking that for the third time than whether I can break 9:30 this time. It’s a bit of an issue to deal with really as I’m at risk of being a bit more cautious to secure another sub-10 over sticking to a sub-9:30 strategy (assuming things don’t really go wrong).

The worst thing about tapering is you realise how much of your life is training. Suddenly I have a lot more time on my hands. Combine that with my restrictions on web browsing and inevitably I end up watching a lot more TV. Not quality programming either, unless ‘10 Years Younger’ is your idea of great TV. Fortunately it’s not all a brain drain as I’ve been hitting the crosswords again though I’m sure I’ve got worse at them. The sad conclusion though is that without training my life is filled with TV and word puzzles. It’s not surprising I’m also getting more sleep right now.

Seven days till Ironman Switzerland now, in fact all being well this time next week it’ll all be over. It’s also 16 days until I finish my job. And in 11 weeks time I’ll be on the Gold Coast.

Firstly I’m done with the whining now, it’s 7 days to go, there’s nothing more I can do. I still feel tired and my joints have stiffened up, but I’m putting this down to the typical taper effect. I checked my training diary from last year and sure enough I was seeing similar symptoms one week out. I was also doing less training than I planned too so not feeling my best I was happy to cut things back a little (OK, a lot). I’m not ashamed to say that today become a rest day, the weather was horrible and my motivation was low. I am ashamed to say I watched the Hollyoaks omnibus for the first time in a long time. I will be doing light training for the next 4 days before and after work, then Friday I’m travelling.

Am I suddenly confident? Well not really, but on the other hand I’m withdrawing the cash to pay for a Hawaii slot should I manage it. The worst that happens is I lose a bit of money on the exchange between the pound and the Swiss franc. The best that happens is I lose a lot of money paying for a slot and the accompanying trip involved. Either way more events should start accepting credit card, it’s bizarre to expect cash these days.

The reality is the exchange rate is a small price to pay besides the cost of the training, travel and equipment involved to get to this race. So monetary commitments aside I’d say I’m now appropriately nervous. This isn’t going to be an easy task by any means and I can’t say whether on the day I can execute the race I need. However assuming I don’t run foul of objective difficulties I should be able to do the swim in an hour and the aim for the bike is 5 hours which is within my reach. The real challenge is putting together the run I want after this. I’m looking to go below 3:10, my last 2 runs have been slower than I hoped, this time I want to hit closer to my marathon pace. A quick check tells me a 3 hour marathon is around 4:15 min/km and a 3:10 is about 4:30 min/km, I will be monitoring my pace a bit more closely this time round. All together and throwing in some hopefully reasonably rapid transitions and I have a little room for manoeuvring on my goal of going sub-9:30.

Back to my countdowns and my Oz plans are firming up a little as I’ve entered both the Noosa Tri and Ironman Oz. The rest of my race plans there now depend on that Hawaii slot. Looking further ahead I’m considering returning to the UK in the summer next year to race a few races in Europe, probably Roth and Ironman UK. I’m not sure how far in advance I’ll have to commit to that plan, but with most European races I won’t have too long to wait. Ideally I’ll return to the Oz summer after that to get in the World Long course event in Perth next year, but I may have to actually do some work for these plans to go ahead! Shocking.

I know I’ve repeated myself a little with this post, put it down to race nerves, there’s not much else on my mind.