The Week That Was - (IM - 8 weeks to go)

As promised a quick update. The volume is starting to mount and I'm now flirting with injury 0h-O!

Monday started off with me sore as a sore thing after the mega run the day before. Couldn't bring myself to do either the planned swim or turbo.

Tuesday was much better though with a solid swim, spin class at lunch time and a mega treadmill interval session in the evening. The treadmill session seemed easy on paper but turned out to be a mind bending exercise of pain, torture and torment. Somehow I finished it but on reflection I'm not looking forward to that again on Tuesday.

Wednesday was a bit of a tormentor too, it was a 80k ride followed by an 11k run all before work. I kicked off at 5am on the lonely lonely ride. All went well though and even the run afterwards seemed to come together nicely. The evening was the usual triathlon training session at the Commonwealth stadium. 1k of warm up and drills followed by 5 sets of 300m at which point the coach went a bit insane and instead of giving us one last short set he came up with an idiotic 20 x 50m sprints. Even after that he gave us another set of something or other but I'm too tired from thinking about it to remember what that was. Total swim 4k - strangely I felt good!

Thursday real long hard swim at home in the morning followed by a 9k run in the evening - Shilpa ran the first half with me but by the end my legs felt like numb tree trunks!

Friday I was supposed to do a bike ride but just couldn't face it in the morning...or lunchtime...or evening - USELESS!

Saturday 190k, very hilly ride - didn't cook myself but did all the hills very solidly - my bike distance has increased rapidly and I'm finding it easier than I think I should - I'm not going to complain though. After the ride a mind bending 8.8k hilly interval run - collapsed into the pool to try to cool down afterwards.

Sunday was the usual long run although I was hoping to do at least 25-30k. As with last week I felt strong and so headed out at a reasonable pace although glycogen levels were clearly lower and muscles tireder - ran back from the 11k drinks stop with Sam and then it happened, I started feeling a twinge just above my left Achilles tendon and at the bottom of my calf. I soon decided to stop at 21k just in case.

All in all I'm pretty happy with the week, I've dropped another Kg and the volume is on target with speed way ahead of where I expected. Next week will be tougher though as the volume picks up - I won't miss any of the sessions and have a couple more to add in there too. Calf/Achilles is a bit of a worry though, it's giving me jip this morning so I need to watch that - ice, ibuprofen and deep heat will sort it I hope.

A solid swim this morning kicked the week off nicely and I even got some more done to the boy's climbing frame over the weekend so all looking good so far - 7 more weeks to go and 5 weeks of misery before the taper starts.