October

A couple of achievements in the past month to get me on the road to another ironman. The entry has gone in and I’m feeling pretty excited about the prospect of fronting at Taupo come 1 March.

The last month has gone pretty much as I planned. This last week particular attention has been paid to dropping some pounds pretty quickly. This has been achieved by using a week long carb depletion diet, mixed with some training. A tactic I intend to use about every 6 weeks over the coming months. The key is to kick my metabolism into action and get the body used to “burning fat as a fuel.” I have a target weight of 75 kgs for ironman this year, getting down to this weight will be a challenge. (Current weight is 88kg, last years IM race day weight was 79 kgs, hard to believe I once played in the front row and tipped the scales at over 92 kgs)..

In addition I’ve dusted off the indoor trainer over the past month and managed to get in some regular one hour sessions and had a couple of reasonable runs of an hour 20 minutes. The stretching and core strength work is coming on nicely and will continue to be a focus through out. One exercise that worked particularly well on the indoor trainer two years ago was “one legged” spins on the indoor trainer. The target in one session is 15 x 1minute each leg in the BCR.

In setting my goals and training for the next couple of months I think it is wise to record some of the thinking I have been doing around my training programme. This thinking was prompted by the time estimates required for the entry. I have to acknowledge that the body isn’t what it used to be, so I need to be careful that I don’t fall into the trap of doing junk or rubbish miles, just filling in the miles to say that I’ve done the weeks programme. The body does take longer to recover, and it hurts a hell of a lot more now than it used too. So I need to be conscious of listening to my body and making sure that I allow sufficient recovery time between sessions. I intend to adopt a hard easy rotation from day to day and to make sure I watch my nutrition before, during and after training. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I am trying to train smarter not harder. The other thing that I think a lot about is just getting our there and doing it, getting to the letter box can be the hardest thing sometimes.

Over the next month I intend to build some endurance with some long slow distance on the bike and to build the running base, incorporating some bricks. The cycling goal is to have a 160 to 180 km ride under my belt by end of November.

So in summary the past month has been again a mix of consistent swimming three times per week, getting back on the indoor trainer for 5 or 6 one hour rides and braking out the running shoes for a couple of reasonable sessions, all mixed with some good stretching sessions and core strength.