Jo’s bike ready to rumble

It’s not long till the Ironman and the place is hotting up. Loads of people out swimming and cruising on cool bikes. It’s fun to have all this atmosphere whilst training hard and not getting nervous. This must be the most people I’ve ever known doing a single Ironman and with many of them staying in our hotel I’m having some  really fun social breakfasts and dinners.

So … good luck to Jo, Sergio, Jaime, Mel, Ted, Simon, Paul, Paul, Emma, Brett, Jon, Kevin, Kevin, Frank, Pat, Joann, Nick, Roz, Helen, Raf, Rachel,Lotte, Ben, Tommy, Robert and Matt. I’ll be on the sidelines cheering you all on and trying to track Kona slots across six age groups as best I can.

My training has really come on this past week. A couple of long hard rides with Russell and then today I did my long run. Aiming for 30k with each 10k getting faster than the last. I managed: 52:54 (120bpm), 51:48 (124bpm), 49:16 (135bmp). I was really really chuffed. It felt controlled and strong and I felt I could have easily done another 10k (not sure faster!). It’s encouraging to see improvements in my running.

Here’s my training since the last post:

• Mon: Swim: 3.5km / Bike: 109km / Run: 13km / hours: 5.9
• Tue: Swim: 3.5km / Bike: 110km / Run: 11km / hours: 5.9
• Wed: Swim: 3.5km / Bike: 183km / Run: 0km / hours: 7.5
• Thurs: Swim: 3.65km / Bike: 0km / Run: 30km / hours: 3.6
• Fri: Swim: 3.8km / Bike: 94km / Run: 10km / hours: 5.1

The routine and rhythm of this camp has built and it’s great fun. It’s reminding me of the fun of just training long most days and being tired every night and sleeping superbly.

Today was really the last day of this training camp. I’ll probably get something done on Sunday but this is really it for the main training. Really rounded off the camp well by swimming the full Ironman course then riding the Ocean Lava half Ironman route – we hammered the climbs giving me my best ever CP1min though to CP1min15 !! It was a real laugh. We had Tomas along who did precisely the right thing in hanging on wheels the whole time and never getting dropped – this gave him best ever CP numbers from 2mins through 15 mins. Not only was this a great laugh but I had my best normalised power of the trip – 242 watts. I capped it off with a 10k run. My target with a lot of my running is to get faster throughout. My theory is I want to learn to push my pace when tired. This run went so well – I managed to get faster every KM. I did the first 5km in 28:40 and returned in 23:20. Great way to get in the mood for supporting.

So in 11 days I’ve done 39km swimming, 1,018km biking, 116km running for a total of 57.6 hrs training … it’s like the good old days. It does mean for the rest of May I have to average less than 2 hours a day. I guess, thats called recovery.

An awesome camp. Having a training camp ending supporting friends at an Ironman is good for the motivation. It keeps what it’s all about right at the top of your mind. Having a buddy along to train with helps so much. Russ is a brilliant training buddy for me. Firstly he’s easy going, secondly he’s pretty much up for alsorts of craziness in training and thirdly he’s none competitive in training. This latter point I should clarify. He is not overly competitive – we do race and push each other but we he appreciates that the little victories in training are not significant. They’re often for reason of other training or whatever. We just have a laugh about it afterwards. It’s never like we’re always trying to beat each other but we do try and pull a fast one and it’s amusing and pushes us hard. Just like at the end of our Ironman plus ride when we each went through upping the watts hoping the other would crack but eventually just calling a truce. Good stuff. We both talked each other in to Epic France this year and I reckon he will be one of the strongest riders there. It’s going to be a blast.

Tomorrow is the big race. I’m sat on my own by the pool now letting Jo get some rest and time to think. All my thoughts are with her. I so want her to do well and truly believe she can. I will do all I can tomorrow to give her the support she needs to put it all out there and get a brilliant result. GO JO !!

Lets finish on something completely random and fun. Been messing with my training data and decided to re-bucket my run distances for the whole diary (~7.5 years of data) – how weird is this graph … big peaks for 7 and 9 mile runs but low for 8 mile runs. Makes me wonder … also makes my life that little more fun … yeh it makes me think back to try and work out what regular runs I’ve been doing in places I live that were all 7 or 9 miles but never 8. Now that I have this graph though it will probably influence me towards 8 mile runs…