Chipping Away

Some progress is being made, I've decided my racing focus at last and my fitness has made some tiny improvements. The big decision has been made and my flights are booked for Challenge Roth. It is going to be interesting as I will be putting in about half the number of hours I have done in the past in preparation and will be relying on what I have learned about from training and racing in the past. That said there aren't any secrets it's all about the long bike rides and runs. The knowledge I have gained lets me know how many I need and when need to do them.

The first task at hand though is to just get a solid, robust base of fitness together. Currently I am still delicate, but not taking quite as long to recover from harder session. That has a lot to with the little high intensity work i'mm doing is now being done indoors on the bike, so there is less impact damage to the muscles. I have gone back to easy running and picking up the pace a little when the legs want to. The harder club running sessions I was doing where leaving me trashed until just before the next hard session, consequently my easy running pace was getting slower and slower, which isn't good as easy running pace is Ironman race pace.

Since giving the track sessions a miss and just running, my easy pace has improved and the longer runs are not such a chore. The Indoor bike session is a focused around 30mins of higher intensity work, but not flat out. I'll increase this to 40 or so minutes. I'm likely to keep these going even when the nights get lighter as they are easier to control and I can just focus on the required effort.

I'm not swimming much, mainly as the pool seems to be closed when I turn up in the morning, with another lame excuse. I'm only planning 2 swims a week for now, so every one missed is a big deal.

Hopefully by the end of March I will be resembling some from of athlete, a little leaner and a lot fitter.