Trains, Travels

Today’s post is dedicated to laziness. After a week off training and so much of everything else I normally do it seems appropriate. It’s also a bit of a mix of content as there’s not too much to tell from a seven days spent mostly laying about doing nothing! I do have a chart though.

Binge Eating! I promised myself a week off and time away from the Paleo Diet. I think I delivered on all counts there. I treated myself to a Domino’s Pizza (Full House for those interested). I know, they’re not the best, really that wasn’t the point. It was all about having some greasy, junk food I enjoy. It ticked the boxes on that count. I have eaten a load of cake and I really mean a load. I ate bread for a while, but found it didn’t do much for me. Completely at odds with the avoiding healthy foods I had porridge for a change! Fish and chips, biscuits with my tea, deserts and puddings with my meals… The list could go on.

Unsurprisingly there’s been some weight gain. I expected as much, but trust in my ability to get to race weight. Being back on the carbs I noticed how easy it is to eat a lot. I definitely found that I was hungrier in general and that despite eating a lot of food soon felt hunger once more. Not so surprising with cakes, chocolate and biscuits, but porridge is promoted as giving long lasting energy. An omelette seems to do a much better job in that regard.

Today marks a return to proper Paleo eating. I’m glad to be back! Some of the foods off the diet are fun in moderation. I can’t deny a fondness for cake. Outside of that though I genuinely enjoy Paleo more. The large meals of salad and vegetables and protein emphasis leaves me feeling much fuller. Hopefully it won’t take too long to undo the damage of my binge week!

Ironman UK Bolton Course For those interested I’ve uploaded the course from my GPS. You can download it from GPSies.com. The route is exactly as ridden, 3 laps of the course on the day. Plenty of waypoints so nice and accurate too. I’ve seen people searching for this in my logs so hopefully it’s a help to them.

The Taper

A little bit of a revisit to the subject of my Ironman UK taper. With the advantage of hindsight I guess I can claim it worked! At the very least I can say I was able to achieve my goals. I’ll never know if I could have done better by another route.

Another of my favourite charts – straight from WKO+. I’ve mentioned them before, but to recap we have Acute Training Load (ATL), Chronic Training Load (CTL) and Training Stress Balance (TSB) corresponding to what might be termed fatigue, fitness and form. I’ve referred to Joe Friel’s blog and his views on tapering using this chart before. The aim is to have as high a fitness and form as possible come race day. Tapering reduces fatigue and improves form, unfortunately it also reduces fitness. So objectively the aim is to maximise the improvements in form and minimise the loss of fitness. Friel suggests that you want a taper to result in no more than a 10% decline in fitness.

I’m mentioning these details because if you look at my chart above and follow the CTL (fitness) from a week prior to Challenge Roth through to Ironman UK you’ll notice far more than a 10% drop. I don’t think it’s surprising to find that I couldn’t stick to that guideline racing this close together.

I tapered a single week into Roth and did stick very closely to the 10% reduction in fitness rule. I’d say I raced well in Roth, though felt I wasn’t as free of fatigue as I’d like. Whilst fatigue (ATL) and form (TSB) would suggest I should be pretty fresh. I think the reality of my months of training and racing weren’t showing through.

Immediately following Roth I attempted to follow a plan that had plenty of light training. There were mixed results and I managed to train regularly, but certainly couldn’t manage much in those sessions. The result was there was no chance of limiting myself to a 10% reduction of fitness over that time. CTL declines pretty steadily over those three weeks. What training I did prevented it completely plummeting. In the final week before Ironman UK you can see it plateau a little as I’m able to train a bit more. At this point though the drop off was so large I was no longer concerned about any kind of 10% rule.

Performance on race day was pretty good. I felt none of the fatigue I’d experienced in Roth and definitely felt able to work well throughout the race. I would be hard pressed to identify a loss of real fitness between Roth and the Ironman UK. If there was it was more than compensated by that significant reduction in fatigue. My view is that after many months of high volume training with little break I needed a solid rest. As it happened a three week period of light training between the two races proved ideal.

More about recovery

So I come to a full week off training for even more recovery. You can look back at the chart and see fitness dropping even further! For the past week I’ve felt terrible. My legs have been stiff and once again I’ve been retaining a lot of fluid. I’m curious to find out potential causes of this reaction. It’s only been Roth and Ironman UK where I’ve experienced fluid retention in recovery. Why it’s occurred for both these races, but not before is an interesting question.

With the week now done I’m looking to get myself moving again and very slowly introduce training. Level off the loss of fitness and then start a gradual increase in a couple of weeks time. I wonder if the extensiveness of the taper for Bolton will help in the overall recovery process. Whilst the past week did feel awful I’m starting to feel good now. Hopefully a proper massage tomorrow will have my legs ready to start some exercise.

Generally I’ve bounced back in two to three weeks after a race. I’m looking to be a bit more gradual about it this time. My focus now is on good dietary habits and a bit of weight loss ready for training. I’ll be thinking through the Kona build in a future post.

Today’s picture is courtesy of Helen, go and check more of Helen’s photography or Tom and Helen’s blog. All good stuff as you can see from the awesome race photo.

After weeks of dedicated focus on diet and weight loss my birthday marked a day of excess. For once I’d say to hell with portion control and hello to cake and sugars! I have to admit I was looking forward to it quite a bit, particularly as I planned to make the above New York Baked Cheesecake. An entirely new venture for me. My favourite dessert, the last thing I wanted was for it to be a let down. I’m pleased to say it was a big success and despite its size vanished that day (in no small part thanks to me!)

Before all that I’ll pick up from the events on Saturday. As I mentioned on Twitter the big picture won out and I didn’t run. This gave me a total of 28 days of running at least 30 minutes per day. A pretty good effort and frustratingly close to my target. However I am pleased that I didn’t allow a personal challenge to get in the way of the smart thing to do.

In fact I was smart enough not to bike or run on Sunday and to completely rest on my birthday. Sure it didn’t make my training graphs look as impressive, but it was the right thing to do.

Sunday wasn’t easy by any means. I started the day with a trip to the lake. I had a big plan in mind. Ten laps of the lake for an 8km open water swim. Pretty epic and excessive, certainly further than I’d ever gone in a single session. A little bit of messing about before hand delayed my start in the lake and as things went I had to get out at 7km. That’s still excessive! So I allowed myself the treat of some chocolate brownies shared with my mates at the lake (thanks to mum for making them!)

With 2 hours of swimming in my arms I headed home for the next bout of excessive behaviour. Something I think far more people will appreciate. Excessive eating. The weather was beautiful and it was perfect for the planned barbecue. During the course of lunch I would estimate I consumed roughly 1.5kg of meat. Yep, that is a hell of a lot of meat. Technically I was still being pretty Paleo at this point. The consumption of cake that followed throughout the rest of the day was definitely off the charts. I would guess I consumed a whole fifth of that cheesecake, a good portion of fruit cake, some more brownies and a bit of a ridiculously sweet birthday cake!

You should have seen the scales the next day! Let’s just say I put one heavily anomalous data point into my weight chart! Still two days later and we’re back to normal and back to losing weight. I’ll be blogging about my success with Paleo and lower carb eating in the future though.

Excess consumption has its place, but once done it’s best to get things back on track quickly. So come Monday and my actual birthday it’s back to being a modern day Paleo man. I ate pretty lightly that day, especially with zero training taking place. I relaxed in the sun and tended to the sore knee which was showing good signs of being much recovered. All in all a very pleasant and relaxing time. The first total rest day in a month and much needed as I realised the last four weeks had seen almost 120 hours of training! My body was and to an extent still is excessively tired. It’s a good job my aim is to be at a peak for Ironman UK and not Roth.

There is one final bout of excess before things return to more normal parameters. My failure to hit 8km in the water frustrated me so Tuesday I went to the lake earlier. I got in and set off feeling a little warmer than I’d like with the fantastic weather we’re having. I stuck at it for the 10 laps to hit 8km! Probably more when you allow for course deviations that creep in. I was pretty satisfied with that!

Once I got home it was straight out on the bike to meet Steven for an easy ride. It was relatively easy thanks to a couple of coffee stops, but he’s riding pretty solidly right now so it wasn’t a cruise. It was good to catch up as always and chew over a few issues. Discuss the benefits of massive over-distance training like my swim. Pleasingly my knee was holding up well. I was aware that something had been wrong with it as I rode, but it wasn’t getting any worse.

The final test of the day was the SAAB Salomon Forest Trail 10K I’d entered as race number 4 in my mini-series. Any thoughts of racing were gone instead I planned a 10km training run with a goody bag at the end! So lining up at the start I placed myself well back mostly concerned with my knee. The horn sounded and off we went at a leisurely pace.

The first 4km I was barely working. I kept to 5 minute kilometres so a real jog! The knee was feeling fine though. Somewhere around that 4K mark I picked things up. I was loving every minute of the trail run just like the week before. This was far too much fun for a race! My run form felt great, really stable above the waist my legs moving effortlessly below me (it wasn’t that hard a pace). I just kept on building towards the end crossing the line in 45 minutes. No kind of record and a little disappointed that if 100% confident of my knee I could have raced well.

Even so it was a fantastic evening. Thoroughly enjoyable and once again I found running trails an addictive experience. I want more of it! Enough that I’ve entered the Rivington Trail Half Marathon race in September! I just wish I had easy access to trails right here on my doorstep. Running the roads gets repetitive and boring, but the forests never seem to.

Here we are. The knee seems to be fine and I’m back into training. I’ve a rough idea of the next few days plans and what my focus will be. I want to try and get some good sessions in on the bike if I can, I certainly feel I need them. Swim and run feel great. I’m enjoying open water swimming so much lately and have plans to go longer still! Running is comfortable and I’m starting to gain confidence for my races. Cycling seems to come and go though, I want some consistent work in there for the next few days.

And then it will be Roth.

[If you read this blog purely out of interest in my training you may want to skip this one. Having more free time and with wet weather yesterday I finally got around to seeing Watchmen. Many weeks after everyone else here's my thoughts and a few comments on comics.

And lame as it is - the title to this post is based off the 'What If?' series of Marvel Comics. The idea being change an aspect of a Marvel story and play out how things might go. Ranging from if Peter Parker's Uncle Ben hadn't died to the more absurd Bull Pen being the Fantastic Four. Personally though I'm a sucker for anything involving World War II heroics like the example to the right!]

A couple of weeks after everyone else I’ve finally got around to seeing the Watchmen movie. I’m surprised to say I actually really enjoyed it. I didn’t find it too slow, nor the sex scene as uncomfortable to watch as others have claimed. It felt remarkably true to the themes of the book even with the alterations to the ending. I would say it was a little bit too violent, I don’t really remember the comic being quite so graphic or extreme. Perhaps I’m just getting old in my opinions?

I encountered the comic in my early teens. A period when my dabbling in comics was largely influenced by what my older brother showed me. To be honest I had little taste or appreciation back then, but could recognise good comics. Watchmen was definitely that and being a young comics geek I also owned the smiley button and a T-shirt. Since that first time I’ve possibly reread it once and that would still be over 15 years ago. Despite the lack of familiarity it left a lasting impression which could have set the movie up for a fall. Watchmen was a significant comic in my comic book geek life.

As a slight aside I just want to vent a little comic geek frustration. It’s not hard to find articles or comments refering to Watchmen as significant, breaking the mould or redefining comics. It’s true, it was an introduction to a wider world of comics at a time when I was new to the medium. It was different to the bulk of other titles out there, but it wasn’t an entirely new concept. Moore himself had explored similar themes in previous works (reading some bits and pieces online reminded me just how good Miracleman had been). Others had touched on the themes too. The significance with Watchmen is that it is read by people who probably don’t read many comics and it show them that ‘comics aren’t just for kids’. Every week in comic book stores there are plenty of titles from the trashy to the intellectual. Watchmen didn’t change that, it was good, actually great, but comics covered the range from trash to treasure long before it was around. Grumble over.

So a classic comic from my youth that left a strong impression vague on details admitedly) made into a movie. That’s aready a big hurdle. Throw in that it’s a long movie and I like my movies to aim for around 90 minutes of entertainment then end. Really I was almost nervous when I went in the cinema potentially I’d paid to spend nearly 3 hours watching memories from my teenage years be trashed. Yet almost immeadiately I was drawn into it and from then on enjoyed every minute.

In my opinion it did a fantastic job of capturing the essence of the comic. I’ve seen complaints about it being slow, but the pacing seemed spot on. Perhaps there could have been cuts, but nothing really felt unneccessary. If anything the slowness worked for the film adding a heaviness as we head towards armageddon. Whilst I haven’t read it for years surely the comic was slowly paced too? Visuals were great though the nuclear kiss dream sequence is far more striking in the comic. That was a moment of disappointment for me, but I admit my Watchmen T-shirt was the image of the skeletons kissing as the bomb obliterates them. I didn’t have much luck trying to find an image of that. Poor google skills and with the movie out most of the images you get back are disappointingly from it.

I won’t spoil the ending. It was changed and I can kind of see why. Perhaps they thought the original events of the comic book finale were a little too ‘silly’. They work better in the context of a comic read by people familiar with the medium and its themes. In a standalone movie it would possibly have seemed almost random. I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere, but Bubastis, Ozymandias’s Lynx is only really relevant to the story if you have the comic book ending. I guess if you’ve got a special effects budget to use though.

To sum up I liked it. It’s an unusual superhero movie just as it was unusual as a superhero comic. I think that may have worked against it a little. Comments I overheard from some audience members after the movie suggest to me it wasn’t what was expected. I’ll catch it again when it’s on DVD with apparently even more film to watch. It’s probably not going to have the same replay value that Iron Man does, but that’s a different, simpler kind of superhero story. Incidentally, during the trailers – a new ‘The Fast and the Furious’! Oh Good! (No really I’ve seen all the others, multiple times in some cases. There is something wrong with me.)

Normal service resumes from tomorrow onwards. Back to the triathlon stuff and upcoming race and I’ll keep the comic books to myself. I feel better for this! Outside of training and racing if you really want to get a long conversation out of me ask about comics. I can cover manga, bande dessinee a little, not too bad on Brit comics, pretty good on DC, OK on Marvel and can hold my own discussing indies!