Week 1 / 20


One week down, 19 to go... The first week back to school was pretty tough - hard to get back into work (the work that pays the bills), a fairly hard training week and also my wife was ill, so she needed support from me when I was instead out on my bike. Also, we had a couple of our kids' friends to stay the night on Friday night...

Anyway, I got just over 15 hours of training under my belt, plus one weights session. As you can see from the graphs above (sorry about them being in Spanish), that effort was divided up between swimming (N), biking (B) and running (C), in about the same proportions as the Ironman race itself will entail. [I'm not sure why the pie chart came out wrong, there must be a bug in the spreadsheet and it is protected so...] The upper bar chart represents the TRIMPS (TRaining IMPulses) which are a function of duration and intensity of training. The lower bar chart represents my subjective score for how hard I found the training that day to be. The Friday (V) felt much harder than it was supposed to be, probably because I'd had an upset stomach and I was getting tired from all the running I was doing. The amazing thing I find about training for triathlons is that you can feel utterly exhausted going into Saturday and yet, because you are switching from one sport to another, you can feel fully recovered on Monday without having taken a day off. Normally, of course, it is important to have rest days but I have less days of complete rest programmed than when I was training purely for the Marathon. The good news is that meanwhile my feet have grown back enough of a thick skin to be able to run without any more blisters.

Pozuelo-Brunete-Valdemorillo-Navalagamella-Fresnedillas-Quijorna-Boadilla-Pozuelo (109km, total ascent 1080m, 4h)

On Saturday I did a beautiful 4 hour ride (see map and elevation profile). I tried to plot it out beforehand using Bike Route Toaster but every time I got to a particular section "se tostó" (it crashed or "toasted itself"). I found out why once I got to that section because it turned out to be a dual carriage way on which bikes were not allowed. Nevertheless, there was a generous hard shoulder with relatively little broken glass and debris so I rode along that; at one point I was overtaken by a couple of policemen on motor bikes but they didn't tell me anything. I'm lucky to live in a very picturesque corner of Madrid. The weather was absolutely perfect, the sun was shining but it was not too hot (around 10-15 degrees). The route has a few challenging hills so it was impossible to keep my pulse rate in the aerobic zone all the time but, on average, my pulse was 128bpm. On the ride I drank about 2 litres of water (I had 2.5 on board between all my various water bottles) and I ate a couple of Apple and Cinnamon Mule bars which tasted sooooooo good. In summer I will have to drink a lot more on the long rides and probably take electrolytes with the water but, for now, it is nice not to have to worry about that.