Phase Change

Post Apollo Bay Camp, we are now moving into the race (pre)season training phase. The next phase consist more of speed and endurance work and less on strength. Our summer training timetable kicks in the same week as daylight savings and this is where we move our Thursday night sessions to the Elwood Life Saving Club for Combo - bricks (run off bikes and then swim for short course and run and swims for long). Thursday mornings will be a TT ride for long course or a run session for short. As I am part of the Long Course group, there isn't really much of a change in my training schedule other than adding an ocean swim on Thursday evening.

Swim:

There are 4 planned swim sessions in a week - Monday, Wednesday, Thursday (as part of Combo) and Friday morning. I skipped most of the Friday morning swims last season as I was too tired from Thursday evenings. I will try to make it to as many sessions as I can, otherwise I must follow the program on my own after work. No slacking off.

Bike:

Bike sessions are still Tuesday evening windtrainer - ranging from 60-90min. Long course athletes will still have our Thursday morning TT efforts. This will either be laps of Albert Park lake or onto Beach Rd. Our long endurance rides will still be on Saturdays (with a small run off the bike). I will need to juggle between doing my long rides and some of the Saturday coaching sessions with Tri Alliance. It is our busiet time of the year with our association with Supersprint (for the Gatorade Series) and also our 6 week Try-the-Tri program for which we have 5 of them running over 6 months. It maybe that I will need to do a 2 hour ride before 9:30am and then another 2-3 hour ride in the afternoon. Closer to race dates, I will also be taking Wednesday off work to do another long ride in the week.

Looking back, I really didn't do much riding on the TT bike the previous summer and this is something which I will have to change if I want to do well in my races in the coming months.

Run:
Nothing really will change for the run session other than adding more kms and work on speed. It will be the usual Tuesday morning intervals at MSAC, Thursday evening run-swim combo at Elwood and a long run on Sundays at Fairfield/Beach Rd. My plans for running the Melbourne Ironman route is still being sorted out and it will be done over several weekends. I guess I am lucky to live so close to it (22-23km mark was pretty much at my doorstep). After shepparton, I will try to build my distance up to 35-37km prior to Ironman Melbourne. My longest run is 22km.

From experience, I will have good and bad days/weeks in training so I will consult the coaches and assess where I am at on a weekly basis. Injuries have been managed well so far - just muscle soreness/tightness. If I could afford massages I would get them on a weekly basis.

Looking forward to my up and coming events:
Kinglake 115km Ride in 8 days
Half Marathon 21.1km in 17 days
Round the Bay 100km in 24 days
Noosa Olympic Distance Tri in 38 days
Shepparton 70.3 in 52 days
Geelong Long Course in 136 days
.....and the big one - Ironman Melbourne in 178 days

Throw in a couple of ocean swims in Nov for Corporate Games (1km) and Feb for the Big Bay Swim (3.2km) to keep things interesting.