Week 4 / 20

Another really easy week - 8 hours + one weights session - this time to allow for full recovery after the Half Marathon. To be honest, I didn't feel as though I needed any recovery but I have learnt (finally) that it is better to be on the safe side. After all, a few extra hours would have had very little effect on my fitness in 4 months time and would only have made me more tired going into week 5, which, by the way, looks like it will be relatively tiring.

On Saturday, I had to do 35 minutes cycling at CEXT (easy pace, <123bpm), 60 minutes at CMED (medium intensity, >142) and another 35 minutes at CEXT. Its quite difficult to adhere to the pulse rates with all the hills that are on my route - this is where a power meter would come in handy because it gives you immediate feedback on how hard you are pushing the gears. So I was chugging along at CMED (which was about 34kp/h on average) and, at one point, I whooshed past a group of three cyclists who were slipstreaming each other. I must have pressed the big red button marked "testosterone" because, a few minutes later, one of them (who had probably been tailing me without me realizing) suddenly overtakes me and says, "I'll pull you along if you like". The problem is that then my pulse drops because it is much easier tailing behind someone else and yet if I overtake him back its going to look like I want a race. After another few minutes he slows right down and pulls to the side saying that he seems to have "lost" his friends and I just carry on as before.

On the Sunday, I had 3 hours at CEXT programmed. This time I got into a silly situation with another cyclist because I kept overtaking him and he kept overtaking me back. The thing is, on the climbs, I would go more slowly than him because of the throttle limit imposed by my restrictive heart rate while he would give it some welly; on the descents, he would coast and I would have to pedal frantically to get my heart rate up. At one point I took a different route through the village only to find that it joined up again with his later. He's probably writing in his blog about a testosterone fueled dick who kept on overtaking him right now.

Here you can see a kind of summary of the training so far. It goes back to just after the Marathon I did at the end of November. The "TRIMPS" are TRaining IMPulses and allow you to add up apples and oranges by assigning weights to each of the intensities and disciplines. So, swimming clocks up more points than running which clocks up more points than cycling and, obviously, the higher the heart rate intensity, the higher the points. Again, "N" is swimming (Natación), "B" is bike (Bicicleta) and "C", running (Carrera). You can see that the subjective load ("carga subjetiva" or, in other words, how hard I found each session) follows the TRIMPS much more closely than the number of hours of training ("horas totales").