Equipment - Bike Box

I bought a bike box. I should have done this last year, but I tried to save a few quid and got a bag for taking the bike on the plane instead. This worked, but was a bit hard to push/pull, and I'm pretty sure bike frame got bend in the airplane's hold on the way out to France last year.

But I've now picked up a fairly new SciCon Aero Tech Evolution from a friend who doesn't need it any more, and it looks really good.

The plan is to take my bike on any holiday, and get some nice warm cycle practice when abroad. We'll see. Other than that - I'm now ready (equipmentwise at least :-)for my next Ironman.

February 2008

Brief summary of the year so far.

I've been feeling really tired. Not sure why I'm quite so low, as I'm doing exactly the same as I did last year, except less training! Oh well, not getting any younger perhaps.

I've been doing a regular 30 minute run on Wednesday evenings and a fairly regular 40 minute run on an Saturday. I've been swimming 50 lengths (750M) on a Friday afternoon. I've been cycling for around 2 hours on a Sunday, but have missed a couple of these. This is the hardest for me recently, and I've struggled with my pace a lot. Of course, I'm still cycling to work every day, which comes to around 45 miles a week.

So, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday are rest days - two more than I got last year when Ironman training.

I've had a lot of trouble with the Polar heart rate monitor. First I thought I was pre-soaking the chest strap in too much water, so stopped. This didn't help. Now I'm wetting it a little bit, and even that isn't working all the time. It's annoying, but at least I'm getting the times of the exercises recorded, if not the HR, and I'm also using my foot pod to record speeds. I will post this information when I work out how to do it in a sensible way.

I am feeling quite strong, just too exhausted to exercise every day. Unlike the last three seasons, I am not scared this year of finishing my events. I'm doing races I've done before, and my goals are completely different now. I have to beat my previous times (weather conditions willing), and I really think I can do this. Unfortunately, the place where I can save most time is in the swim, which I'm still not fast at. I can swim crawl now instead of breaststroke, but amazingly the two are about the same speed for me. I do get less tired though, and can be more consistent, so by the end of my swims, I should be more ready for the bike and run than before.
I've also incorporated a fairly steep hill in my training run this year which really gets my heart pumping, and should be good practice for the climb up to the castle in the Windsor Triathlon.

So the plan is to keep on keeping on, and then get more rest in the weeks approaching my events. Spring is coming and the cycling always gets easier then. I think the training is enough to get me through, and to be honest, ramping it up much would probably cause me to injure myself.