Month: April 2018

Giant Steps.

I did my marathon last week and found myself surprisingly fast. I really wish I’d have pushed harder from the start instead of tentatively pacing myself. Lots of 8.15- 8.30 M/Ms, with which I was both pleased and surprised. On Wednesday I got an early dart from work so introduced myself to my tri club at the run training session.  Apparently they normally get you to run a few K (they work in French, I think in minute/ miles, so that’s a bugger) then scientifically work out your run speeds for different levels of work out. As I had a recent marathon time for them to play with they just paired me up with an ultra runner (Jim, who does 30, 50 and 100 mile runs) and used his times. After the warm up, it was things like: Run 400m at X pace, jog 400m, repeat. Then run 1K at X pace, etc. I’m not sure I’m at the pace of Jim, or that he was going at the pace set, supposedly roughly 8.00 m/ms. I was gasping for air after each run. Next time I’ll check my own times and pace. Anyway I went, I introduced myself. And I got beasted. Exactly what I need. Someone else to crack the whip. That’s how you get faster. I was talking to Jim (between gasps) and said that I still hadn’t given up on my ambition to go sub 3 hours on the marathon. He said he’d be happy with a “good for age group”. I didn’t say anything. (I think I’ve grown as a person, lol.) I looked it up, good for age for 51 is 3.15 marathon. OK, that’s a good target on the way. Today I got up early to do my long run before running Wendy for her driving theory test (she passed. YAY!) I was going to do 20 miles, but was a bit late so was going to wing it. I did the first mile slowly to warm up. I stopped to retie my shoelace. I still managed a respectable (by current standards) 8.27m/m. I decided to up the pace, thinking I’d try for the 8 m/ms of my circuit training. I checked my watch at the end of the second mile, 7.27! Bugger the 20 miles, I was on for a benchmark 10 miles! I gritted my teeth and pushed on. After the warm up mile I only dropped out of the 7.30s once (7.45) and did a 7.25. My average was 7.39 for the 10 miles. If I’d have warmed up properly and ran from the start I could have been faster. I was going to go another fast 10 miles, try to go fast from the start and beat the 7.40 average above. Crazy rookie mistake though, after work I drank a load of orange juice and had some food, within a mile of setting off I had an awful stitch. I was forced to stop and get my breath. I decided […]

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Condition. I haz one.

I can only apologise for my last blog. I read it back the next day and I sound like a total arsehole. It’s taken me a while to work through it but I think I have it. I have a condition, one of the aspects of which is low self esteem. Which is all well and good and you’d think it would keep me from being an dick. However, as it’s not something of which I’m consciously aware, I don’t factor it into knock-on judgements. It bothers me people making a fuss because I don’t think anything I can achieve is that praiseworthy. I actually get angry at people for saying they couldn’t. That is the knock-on effect. I can do it, and I’m shit, so anyone who doesn’t do better is taking the piss. Which leads to me advising noobs on a triathlete forum “If you eat at every feed station, you can do it.”  Bad advice and belittling the heroic failures of some people.  Anyway. I have to bear it in mind. I’ll have to try and accept praise without anger and big up other people’s achievements. It’s got to be better than being the arsehole who wrote that last blog.   The big ride didn’t happen last week. I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I took my bike in to have the gear cables internally routed as I had no idea how to do it. It took the guy a week. I hopped on my bike, rode to the main road, went to change down gear, nothing. I rode back and tried to work out what was wrong. I finally sussed out that where the inner cable goes into the frame there should be a washer to stop the outer cable from following it, thus keeping the cable under tension. The washer had pulled into the frame, the outer cable had slipped in, their was no tension, couldn’t change gear. Balls. The problem is the internal routing. You have to feed the cable in to the end of your tri bars and somehow have it pop out at the end of the frame on the back wheel (what would be a swinging arm on a motorbike). The shop guy, a full-on Ironman age group winner, had made done such a half arsed job that when I was looking at my bike I noticed a screw protruding at the bottom of the downtube. Apparently you unscrew that and a plate comes out, you push the cable in at your handlebars, it pops out of the panel, you then thread it through the (not) swinging arm and improvise some washers to retain the tension. Simple as that. Took me about 15 minutes of fiddling about. Bastard. Tri guy won’t be getting another penny from me. I’m riding in to work in top gear nearly all the time now to build muscles. But my bike started creaking and the chain skipped a few times. Which worries me on […]

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