After using ankle bands in the pool on Tuesday I can confirm that my legs are actually made from lead. After two laps using the bands, a pool buoy and paddles I was essentially walking up and down the pool (trying not to drown). Don Corleone could use these instead of concrete shoes when sending folks to 'sleep with the fishes'.
Tonight's swim session was cut short since the Swim Team at Virgin Active Lanarkshire would find it difficult to organise an escape from a paper bag. Two weeks ago we were told that the swim club was going to be split into 2 groups, one at 5:30 p.m. and one an hour later so that one lane would be free for club members to swim laps. However, tonight the 5:30 p.m. session actually started at 6:10 p.m. with both sets of young swimmers taking up both lanes… Seemingly they'd tried to contact all the parents to let them know - although 75% of the folks I talked to had not been informed. It turned out they were using a phone number that I'd changed 4 and a 1/2 years ago - looks like their record keeping skills could do with a little TLC. So I only managed 35 minutes tonight, not too bad, but I was hoping to squeeze in an hour (aiming for 3km). Grrrrrrrrrr!!!! Rant over! I'll feel better about it once I've refuelled with curry/rice/nan bread and a beer or two!
The cycle and run sessions are now introducing short, high intensity bursts into the endurance sessions. These help to increase cardio-vascular fitness, speed and help to stretch out where your lactate threshold kicks in - i.e. you can run harder for longer. They can be pretty challenging (and super sweaty when training indoors) but they actually break the monotony of the session and help to give your mind something to focus on. That's one area of training that I've not gone into much at present as most of the work has been training the body to cope with the constant exercise - as time progresses I'll need to come up with strategies to keep my mind focused, and positive, for the duration of the race.
Anyway, on happy topics I treated myself to some trick new carbon fibre wheels for my road bike this week. The 52 mm deep section carbon rims should aid aerodynamics and help the bike slice through the air… that's the plan, although if that fails they do look uber cool :-)
Remember, all of my detailed training sessions are updated (pretty much daily) in the Training Logs tab at the top of the page… If you really want data, click on the Detailed Garmin Training Logs tab and then click any of the blue hyperlinks to be whisked off to the Garmin Connect site where there is more data than you can shake a big stick at!
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