22/04/2013-28/04/2013 - My training week

Well, we might as well get the negative out of the way first and then we can finish on a high note!

I still cannot run, which whilst quite disappointing is not really surprising. There has been an improvement  to the extend that I can walk without it causing too much havoc, but the residual tenderness and pain on palpation is still there throughout the day.

I have booked myself in for some physio on tuesday and hopefully they will be able to work some wizardly or voodoo so that I can at least participate in the up coming try a tri next Sunday. I will have a chat with them about what sort of things I can do to ease any continuing pain on the day and then we can work on rectifying any additional damage the race might cause afterwards.

I am a bit disappointed on the whole as the try a tri was supposed to mark the start of a new era in my competitive book and provide an easy entrance into the triathlon world. Alas, it wasn't meant to be and as always, I will try and take away any lessons I can to help shape my future athletic career.

Onto the positives, and what positives they are!

Swimming was a pretty successful venture this Thursday as I managed to complete a pretty brutal descending pyramids set, albeit the last one to do so. It is reassuring that I mamaged to swim 2500m in the hour session and is another reminder that my capability is improving all the time.

I am still working on my swim endurance at higher force outputs as I find my shoulders and arms tire quite quickly when I am trying to push on beyond my "plodding" pace, but this will hopefully come over time and it is still a few months until the olympic swim in July.

Running is still a no go area, but hopefully my ankle will heal up soon enough.

Cycling has been amazing this week. The journey to work on the mountain bike is still going strong and I am finding that I can push a little harder each week.

I managed to get out on two rides this weekend, a longer ride on saturday with the club through newport to usk which was a long 4 hour 30 min ride covering about 52 miles or so.

Sunday was a shorter cycle incorporating a ride round of Sunday's try-a-tri route, but no less enjoyable. I was pretty drained after cycling and so didn't quite make it to sunday's swimming session because of this. Something to improve upon for next week.

27/04/2013: Club ride

The saturday morning club rides are hopefully going to be a repeat occurence every week which will give me the much needed opportunity to put in some real distance on my bike as I go into the competition season.

15/04/2013 - 21/04/2013 my training week

Slightly happier with this weeks training over last weeks all in all. I managed to get a long biking session in on Saturday and finally pushed myself to do a longer swim on Sunday.

I didn't quite manage the full 90 minutes, primarily due to having a bit too much to drink the night before and feeling pretty awful for most of the day!

The Saturday right was immense and was a good bench mark to see how far I've come since I started riding 5 months ago. Whilst the ride wasn't quick, the distance would have been a struggle back at the beginning.

My leg is still painful but decreasingly so and hopefully it will be fully mended by the try a tri on may 5th.

Diet wise, well lets just not go there! The weekend was fuelled primarily by alcohol and pizza although the week was fairly good bar the odd slip.

All in all, a good week!

20/04/2013: Club Ride

The club ride this week was a monster of a ride totalling some 95k in distance and taking 4 hours 30 mins+ to ride.

19/04/2013: Garmin feed now active

I have decided to include a garmin feed which can be found on the bottom left hand corner of the screen which will display the last 10 activities logged to garmin.

Unfortunately I haven't quite worked out how to create a "more" or "history" option yet but will take a look over this at the weekend when I have time.

Hopefully I will be able to make a similar one for Strava and the riding, but seeing as I only use that app for work, i;m not sure how useful or material it will really be further than just another thing on the site.

On a different note, I am thinking about changing the colour scheme (again) as I think the black/blue is too dark.

18/04/2013: Swimming

With my running habits firmly curtailed for the next few weeks, I have an opportunity to firmly focus on the remaining two aspects of my triathlon adventure.

Disaster!

So, unfortunately I am injury stricken! I had hoped that the twinge that I was feeling in my right shin/calf was only a temporary misfortune but four days later it is still pretty painful and palpation of the surrounding area illicits some very high pitched screams!

08/04/2013-14/04/2013 - My training week

Last week's training can be summed up in one word: awful.

14/04/2013: Impromptu triathlon

The reason I was in London this weekend was to support my brother at the Cambridge duathlon which comprised a 7.5km run, 40km bike and a final 7.5km run.

13/04/2013: Run

My schedule had me down for a 7 mile long tempo run which I was due to do on Friday but owing to some other travel arrangements and some issues with my car that took up my attention, I wasn't able to do it until saturday.

08/04/2013: Swimming

After the success of Thursday night and the continued improvement in my swimming, I am starting to get a much more positive about my ability in the pool.

08/04/2013: Easy Cycle

I had planned to do the long ride on saturday with the club but owing to a slight mishap with my alcohol intake, it became very apparent on Saturday morning that that wasn't going to happen!

05/04/2014 - Run - long tempo run

This week has a long tempo of 6 miles scheduled which, if i'm honest, is a more daunting prospect that the other shorter but faster runs put together!

04/04/2013: Swimming - monthly time trial

Every month Cardiff Tri does a 1500m time trial in the Cardiff International Pool on our thursday session which is a good opportunity to measure your progress as the year goes on outside of a race environment.

03/04/2013: Run (tempo)

I was hoping to get two workouts in today having missed the bike session yesterday and had planned to do a quick 5km before work followed by the turbo session with Cardiff Tri in the evening as usual.

Riding to work

Well, the return to mountain biking after three months of using a road bike has been a strange one!

Prior to getting the road bike I figured that my mountain bike was pretty light, but in comparison it's massively heavy! I can still hit about 23+ km/h on the way to work but the uphill journey home is a bit of a struggle.

On an up note, my journey time to work is only 20 mins or so and of course it's a lot cheaper than the train!

01/04/2013: Turbo session

So, I finally managed to drag myself kicking and screaming to do today's turbo session!

01/04/2013: Sprints

There's no sprint training with Cardiff Tri today with it being easter monday and so i figured that I would take myself out and restart the 12 week 10km plan that I began back in January to see what sort of progress I can make over the next three months.