week ending 10/07/05

Photo
Northern loop ride. A beautiful undulating ride up to The Northen gates. It takes about 2 hrs to complete from Figtree and I love this ride for the ocean views and early morning sun rises.
Base 2 (week 2/4)
16 hrs of training this week. I did 10 hours of riding and 6 hours of running. The breakdown of training was a follows

• Recovery: 5:50
• Zone 1: 5:12
• Zone 2: 3:47
• Zone 3: 0:37
• Zone 4: 0:34

Spending the majority of time in and around zone 1 now. This is good as I’m now up around 16 hrs of training and I need to start focusing more on recovery. While I only ran 4 sessions, I did every run between 1-2 hours. This really tested my foot and I must admit it did feel a bit tender towards the end of the week. I’m probably still not ready for the longer runs yet. Next week I’ll drop the volume of each run and increase my frequency to hopefully run around 7 hours this week.
My LSD bike was the best session of the week. Rode with the group up Mt Keira then through to Loftus, Sydney. Felt strong all day. I was happy to finish the ride feeling like I could of punched out a few more k’s. I was especially pleased with the new found strength I have on the hills and am looking forward to challenging the record for Mt Keira climb as found on cycle2max.com. I’m 40seconds off the record at the moment and that was around 6 weeks ago. I’ll probably have a shot at the 19:05 towards the end of my recovery week next week.
Getting up in the morning is difficult at the moment with the tour on. Those late nights are starting to get the better of me. I don’t even watch the whole thing. I’m good to about 11.30pm before I give in to modern technology and hit the record button.
Read Haads approach to running this week and I must say it made some sense. I don’t think I’ll be able to even get close to running around 150-160km per week but I definitely agree with his philosophy on running as much as possible at a low hr in order to improve your aerobic capabilities. He states that you need to run as much as possible between 70-75% MHR. Even now I struggle to run at 75%. It just feels to slow and I guess it confirms how aerobically unconditioned I must be. At the moment my comfortable all day running pace puts me at around 78-80% of MHR. No wonder I haven’t been able to run a good IM yet. I know now I need to get good at running between 70-75% MHR and only then will I consider upping the intensity. This may still take a few more years to achieve.
Haads also talks about pace 2 running which is much higher and around 5 bpm of LT. This is something I’ll avoid for now as I am just not conditioned well enough to be running comfortably at a hr around 165-170bpm. I also think this type of intensity is not relevant to IM racing. I decided to cap my pace 2 intensity work at 155-160bpm. This will still put me at least 10-15bpm over my Aet (145bpm). I think this will be a good adjust for IM training considering that we still need to swim and ride before we reach the marathon.
Well onto next week. This will be the challenge. I’ll aim for around 20hrs this week of just riding and running. My goal is to ride 13 hrs and run 7 hrs. My LSD bike will be up to over 5 hrs and my LSD run I’ll keep at 2-2.15, depending on how my foot holds up. I’m off to the coast on Thursday for a 4 day break, so I’ll be able to hit the trails around Berrara National Park which makes running very enjoyable.
Hope everyone is training well and enjoying the tour.

fluro