January 30, 2007

The Great Wall Of China

My training program is starting to resemble the Great Wall of China, in that it's hard work and involves a lot of bricks! Triathlon bricks however are back-to-back training sessions in two of the three triathlon sports. Usually it means a cycle-to-bike, as your legs feel like "bricks" when you get on my bike, but it also covers the other combinations.

Apart from my Monday rest day, I'm doing a minimum of two sessions per day (2-3 hours in total per day) for the next 5 weeks, including 4 time trial triathlon's at the beach on the weekends. My little sister has kindly volunteered to mind my gear during the swim and run parts of these. Tomorrow is going to be a hard day, as I have a 2.5 hour cycle session, which is pretty huge probably 65km or more in distance, and my legs are still a little sore from the 20km run on Sunday!

My swimming is improving the slowest, but there is steady improvement. I can now breath on both sides with relative ease, but my stoke count is still very high: 27 per 25m when I checked morning, good is something like 16 or 17. So there's a lot of room for improvement there! One of the first things I need to work on is, on my breathing stroke my other arm goes back almost immediately (rather than waiting for the one on my breathing side to return first), this is a bad habit that will require some conscious effort to break...

On Sunday we went over to Rotorua's Blue Lake to watch the race 5 sprint triathlon, part of the New Zealand Triathlon series (I'm doing race 8). This time we got there before the race started, got to see both transitions and an idea of what a good time is for this length event. The guy that won did it in about an hour and splits were about 10min swim (750m), 35min bike (16km) and 20min run (5.5km). The lengths for my race are slightly different, and in fact had changed from previously posted when I looked at the Triathlon New Zealand website this morning.

My race is now a 500m swim, 16km bike and 5km run, which is a fair bit shorter than when I first signed up (750m/20k/10k) in December. While I'm sure the training I've done for the extra distance won't hurt, I'm going to focus a bit more on speed work now and drilling transitions as these are all important for short triathlons.

Posted by Matt at January 30, 2007 8:53 AM

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