Month: January 2018

Training.

Last week I was saying it was just the swim I need to worry about. Hmmm. Good news and bad. The good news is I bought a clicky ring lap counter. You wear it like a ring and click it every length (otherwise you quickly lose count.) After my first swim in 4 years, when I was quietly pleased to complete 40 lengths (two thirds of a mile) I thought I’d up it to 50 lengths this time. I forgot I was only clicking every time I got back to the shallow end. I was getting changed into my gym bunny kit when I suddenly realised, “hang on, that’s 100 laps!”  A bit over one and a half miles! On my second swim!  Well pleased with that. The not so good news is I’ve had to cut right back on the running. I’ve been getting warning pains up the side of my shins. Not bad, but enough that I’m scared of getting a proper injury. Instead I did a two mile run on the treadmill (after the 100 length swim and 25 minutes on the gym pushbike.) Rather than irritating the injury I’ve been beasting myself on the turbo trainer. 3x hour+ long sessions this week. That is some graft!  Also, thanks to me losing my sense of taste last March, and this training, I’ve gone from a jammy doughnut shy of 12 stones, to 10½ stones. So that is great. Less weight means less effort to drag my lardarse around the Outlaw.    More exciting news is I’ve been forced to go on a spending spree. Bought a new Ironman GPS watch. 12 hours of GPS battery. So, once you get out of the swim and transition (not GPS), you’ve got 12 hours of battery (enough to finish the race) to tell you how you are doing and how much further you have to suffer. Amongst the features that attracted me to it (other than that it’s designed for Iron distance tri’s, obviously) is that you can choose how many lines of information to display on each screen. This means, if you choose just one line, you get a big, clearly visible, display. I’m getting to the stage where reading glasses are no longer an option but a necessity, making my old watch illegible.   Also I’m totally moving the turbo trainer to the shed. I sweat so much I have to clean up puddles off the mat when I’m finished. This is not making for a pleasant house smell. The thing with that is, I’ve currently got it facing my PC to take my mind off my misery as I train. So I started shopping for a refurbished laptop. The online opinion is that refurbs are a pig in a poke though.  In the end I’ve got a cheap, new, Chromebook. A laptop built on a Google platform and down to a budget. After ages spent reading the reviews of what I can get for my money I […]

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Spin to win.

I got that turbo trainer for us. It’s proving to be completely impractical to try and get Wendy’s bike on it. Which is a bugger. The idea is you take your back wheel off and mount the bike on the turbo, running your chain on to a gear cassette (cogs) mounted directly on the turbo. Like this Which is all good and well. Until you come to try to mount Wendy’s bike. Apparently the modern fancy-pants gear cassettes (as on mine) fit each cog individually onto spines on the spindle, and need a special thin chain to fit the cogs, because they in turn  have to be so thin so they can get 11 cogs on the back wheel. Wendy had a go on the turbo with my bike and a lowered seat. She lasted about 2, maybe 3, minutes. That was a shitload of cash well spent. I gave it a try out. After a few minutes your legs are burning. I set myself a target of 20 minutes for my first go as I was in a rush to get to work. It was hellish. And that was in a low gear. Today I upped it to an hour. I was sat in just a pair of shorts and my clip-on shoes, window open, freezing day, sweat pouring off my whole body. Hence the towel and that strip from seat post to handlebars. Seems sweat is corrosive on the bike. It is non-stop burn. It’s like you are going up hill constantly. There is no let up, no flat bits, no coasting. An hour of solid pushing. I was moaning about riding in to work nearly killing me when I first got the bike, someone on twitter said “Spin to win!”. (Spin classes being the name of group sessions of people doing turbo. Seen them at the gym.) He may well be on to something. If I can build up my time on the turbo, and put it through the gears, I am going to batter my bike time at the Outlaw. Usually I just grind out loads of tedious long rides and gradually improve. With this I’m pushing it the whole time. I’ve joined the gym again, like a proper January Gym Bunny. Primarily for the swim sessions, but I’ve got a new pair of trainers so I can do small bricks. Possibly do an hour swim, half hour ride, half hour run. Getting your legs used to switching from one discipline to the next is half the battle. I’m going to give it another 2 weeks to build up some slight fitness, then join Warrington Tri Club. They hold an hour’s tutored swim lesson every Saturday afternoon, which is my day off. If I can get swim training and turbo the crap out of my legs I reckon I’m well on for a personal best this year. Which is quite the ambition in seven months, from scratch. (Day after. Saturday.) Feeling good about my training. Last […]

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Or die Tri-ing!

I’ve been eating humble pie for breakfast, dinner and tea since I started training. I used to scorn low gear wobblers, put it in top gear and pedal you lazy bastards! When I started training for my first Outlaw, on my first day, I did a 51 mile ride and a 13 mile run. A lifetime of bans and motorbike write-offs meant I had cycled everywhere for years.I thought that level of fitness was normal. So people who were making hard work of it needed to pull their finger out and do a bit. Oh the humility. I’ve found a decent route into work, it’s 9.1 mile each way. And it’s been battering me. I’ve only ridden in 2 days but I am ridiculously far away from ‘hop on and ride 51 miles’. I took the car in to a body repair shop to have the wing fitted, pushbike in boot to ride home, and the mechanic was a tri guy. He took one look at my bike and told me to look at bike set-up tutorials on YouTube. I did. Seems I had it all set up wrong. I’ll try this, see if it’s any better. I’m so unfit I’m not even doing a long run on the bike. I’m going to give it a month of riding to work to build up some semblance of fitness then start.   The “die tri-ing” thing was a bit of a moment. I was having persistent chest pains, smack over my heart. It wasn’t bad, that level of pain anywhere else wouldn’t have warranted a mention, but being there you have to worry. I was steering clear of ibuprofen as it has recently been linked to heart attacks. I Googled it to see if I should worry. “Survival rate outside of hospitals, 6%”. OK, that’s not ideal. Warren Lang (school friend) said one of his RAF chaps had died of a heart attack whilst training for an Iron tri. One of the security guards at work, who looked fine, has just dropped dead of one. I carried on training but was going to go to the doctor if it hadn’t cleared by Friday. Then on Thursday morning I was awoken by shooting pains in my left arm and pins and needles. I really thought I was going to die, right then. I was not a happy bunny. It scared me. I was all “I don’t want to not be!” I took a moment, “Can’t avoid it. At least I have been.” I decided to concentrate on the dying bit and not worry about the rest. I didn’t die, by the way. In case you were worried. I hit Google again in the morning. “26 causes of chest pain that are not a heart attack.” I had a read through, tons of stuff. The bit I took from it was “you can tear chest muscles from just a coughing fit… If, after taking anti-inflammatory drugs, the pain persists…” I took some ibuprofen. […]

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Tri, Tri, Tri again.

What was I thinking? After the painfest of the first Outlaw tri I said I was never doing another. After the near death experience of baking my arse off at my second Outlaw tri I said I wasn’t doing another and meant it.   The swimming (2.4 miles) bores me, the riding is painful and boring (112 miles) and the marathon (26.2 miles) at the end, on dead legs, is just an ordeal. Not doing it. No way. Then I got a motorbike and that was that. Never swinging my leg over a pushbike again!   *sigh* Here’s my new pushbike: My life had just become work and sleep. I hadn’t done a run since the 2nd of August, no pushbiking for years, no swim for longer.  The running was the last to go because I actually enjoyed that. But the bit I enjoy is when you are pretty fit and you start pushing it, and making gains. In this job, on my shifts, I couldn’t train regularly so I was always struggling to get going, never improving. I didn’t know I was low of mood, it was just how it was. On a whim I decided to get back into triathlon for a New Year’s Resolution.. On the 2nd of January, 5 months since my last run, I went out and did a 5 mile test run. The run was easy, getting my arse out of the door was the huge challenge. As soon as I got back I was buzzing. Really up for it. I went out the next day for a 4 mile run, then yesterday for another, knocking 30 seconds a mile off the time of the day before. I just can’t help myself. That is so bad. I was trying to take it slow as 90% of injuries are “too much, too soon” I was thinking “getting back into tri”, no specific deadlines.  Tonight I enquired about “improver” swimming lessons, the last two times I was so crap I was too embarrassed to go a tri club for tuition. So I stayed crap. And thrashed about for 2.4 miles, then got out of the lake in the last dozen. Looking at a 1½ miles long lake is a terrible sight when you’re a crap swimmer. I’ve bought a decent bike, I’m looking into swimming, (training and pool times), and I’ve done three runs. Half an hour ago I Googled the Outlaw 2018. It’s not sold out yet. Oh god! TEMPTATION! 29th of July. That’s 29 weeks. It’s do-able, but massive. I want to commit right now. I’ll be gutted if it sells out and I think I can do it. I’ll have a trial week. See what training I can do around work. I could totally do this. If I can train. Oh wow. This is more like it! The terror of a vast and seemingly impossible task with a fixed deadline. Now, I feel alive! Later, Buck. Quick PS, as usual I was suffering […]

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