First 'Race' of the Season

Last week was my last planned hard week before I start my race prep stuff.
I only managed to actually get outside for a couple of my run sessions this week as it was way too wet, windy and icy for biking, especially as I have ‘fabric’ poking through on my back tyre! That was a new tyre 4 months ago! That’s what turbos’ do to your rubber!

I’ve been mainly concentrating on increasing the intensity…hard short efforts with relatively short rest intervals, for example on Saturday I did a morning swim session which consisted of a main set of 10 x 100m on 20 secs rest, then in the evening I did a high intensity bike workout. Quite a hard day, but very satisfying!

I also did a couple of bike run bricks last week, the hardest of which was: 15 min steady run, 30 min hard bike, 15 min moderate run, another 30 min hard bike and finish with a 10 min hard run. This was quite a leg wobbler! Not exactly intense, but good race type pain!

Did my first tri ‘race’ of the season today. All indoors!! It was a charity sprint distance event with a 400m swim, 20km indoor bike and a 5km treadmill run. Those indoor bikes are not meant for racing on!! Although racing on indoor machines has its obvious drawbacks, it was still a good intense training session. I don’t have the results yet as I was in the first wave which started at 1300, and as I’m writing this, the last wave of competitors are still going…they started 3 hours after us! The huge time difference is not because there are so many competitors, (only about 30 I think) it’s because it’s the only way it can be done when there are no timing chips and only 2 PTI’s doing all the timings! I’ll find out how I got on tomorrow when the results ‘go global’, but my timings were 5:59 for the swim, 25:30 for the bike and 17:30 for the run. I felt ‘too good’ afterwards, and a little disappointed that I didn’t push harder, but it is really quite tricky to judge your pace on the indoor bikes and treadmill. But like I said…all good training!

Train smart