Epic

Well what an epic weekend of training. 300km on the bike over two days. With a run off the back of the bike on day 2. I am pretty happy with getting through that, I had my doubts at times.

It would have been nice if it could have come at the end of a solid week of training, but I will take what I can get. The last two days goes a fair way to making up for the rest of the week.
I was pretty unsure how the body was going to cope with a second long ride off the back of yesterday's long ride, but I was pleasantly surprised how well it went. There was certainly some carry over fatigue, but I wasn't too aware of it, unless I was heading up hill. In fact for the majority of the ride I would almost say that today felt better than yesterday. I was being a lot more conservative for the first part of today's ride, which might have contributed to it feeling better. Having said that though, my average speed for the ride today ended up being exactly the same as the average speed of my ride yesterday, despite the conservative start. I am happy that I was able to maintain the speed. 


I was also fairly unsure how I was going to go with the intervals in the session. Once again better than expected. I am still struggling to hit the target speeds on these intervals, even when I am feeling fresh, but I am getting closer and they are feeling better each time I do the session. I wasn't expecting much today, given the carry over fatigue, but I got a lot closer to my target times than I expected. One thing though, we seem to be getting a lot of north westerly winds at the moment, which means the last part of my ride is always into a headwind. I am really really getting sick of slogging into a headwind for the last 10kms of my rides, right when it is hurting the most.

For the whole ride I had the run hanging over my head. All the way I was thinking, I still have to run after this. I was really unsure how it was going to go. Despite approaching the ride pretty conservatively, I was still stuffed by the end, but I was pleasantly surprised how the run went. Once I was running, I was just running. I would by lying if I said I wasn't tired, and that certainly played its part,  but not as much as I thought it would. I usually take these sorts of runs pretty hard, seeing how much I can beat my target times by. But today I just wanted to make sure I survived, the aim was to only be under the target time by a little bit. In the end I was under it by a fair way. Certainly not a PB, but that really wasn't the intention, a lot quicker than I expected though. It was good to go into a run carrying that much fatigue and have it go okay. Running under those sort of circumstances is a new experience for me, but something I will have to get more used to as I move more into the world of Ironman. So this was a positive first step.