8 WEEKS TILL HAWAII

Brick

Turbo
90mins
Main set - 2 x 250W x 20min x 90rpm on 10min recovery

Run
Off bike easy aerobic 45min
Felt very lopsided - need to stretch.

It's been a busy day of DIY - repairing roof. Lucky I had the energy to do this later on.
I mixed a few tunes in the afternoon and made my first podcast - tested it out on the turbo this evening.
I'm looking forward to the bike fit on Monday as i'm still making changes!

Turbo

30min Warm up
20min x 250W x 90rpm
10 min Cool down

Just a short session as I prepare to build it up again.

Sauna
20min 4min 4min
This is about as hard as any training session i've done! Think i'll take the heart rate monitor in next time - not sure if it's good to be able to hear your blood pumping in your ears.

Massage 
WIth Roberto (www.robertofitness.com) The first one since the race. He's off to work at the world championship athletics in Korea so I got it in before he left. He used this scraping thing on my achilles - 9/10 on the pain level!

Swim

400m Warm up
10 x 100m on 25sec recovery at race pace
100m Cool down

I found this tough. A bit of inertia in the arms, so it was good to get them moving again. Bret Sutton the triathlon coach guru thinks we should be doing 40 x 100m sessions. So I hope to be adding a few more sets as the weeks go by. Today I focused on my hand entering the water before my elbow, i've not really looked at that aspect before. It seemed to help.

Sauna

30mins
I did some research around this yesterday. Apparently it takes 3days for the adaptation to heat to fall again so i'll aim to repeat this every 2-3 days.

Run

60mins treadmill
This was the first significant run since the race. I took it fairly easy and did a few repetitions at fairly steep inclines and a few minutes around race pace 14km/hr.
Just a bit of internal rotation of the right leg and minor niggles which are only to be expected.

Took the boys to the park and took the skipping rope for a bit of plyometric exercise. This is graded by the number of foot contacts. I did 100 and will build on this gradually.

After the treadmill I did some hip thrusts;

This is recommended as one of the best exercises for developing posterior chain strength. Apparently Lance Armstrong could lift the sort of weight only professional rugby players can. A far cry from what I was doing! (that's not me in the picture)

Turbo

1hr 20
Easy spinning with 30mins of single leg drill, 1min left 1min right leg repeated.
No fan on!

Sauna
30mins - I managed to do 15mins straight then 3x5min. I think the goal is to get this up to 30mins straight. It's also about getting used to processing a lot of fluid. Someone was in there with me rubbing Manuka honey on themselves - a bit weird. It was in Peckham so the talk was largely about the rioting.

The turbo was aimed at just keeping mobilised and doing a bit of drill that I had neglected. I've just booked in for a bike fit that's run by a fellow Serpentine runner - FREESPEED, it would be great if I could address that concern.

Did a bit of cycling in the day with Will in the cargo bike, and had to pick George up early from nursery - they were concerned about the troubles kicking off again.

Following yesterday's thoughts, I had a chat with a friend today. We decided rather than focus on "not getting injured" I will focus on "staying healthy"

So 9 weeks to go till Hawaii. I've spent the last week thinking about how to prepare. It's a little tricky as I've got to recover from the UK race and build up for this new one. Also it would be easy to set some mega goal which would just put me at a greater chance of injury.

Bottom line is to finish at Hawaii. However on the other hand, if I spend all my time being cautious and thinking don't get injured there is a good chance that's exactly what will happen. We all tend to gravitate towards what we concentrate on - it's like that "don't think about a pink elephant". Some people think the mind doesn't really deal in negatives just the object of the thought.

So, I think the best approach is to ease back into it. Address the things that held me back in the last race whilst setting some modest goals.

I've sat in the Sauna a fair bit this last week in an attempt to start the process of acclimatisation. I've also put on 2kg, the eating really surprised me, it's settled back down to normal now though. I'm not going to get too concerned about that at the moment.

I've had a couple of emails from super stars in the ironman world like Rachel Joyce who is a fair bit better than me!

I'm waiting to hear from a few people with any advice they have.

Today

Brick

Turbo
40mins warm up easy spinning
Main set - 5 x 5min 85rpm 250W on 3min recovery
10min cool down

Run 1.5km easy

I've also taken the bike position back to the starting point and will hopefully get that dialled in well before the race.