Just another training weekend

Once again the end of the weekend rolls around and I am shattered, too much fun playing! Training for a Decatriathlon takes you a lot of great places, but it sure does leave you feeling the worse for wear on a Monday morning!

I try and structure my training to have three progressively harder weeks followed by one slightly easier week to allow some recovery. The last couple of weeks have been big training weeks for me, I’m looking forward to easing back a little this week.  Here is a summary of what I have been up to in the last two weeks:

Week beginning April 2^nd  - Total 27 hours

Road bike riding  21 hours

Run                       4 hours

Swim                    2hours

The running looks a little lacking in this week, but I was still recovering from the Tarawera ultra marathon and had a big/fast hike coming up on the first day of the next week, Which looked like this:

Week beginning 9^th April – Total 28 hours

Road bike riding    14 hours

Fast hike                 7 hours

Run                         6 hours

Paddle                     1 hour

Do you spot the trend, biking is far more my thing than running!  In fact, my body does not handle running all that well and tends to break if I do too much of it, whereas I tolerate long rides day after day extremely well.

With Easter weekend being included in these two weeks I was able to do a first test of how my body was able to handle training in a fatigued state, going out and training hard four days in a row, followed by a recovery day and then good solid training for the rest of the week.

I am extremely pleased to report that the body stood up well to this test. The days did not get progressively harder, the body seemed to switch into the mode of “well complaining isn’t going to help so I might as well just enjoy the scenery”!  I am extremely pleased about this, I feel strong at the moment –well except for the four hour beach run that I finished the week off with last night…that could just have easily been described as a death march.  In reality though, although I never really felt great I didn’t actually feel any worse at the end of the four hours than I did at the start, and it was great mental training to have to keep going, knowing that in the Deca I would be feeling much worse than this and I will have to keep going.

Part of all the joy from all this training is going cool places, so here are some picture from Easter weekends training evolution:

Great views of the Kawhia harbour on Good Friday and Easter Saturday

Fast hike (zone 2 and 3 training) up Mt Ngauruhoe (otherwise known as Mt Doom)

That was a spectacular day, not a cloud in the sky!  When people ask me "why do you do this?" part of the answer always has to be "because I get to see such cool things out training"!  And for the record, my climb to the top of Mt Doom was considerably easier than Frodos mission. 

Because I am also a scientist, my training really needs to fit in with my full time job, but come Monday morning, I'll be plenty happy to be sitting at my computer with some 34Gb files, giving my legs a well deserved rest!