Paris Roubaix

Another day, another very interesting morning down on the Pool Deck.

As mentioned yesterday, the session today was the Wednesday Redmist session. Up to 5000m of solid effort, attended by the dedicated and/or slightly unstable.

I always enjoy getting down to the pool on Wednesday and seeing just what Paul has dreamt up for the squad. By necessity the efforts are long and so on paper the sessions can seem dull, but the reality is that programs are well thought out and are designed to be tough, but also engaging. This morning was no exception.

This morning Paul decided to take his inspiration from the recent Paris Roubaix spring classic road race. For those unfamiliar the Paris Roubaix is renown for being a phenomenally tough race, 260km including at least 50km of riding over very rough cobbles broken over several sections. On top of that course and terrain it is often wet and muddy. The race's nickname 'Hell of the North' probably tells you about as much as you need to know about it.

How exactly does one translate a challenging road race into a swim session you might ask? With some interesting creativity is the answer.

The way Paul did it was by making a session that was a mixture of long steady efforts (ie the smooth bits of the road) and shorter, harder efforts involving paddles, pool buoys and bands (ie the cobbles), with a 200m flat out effort at the end (representing the finishing sprint).

Cool stuff.

Feedback from the session was mixed. On paper the session was certainly one of the more interesting ones and some of the shorter cobbled sections almost made it look easy, but it certainly was not. The general consensus from the squad was that it was a killer. There certainly weren't too many blistering times for that final 200m, although there were some.

It was a great session to be an observer for, providing a valuable lesson on ways in which a session can be made to be both interesting and challenging. It was also educational to watch the reactions of the folks in the squad. While most of the squad appreciated the attempt to make the session interesting, I think a lot of squad also would have been happy with a standard, solid (perhaps boring) Wednesday Red Mist session. In the end that is what they come down for after all. It was a reminder that while interest and novelty can be welcome changes, they can wear thin if they are over used.

Any sport, including endurance sports like triathlon, are journeys of years not days. Some of those days are going to be filled with doing the same sort of training over and over. Sometimes it isn't pretty, but that sort of dedication and consistency is what success is built on. Using variation to keep things interesting is a great tool, but the bulk of the time has to be spent simply doing the work.

Not pretty, but simple.