Week IM – 3: Hitting Full Stride

This was a solid week: 4.3km swim, 274km bike and 46km run. I hit a few milestones that I’m really happy about. The first is that I ran, for the first time, a weekly total in excess of a marathon: 46km. Given that I planned to ramp up running last and then hit some injury problems, I wasn’t sure if the last minute ramp up was going to happen at all. So it was great to build up the miles somewhat.

The second is that on a long cycle on Saturday, I ticked over to 25,000km on the bike in the last 3 years. That was a little celebration somewhere between Rathangan and Tullamore.

I did 4.2km in the pool spread across two morning sessions on Monday and Friday. Both were sets of short, fast repeat sets – 6x250m on Monday and 10x200m on Friday.

IM rules state that if the water temperature for the swim is above 24.5C, wetsuits can’t be worn. I saw this for the first time this week. Lake Zurich is currently 23C. It was 22.5 during the week, so there is actually a chance that wetsuits could be banned. That would effect the swim quite a bit. I really notice how much higher in the water (and therefore easier it is) I am swimming with a wetsuit as opposed to without.

On Thursday, I did a 20km bike speed session over the bars, pushing hard. On Saturday, I cycled down to Ballinasloe in Galway. This was a 170km cycle due west. It was a tough cycle as I was going straight into the wind for the full 6 and a half hours. This made it difficult to keep the heart rate below 75-80%. There was no let up, but it was a good chance to go through the bike nutrition plan for the IM, and perhaps simulate the increased effort and calorie expenditure if it’s above 28-30C on race day. This was the route:

The reason I cycled to Ballinasloe was to go and watch TiAthlone on Sunday. My brother and two friends were competing in the open Olympic distance race. There’s always a good buzz around Athlone on the triathlon weekends. Especially this year because it was a European Championship event. It was the first time in 3 years I’ve been at a triathlon as a spectator.

It was a lot of fun but by the end, I really wanted to be out racing. “Patience” is the only thing I could tell myself, “..not too long to wait now”.