Trains, Travels

I am officially, officially tapering! Really, honestly, truly. To prove it I’m doing absolutely nothing today. No time in the pool, no sitting on the bike (my arse is relieved about that one) and no putting on the runners. Just rest, even if my attempt at a lie-in was the usual failure.

Of course if you read my blog the other day you might be asking yourself wasn’t he already tapering and resting? Well sort of. I mean Wednesday I really wasn’t going so well and I took Thursday easy. Had a painful great massage and got my legs sorted out. Then Friday I was going pretty well which was good for a ride around Capel (pronounced like cape not cap as I’m often reminded), Donnybrook and Boyanup. Not only was I riding well we managed two coffee stops, admittedly only because stop number one was so disappointing.

Which brings me onto the Magic Slice once more. Sunday saw me duplicating that Wednesday ride and heading back to Margaret River with Steven. Fortunately the legs were willing to play despite a hard time trial effort on Saturday. I have to say it’s amazing the difference that makes to a ride. No counting down the kilometres, not even to the coffee break. Instead I enjoyed the scenery, the company and the sun.

Once in Margaret River I was in no doubt as to which coffee shop we were going to. The place was heaving on a Sunday morning. I heard it was a thirty minute wait for food from the kitchen. Always a good sign if somewhere is popular just a shame it meant you had to queue so long. This gave far too much time to debate whether to have a Magic Slice again, or maybe the cheesecake, the Chocaholic cake looked nice and so did the Carrot Cake.

After five minutes of waiting and debating I was at the front and it was decision time. I went for Carrot Cake. It was delicious with superb texture and flavour plus a decent portion too. Yet it wasn’t quite enough for a ride I’d called the Magic Slice Run. I persuaded Steven to go halves on a piece of Magic Slice thereby doubling my sugar intake for the week! It was as sweet as I remembered and I left the cafe in something of a sugary haze!

Should you find yourself down in South West Australia a trip to Margaret River is worth it. Just make sure you allow time for a stop at Sail Cafe. As you’ve seen I’m a big fan of their cakes! It has to be said the coffee is superb too. Go check Steven’s blog post for a picture of the coffee art. Clearly they train their Baristas well.

A final point on this subject. Often I harp on about the Paleo Diet and avoiding too many carbs. Yet here I am dedicating hundreds of words to a simple slice. The Paleo Diet for athletes advises on the use of carbohydrates during training. I simply choose to get mine from the cake stop halfway through a big ride! Also one and a half cakes is far more than normal! It’s my one treat outside the diet, surely you can allow me that?

Back on the more serious topic of tapering where does that leave mine? Last week ended up pretty much as big as those before it both in volume and training stress. I have said that tapering was an art form to me and I’ve yet to master it. This is a little bit of an experiment. Training is really good at the moment, particularly the cycling. How well will a heavy rest week set me up for race day? A few hours of activity remain between now and the race. Enough to keep the body feeling good, but let it gain some freshness. At least I hope that!

I don’t feel like I’ve wandered blindly off track though. Not entirely anyway. There’s a good blog post by Chuckie V on how he has his athlete’s handle back-to-back Ironmans. Whilst I’ve gained experience on this one over the year there’s plenty of room to learn. Chuckie V suggests no taper for the second Ironman if your fitness isn’t as high as for the first. A good Ironman is reliant on fitness and freshness, but as he stresses fitness is paramount.

Okay, I’ve thrown in a chart for you. Looking at my fitness (CTL – the blue line), fatigue (ATL – the red line) and form (TSB – the yellow line) after Kona and leading to Ironman Western Australia. You’ll note that fitness is lower than it has been and according to the chart my form is reasonably good. I won’t have as high a form as in previous races, but my fitness won’t be as low as it might have been.

Like Chuckie V’s advise I’ve prioritised raising my fitness over a typical taper with more recovery time. The aim is to be in better bike shape (particularly) on race day and reliant on a good period of rest in the next five days to get me just enough freshness to race well. Looking at the CTL line I’ve done a reasonable job of raising it to previous levels. The cost though is I can’t have quite as high a form or as low a fatigue for the race.

As I often comment in these posts race day will show the wisdom of this approach. Should it work then perhaps I’ll be adopting it more often.

I’m calling it today. After a shocking start to the long ride this morning rest is long over due. I knew it was coming. The early nights, plenty of sleep and then still feeling tired. The pain and struggle of running. Than pain and struggle of cycling! Yes, even the pain and struggle of swimming! The past few weeks have contained some very solid sessions for all my gripes.

This morning I headed out with Steven on a nice long ride to Margaret River and back. A better route than my one involving less highway and no dirt tracks! My legs were dead from the start. Unwilling to give as much as they have done on previous days. The powermeter doesn’t lie, I was weak all the way to the coffee stop.

I wonder if I’ve been a little too strictly paleo. My hard training has been matched with probably the lowest carb consumption I’ve ever managed! Certainly the highly un-paleo Magic Slice in the coffee shop seemed to pick things up on the return leg. For those wondering a Magic Slice consists of a biscuit base, lots of dried fruit, lots of white and milk chocolate, some jam I think and a lot of condensed milk. It is incredibly sweet especially to those of us who rarely touch sugars. When it kicks in it dulls even the hardest ache in tired legs.

The Taper Plan

I made a plan on Saturday and have changed it daily since. Mostly cutting down the volume in response to all the obvious signs of fatigue. As of today this is its current form. I reserve the right to chop out more workouts!

I’m following a similar logic to that outlined during my Kona reports. You can see my taper plan for that here and here (yep, two parts). So a heavy load till about ten days outs and then a massive drop in volume. Little bursts of intensity during my sessions, but again not too much. There’s a lot of rest going on there.

I’ll take each day as it comes and see how I feel. Steven invited me on some tempting rides the coming weekend, but I’m not sure it’d be wise to go. On the one hand I won’t get an opportunity to do those rides at the very least for a while. On the other I possibly need more rest. Amazing that despite sore, heavy legs the prospect of more riding still appeals!

My running volume is pretty low, but then to be honest it has been since I started training again. In fact I wonder if going from a long period of daily running to a more sporadic routine isn’t partly responsible for this awkward feeling I’m under doing things. It doesn’t feel quite right if you don’t run every day!

The Taper Numbers

Referring back to those Kona taper plans again you’ll know I like to use the numbers coming out from WKO+’s Performance Management Chart to help guide my taper. A challenging aspect in planning this race is the short build time has left me building little fitness or fatigue. The numbers I’m playing with are entirely different to those I’ve seen before.

Both bike and run TSB (form) values are much lower than I’ve previously said I should aim for. To get them higher though I have to sacrifice more CTL (fitness). I’m not really sure of the best balance here. Is it better to have a bigger drop of CTL and higher TSB, or to take a lower TSB and preserve what fitness I’ve built?

After a few hours playing around and thinking it through. Along with going on how my legs and body feel I’ve opted to let my CTL drop more than I initially planned. Training sessions are giving me good signs I can go hard when I need to. I think I’m better off being a bit more rested even if it sacrifices what WKO+ terms fitness a little.

Looking at my Kona analysis I noted that I thought my run TSB was a little too low at 10. Currently I’m not even close to that! I wondered if the lower TSB accounted for feelings of fatigue early in the run. Equally perhaps it came down to pushing on the bike earlier in the day. Very hard to tell. It leaves me questioning whether to pull further run workouts from my schedule and keep that CTL lower still to raise TSB? Tricky!

I’m never going to get the numbers I had for Kona or any of the other races anyway. Perhaps I should view this as a little experiment. If things go well on race day it’s a sign I can have lower TSB values for racing! Either way I’m not letting the numbers from a chart dictate my performance. I’ll arrive at the swim start rested and ready to race hard. Then it’ll hopefully be about nine hours of pushing myself hard!

It feels like I’ve been in Busselton much longer than three weeks. I’ve settled into life here – training, eating, shopping for more to eat, training, eating, sleeping… The usual routine. As my intermittent posts have hinted it’s not always been perfect training, but it’s also not been bad training. I may have turned into a fair weather triathlete thanks to the endless summer!

However a week of excellent conditions is leaving me with no excuses. Well other than the imminent race to prepare for. I have a taper plan in hand, but we’ll save that for another post. Today it’s all about life in Busselton and the pleasures of training in South West Australia.

This is a quieter corner of the country and the pace of life tends to match. Not that I live a high paced life these days anyway. It suits me well. Busselton has a large, active if slightly ad hoc training group. Sessions are regular and you soon learn the pattern. This also means you know when things are going to be tough out there on the road. I’ve mentioned before, the group can be merciless at times. It all ends with a coffee though and everyone is welcome.

Once everyone has headed off to work I’m left with a full day of training ahead. I’ve been fortunate that one of the local guys (another Russ) is on leave and around to train. Plus now Steven and Jo are down this way there’s more of us full timers about! With Steven around it’s also meant riding a little further afield.

The picture at the top is from one of my first long rides down here. I cleverly plotted out a course and downloaded it into my GPS. All the way to Margaret River on backroad, no need to go near a busy highway. Excellent. Well aside from the seven separate Magpie attacks there was the point where I hit this dirt track. Now google maps called that a road, whilst I personally consider it a dirt trail!

I remembered back on the Gold Coast having encountered something similar in the Tweed Valley. They were resurfacing the road and had just not got round to putting the hotmix on top. So I figure it’s probably only a kilometre long then back to real roads. After 1km of cyclocross on a road bike I decide that I’d best head back. I got to Margaret River on the highway that day.

I learnt that these were indeed roads and many cars and trucks use them. The surface is a mix of loose and packed dirt and gravel. Sometimes fine to ride on, sometimes not. The next time I went on a big ride I thought I’d been even smarter. Zooming in on the Satellite view in Google to check the roads!

It worked so well until the final section of my route. The first warning was when the road I’d expected to take didn’t appear to exist. I continued on and found an alternative which soon got me back on track. The road climbed up as I expected heading towards an intersection with Sues Road that would bring me home. Then 2km short, dirt track!

I wasn’t going to retrace my steps so I pushed on. Riding the dirt as best I could and admittedly dismounting once or twice. I didn’t want to go injuring myself on some silly endeavour. There was a tense moment when I passed a dead Emu in the road, this seemed the most inopportune and so most likely moment to take a fall. Fortunately I made it past, but was left wondering why the flies seemed more interested in me than the rotting body! Once I made it to Sues Road it was an easy ride home.

This weekend Steven and I headed out for a long ride. With maps checked along with local knowledge we were at least confident we wouldn’t be encountering dirt tracks. Our route once out of Busselton comprised of about five different roads in total for a loop of over 180km. It’s a different scale to back home for sure!

Heading out at 5:30am on Sunday we took the longer route to Nannup. I felt doing the larger distance first would be better and I think we were both glad of this by the end. Early on we were enjoying the ride back down Sues Road, going beyond the point the locals normally turn at. We were entering unexplored territory!

The enthusiasm continued for quite a while. I commented that I couldn’t understand why the locals didn’t ride further down here often. By the end of Sues Road I was beginning to understand. For over an hour the scenery had changed so little. There were positives. In two hours of riding we’d seen just three cars. Isolation has its advantages I guess, but the ride was also becoming mind numbing.

We turned onto the Brockman Highway heading to Nannup, faced with more of the same. Less than halfway into the ride and I found myself looking at the speedometer and counting down the kilometres. I realised a reason locals don’t come down here that much is it’s not very exciting. The roads look the same out in the middle of nowhere and at least if you do loops close to home you can get help easily.

Now to be fair things picked up about 20km out from Nannup. First we came across the Poison Swamp! Offering boating opportunities too! I think it needs to work on its branding to be honest. Not long after it was a herd(?) of Emus! Wanting to cross the road, but afraid of the cyclists they ran along the side threatening to dive into our path at any moment. I had fears of being taken out of the race by a rampant Emu. At least I’d finally seen live ones. Too many of my wildlife encounters take the form of road kill.

Nannup was a welcome break. Coffee and brekkie. I’ll confess to being non-Paleo and indulging in some cake, but when those sugars kicked in they helped get me home! After the repetitiveness of the last four hours riding we lacked enthusiasm for the trip home. Still we had to do it and we’d been told the Vasse Highway was a nice road.

Frankly it wasn’t that much better than any of the previous ones we’d been on. I found myself settle into a sugar fuelled consistent pace just clicking off the kilometres until we were close to home. That was pretty much it for the ride, pushing along tree lined, quiet roads until we were back to familiar territory. A combination of those sugars and a desire to get things over with helped me keep a good pace right to my door!

I’d say the riding here is good, but you almost need a different frame of mind. Often you’re alone out there on the roads and miles from civilisation. Packing spare food and plenty of fluids is a must. You can’t entirely rely on mobile phone reception so I’m not sure I’d fancy riding some of those routes alone. The toughest aspect can be the mental one, simply dealing with the seemingly endless roads with little to distinguish them. On the other hand at times it’s a simple motivator to get the job done and get yourself home!

I’ve left no time to mention the swimming or running. Another post perhaps. With the weather like it is at the moment the ocean is spectacular. Swimming in it or running along the beach front is a real pleasure. I even got to see more live wildlife on my run the other day in the form of a snake. Poisonous too I believe!