and then something happened

After an OK weekend. Monday saw us starting a hard week of training, the season is well underway and the two National Champs are round the corner. This means a lot of fun, hard, quality workouts. And a lot of other ones that are not as much fun, but still of good use for the final objectives. 

 The mini-tri's are a good sample of that. So... I was saying, monday was a hard day at the pool, and the evening session was the ever present cooper's test night. A good sign is that I went beyond the last mark by about 30 metres. I probably said this before, but these tests sometimes are a lottery, you never know how the legs are gonna respond during the first 3/4 minutes of the test. Once you're cleared of that the anaerobic motor kicks in and you don't know if there will be enough gas to finish full throttle. It was a good result and more interesting from the HR point of view. This time around I didn't go as high as last time, but I recovered quite fast after 1 minute of rest. If you want to know the secret of how to nail 3685m in 12min go to this post .



gotta love country roads

 Tuesday was off and Wed was a long day at the office, I couldn't make it to the swim session, which was 1000m time trials, I did them today instead. But something happened between my rest day and the rest of the week. The wednesday long run went OK but not great and the thursday bike TT was shite, even though I went as hard as I can, something didn't quite work. And to top it up the swim TT's were average as well. Coach recomended to go for a blood test, which I will do as soon as I can. But it is not a great concern so far... shite happens, everyday and one has to keep on rocking.
So there I went today to do some trackwork and nailed a good set in the prescribed times and in a reasonable HR band.

a view from the top, Mt Eden on a nice day

The current and coming weeks have many workouts where one races against the clock. It is a good way to train the mind and the body to do two things. The first one is to make the mind push the body to the limit of excertion and a bit further if posible, the full syncro between brain and muscles to make sure that all the money that's in the bank is well spent. The second one is to blow up, to go waaaaay too hard to the point where there's just a black tunnel and no light beyond. Only by going there one get's to know the signals that announce the big WASTED state. Every time in the season that we get to these weeks I treat it as the ones where I will learn more about how much I'll ask my body at the time of a race.
I must confess, though, that besides a big blow on last week's bike TT (I had not a lot of legs for a run right after) I haven't hit the wall as much... I will probably do so next time around.

stay tuned!