Weekly Reflection 27/01 - 02/02

To be honest, I had one of the best weeks in training and racing. I can feel my fitness picking up again as I could recover from sessions quicker and still be able to perform well at a race.

On Monday 27th, it was a public holiday in Australia and instead of doing a pool session, I decided (with a friend) to swim at Mentone beach. I did 3 pole-to-pole swims at Mentone which worked out to be around 3.2km. I did some efforts in between to work on my speed. Even though there was a slight wind, the water was still pretty calm. It was just a magical session.

Mentone Beach

Tuesday was another warm day and we moved our windtrainer session outside. Another sweat test was carried out. I think I have done about 4 of these before. My sweat loss rate is at 0.9kg/hour (which is about 1.4% of my original body weight).

Due to contractors being at my house, I had to work from home that day and did my own swim session. After the warm up, it was 3 x (8 x 50m T4, 200m T3), 1st using paddles, pb, 2nd with pb and last with pb and fins.

Yay for being able to run!

It has been a while since I had done a double session day. The original plan was to do my own run session in the morning but I ended up going down to MSAC (increase my chances of doing a good set rather than not). I arrived slightly late due to missing shoes in the car but ended up starting the set later than the group and did my own program (at my own pace). Instead of 3 x 6 of each (increase speed, shorter intervals), I did a 6 x, 4 x and a 4 x and my legs were ok at the end. I ended up with a 12km set whilst the rest of the crew did 14 - 19km. The afternoon combo session was great. We did a good 1.5km open water swim (at race pace) and then a 1hour+ on the windtrainer.

A did a ride on Saturday starting at 4:30am and headed towards Frankston first. It was only a 70km ride and as much as it was a training session, I didn't want to work too hard and wreck the legs for the next day.

Challenge Melbourne 1.9/60/14 was on Sunday and I raced well. Plenty of lessons learnt and will apply as much of it during training and this weekend for Geelong 70.3.

Swim-bike-run

Favourite session of the week: Loved my open water swim on Monday morning. Not only was it just great being in the water but it has also brought much confidence in swimming a long distance. The water was beautiful and you could still see the bottom of the sea bed.

Least favourite session of the week: Can you count sleep as a session? Finding it hard to fall asleep during hot nights.

Advice of the week: Still need to work out my hydration. Do I really need to drink that much on the bike? I drank about 2/3 bidon during the whole 60km (a bidon with 2 shotz tablets in it) and still needed to pee on the run. Was it the salt concentration which made me go to the toilet or just the amount of water?

Thing I’m looking forward to next week: Geelong 70.3 - I will be doing the swim-bike and will be running off the bike. Looking at the training program, I am suppose to be doing a 160km ride and 25km run. I might have to do my ride on Thursday (I have annual leave from work) and do the 25km run on the Saturday prior to bike check-in.