Gremlins

So in the end I did manage to get on to the trainer last night for a session on the Kickr, but far out it took some time to get there, it seemed like anything that could go wrong with my technology did.

So a bit of background. For those that don't know a Wahoo Kickr is a particularly nifty type of indoor trainer. It is direct drive, ie you remove your back wheel and mount the chain directly on a cassette, which is a design I really like. That is really a minor piece though, the main party when it comes to a Kickr is the controllable resistance. With the Kickr the simplest way to control the resistance is through an app on your phone,which it talks to via Bluetooth. Doing this allows you to program in power levels, simulate hills, head winds, the list goes on. It also means that with the use of third party software you can ride a simulation of a course, like a stage of the Tour or something. All very cool.

All this complicating coolness usually works really smoothly, except for last night.

Last night I was setting up the bike. I had just calibrated my power meter and was connecting the Kickr to the phone. I then realised that I haven't used the Kickr since getting my knew phone so they didn't recognise each other. I quickly rectified that only to find that my power meter had turned itself off because I had taken too long. When I turned it back on it then refused to calibrate properly. Several iterations of turning things off and back on again ensued, before everything was finally working smoothly. I got there in the end, but it took about 20 minutes.

The session itself went well. Felt better than expected to be honest. I hit the power targets easily enough on my intervals and got through the session with relative ease. Very nice.

This morning it time for swimming. Today I thought I would finally brave the Swim Smooth squad. I knew it would hurt, but it was necessary. Hurt it did.

You know you are in for a tough session when you are still in the warm up and you are struggling. Really I was just feeling some soreness from my swim on Wednesday, but knowing that didn't make today's session any easier. To top it off, this morning was one of the tougher sessions that we regularly do on Fridays. The dreaded Goldilocks set. I have spoken about Goldilocks a few times before, usually with a tinge of horror. It looks like this

4 x 100m
200m (baby bear)
4 x 100m
300m (mama bear)
4 x 100m
400m (papa bear)

The painful trick is that everything is done on the same pace, and that pace isn't slow. Really it is the sort of pace you would hold for a solid 100m. As you can imagine doing that for 400m gets painful.

Still I got through. It wasn't pretty and some of it wasn't fast but I survived. Actually I held pace with the rest of the squad better than I was expecting. Plus the pace for the 100s wasn't much off what I would usually swim when fit. It just hurt a lot more to do it.

The thing I like about sessions like this is that there is always a point where you are presented with a choice, and that choice has a sort of beautiful simple clarity. The choice is this:

Stop
or
Don't Stop

Easy option or hard. You are hurting, do you keep hurting or do you stop hurting. Simple as that. In the end I guess a lot of why I do what I do is because of that choice, I like it and the challenge it contains. However, the choice isn't often presented to you quite as clearly as is does during sessions like this.

This morning I chose not to stop. If I want to race well at Albany, I am going to have to keep making that choice.