Brick

Last week I did my first Olympic-distance brick training session - a 25 mile bike ride followed by a six mile run, which I was very pleased with, especially as it was an extremely hot day. As the triathlon is so close now - just two weeks to go - I knew I'd better go out again today but to be honest, didn't really feel like it. I'd been over at Mum and Dad's to celebrate Mum's birthday, drove back in the morning and was trying to get motivated. As it happened, I'd left my purse behind by mistake, so that was the perfect reason to get on the bike - it's about 13 miles to Rushden from Kettering. So I plodded over and back again and still didn't feel very energetic or fit enough to go for a run afterwards and was all for talking myself out of it completely.

The best way to cope with this, I've found, is not to think about it but to just do it. I came home, changed my shoes and as it happened, turned in the best run time I've done in a long time. Perhaps it was the copious amounts of Lucozade I'd been drinking on the bike; perhaps I'm getting fitter at last. I picked my feet up and it felt good and fast - and it was; just over 55 mins for six miles. So that was encouraging.

I also had some encouragement when I last went swimming. I've been going as often as possible to work on my new (hopefully correct) front crawl and to be honest, I'm getting so puffed out I can barely do two lengths. I came away from the pool on Wednesday wondering what on earth I was thinking entering a race where I had to swim 1,500 metres when I could barely swim at all, but on Thursday it seemed to come together a bit more and a fellow-swimmer was kind enough to say she thought I looked a lot less splashy than usual, and smoother. Again, it's a case of keeping the pace up. The Swim Smooth website reckons on about six sessions to learn something new, so I'll be packing in as much swimming as possible over the next fortnight!

Back on the bike

It seems strange to head a message with this when I cycle nearly every day but a decent distance training run is so different from the daily commute - it really does feel like 'proper' cycling. Did 25.4 miles in under 2 hours on the racer, taking in some decent hills around Cranford and Gt Addington. At some stage, I'm going to have to load up the tourer and do a really long ride, but at the moment I'm just focusing on the triathlon. Although I know I can do each individual element, my main worries are (a) whether I can actually do them all together (so more training) and (b) coming in last, miles behind everyone else, or even worse, being pulled out because I'm so slow and everyone else wants to go home! Even if I can do the whole thing at the speeds I've been doing in training, it's still going to take over three and a half hours to complete. The top people do it in about 2 hours (or less!) and everyone else seems to be done in between 2.5 - 3 hours.

So, LOTS more running and cycling to come! At least the weather is getting warmer. It was still a bit frosty out there this morning, but good to get out.

More fun than it ought to be

Tuesday and another bike ride from work through sleet and snow; the worst thing is not being able to see properly because of snow in the eyes. But I was reminded of a similar ride through town the other day in equally bad weather and a chap pushing his bike in the opposite direction called out; 'It's a lot more fun than it ought to be, isn't it?' And it is! Non-cyclists / walkers / runners might not understand it, but cycling through snow and rain can be really huge fun - especially when there is somewhere warm and dry at the end of it.