Improving S-L-O-W-L-Y

Great old saying my coach had was slowly-slowly-cachee-monkey.  As long as you are getting fitter, stronger and thus faster then everything is good in the hood.

In real terms my A race is now the Ironman which is just under 50 weeks away so I have light years to improve and in any case I dont want to be hitting peak volume or load anytime soon.  But, I do have races and targets in between so I am not entirely lapse at the minute and I have PLENTY to work on!

After Tuesdays tough ride I rested Wednesday as planned.  Took the family to a hotel just outside Oxofrd and and a couple of nice days just playing with the kids and spending time with the family.  Training was on the back burner and it was nice to zone out and relax.

Saying that did get a good pool session in.  1.3k in total working on stroke count and trying to be longer inn the water.  Didn''t eat pretty well so that's the 4th discipline for me at the moment - fuck transitions haha !!

Home on Friday and decided that I needed to do my weeklu tempo fix.  Last week managed 1 mile at 5.51 pace.  Plan this week was to build to 2.  Set off OK but Garmin being shit read first mile way long so decided after 100m of manual lap to stick to the markers I knew and do the next 2 miles at tempo rather than take a 10 min warm up.  First mile of tempo clicked at 5.47 - happy days.  Felt hard but more relaxed than last week and knowing every step was an improvement worked hard into a pretty stiff wind.  Didn;t check watch just tried to relax as much as I could and popped up in 5.43 for the 2nd mile (auto lap was bang on here).  Felt great to nail the session as planned.  Its not exactly the 10k tempos I was knocking out in 35.50 or the 4 milers at 5.25 pace in March but it's a good start and an improvement!

At this stage I will take an improvement in any discipline as they are all fairly average!

Jogged 3 miles back to bring up 6 miles in 42.30ish - not bad either way.  HR was high but to be expected with bad diet, tired, long day and hard run !!

This morning picked Ian T up and met Josh for a coached swim session.  Went REALLY well, big improvement on my swimming. Worked out as -

300m warm up

300m drills (catch, pull, stroke count)

4 x 100m (1.45, 1.50, 1.50, 1.52)

200m easy

4 x 100m (1.55, 1.54, 1.53, 1.54)

50m easy

25m flat out (18 secs - NICE !!), 25m easy back

300m cool down

For 2k of swimming (I know 50m is missing somewhere!)

The 100s were 5 secs faster than 2 weeks ago per 100 - and I only did 4 then!  Ian T knocked out a 1.42 for the first one!!

So job done, will ride tonight (16 on the hills) and run 10 hardish tomorrow for a nailled week.  Maybe a 20 min TT drill session and it's all the boxes checked.

Really need to watch my diet this week, that's key.  Get down to around 10.5 stone is the plan and everything will be easier.

Happy days