Woke with awful migrane, haven't had one for years - have become pretty good at listening to body and avoiding these.

Very long cycle today 180km easy pace - done for the time in the saddle

I can appreciate a lot of people's initial reaction - it must be so boring, what do you think about?

The advice I was given was to use all available cues to bring your attention/focus into the present. Forget about the past, don't stress about the future. Concentrate on technique.

Two years ago I was lucky enough to get a month's intensive coaching from psychologist who has trained the likes of Damon Hill and athletes at the English institute for sport. Formula 1 drivers think about gear changes and lines around bends. If they nail them the by-product is a fast lap time. They never think about getting a fast lap time, that is called "end-gaming" and is why England commonly loose football matches when earlier they were ahead.

Hard to do, and where's the enjoyment in that - but worth bearing in mind.

70km cycle - conversational pace, Richmond park
Stretching afterwards
Would have run but letting calf recover

Listened to interview with Kimberly Baldwin -

http://cdn4.libsyn.com/endurancecorner/Kim_Baldwin.mp3?nvb=20100526230145&nva=20100527231145&t=0da862835f1c1d2800eb7

She won national cycling championships in US. Interesting to hear what training she was doing with T-mobile. Her best wattage for an hour was 270-280.  Lots of gym work - squats, step ups, back extensions, swiss ball/core work. Winter strength training cadence would go as low as 45/min (not recommended for mortals - I was always told to keep cadence above 60/min if possible to avoid injury)

Turbo today;

Warm up 15min - 50watts with 4 x 1 minute increasing intervals of 100 200 250 and 300W 

Session - 5 x (4 min at 260 watts 60-65rpm on 3 minutes rest)

Cool down - 5 minutes easy spinning, followed by some stretching

I was doing 8 lots of this instead of 5 three months ago which shows how much training for something like the marathon impacts on your cycling and vice versa.

This type of session has always been the core of the weekday cycling training. Most people call it strength-endurance which speaks for itself. There's basically a fair bit of muscle tension going on and you have to keep it going for a while. Coupled with the long weekend ride you wouldn't go far wrong with just these two. 

Most of the time I would run after this - not necessarily for that long but just to get the body used to the transition. Due to my calf pull I have backed off this.

With respect to that injury I slept last night with a night splint to stop me pointing my toes and keep the calf stretched. This is a common thing for runners to do. What you find a lot of people doing is sleeping further down the bed with their feet against the board at the bottom and so maintain flexibility of the calf/achilles when running a lot.

In evening; stretching routine followed by 1.5km easy swim.

What I use for stretching is made by a company called "trigger point therapy" it's a bit pricey but it's been brilliant over the past 5 years. Just looked at it on amazon, it's about twice the price I paid all that time ago but I guess when compared to the price of a massage it's competitive. 

http://www.tpmassageball.com/

You could the same with a tennis ball!

Plan today was swim 3km

On call for work so plans abandoned - called in for bleeding patient so only got a 20min run - calf not good, should probably back off the running for a while and concentrate on the swim and cycle

Rest