Hitting the limit

It seems like I have hit my physical limit in the training. I hadn't expected it to be like this - I thought I would suffer the dreaded overtraining syndrome of demotivation, sickness and injury. Of course it is important to have rest days in your training program so that your body can recover and make the necessary adjustments to be able to tackle an increasing load; the thing about triathlon training is that the bike is a rest from running as swimming is from the bike. To give you some idea, yesterday I found myself considering that it was a "day off" in that I only had to run an hour and a half.

Since Saturday I have noticed that my lower back has been getting painful. It's not a sharp pain like you get from contractions (for example, in my shoulder) but rather a dull pain which you associate more with general fatigue. It can be an almost pleasant sensation of feeling that you have done a good workout with the proviso that, as soon as you lie down and rest, the ache goes away. Well, that's the problem - it doesn't go away, it keeps nagging all day long and is starting to interfere with my sleep. Yesterday, after the run (and running usually calms any back pain I might have) it got particularly bad. I went to see Paloma, the physio at work and even she was only able to slightly alleviate the pain and discomfort. Some Ibuprofen also helped. Paloma said that it was not a problem with the muscles but with the joints as a result of fatigue from training.

So it seems like the common denominator in the three sports is the back and that it simply does not get a chance to rest. Today I am having to skip my training for the first time since I broke my elbow in June last year. I think what I do now is what makes the difference between the kind of "boom bust" athletes (of which I was one) and the steady improvers. It's always very difficult to break the training schedule because of the fear of losing fitness, the fear of breaking the habit or even the fear of being a "wuss" - and having a incessant pain in your back doesn't put you in the best mood for taking these kind of decisions. This was the main reason I got in touch with my trainer, Jonathan, in the first place: to be able to charge him with the responsibility of me having to "slack off" every now and again. It's funny, my trainers in my rowing years in the late 80's and early 90's were there for the opposite reason, to make sure we didn't slack off. I'll send an email to Jonathan shortly and see what he says. Hopefully a couple of days rest will be enough, followed by a few days to build back up to the volume and intensity I have been training at. It's a shame that it should happen in this important peak week that I have been building up to for a month now, but it's also not surprising that it should happen now.

Taking this break will probably have no effect on my performance in the Ironman - just as well that it happened now and not in two month's time - but, suppose that it results in my time being 10 minutes slower than it would have been. It's still my best possible time. Had I sustained an injury from falling off my bike or overdoing it generally, not only would the effect be greater (most probably), but it would be something avoidable. That I am physically unable (at this point) to complete 100% of the training program Jonathan has set out for me is as much a real limitation as the fact that I couldn't run a Marathon in 2 hours and 4 minutes even if my life depended on it. This is my way of rationalising this little setback, and I hope it will be little.

Week 10 / 20

Half way there!!!

The weather was so much better this week and that makes such a difference. I think that if you have to do your Ironman training in the UK, you should get a headstart in the race to make up for the bad conditions you had to suffer in training. The long rides on Saturday and Sunday were actually a pleasure (once my shoulder had settled down) - not too hot (only needed less than half a litre of water per hour and no sunblock), not too cold (shorts and t-shirt) and lovely clear blue skies. Only got one puncture on the road bike but I managed to (calmly) fix it without any problems.

My shoulder is a lot better thanks to Marta - it's still not perfect, though. I can almost set my watch by it - it starts to hurt about 30 minutes into a ride and then stops again after about an hour. Even though I am coming to expect that the pain will subside, it severely effects my mood and makes the ride seem daunting at first.

I did my long run on Friday on the way to work (2 hours) and I am noticing that I am a lot fitter (which is just as well) but I am getting a bit lazy, I have to say. I am running at about the same speed as I would have done some months ago but my pulse rate is much lower (133bpm versus 147bpm). What I should be doing is running faster but, although the cardiovascular load seems less, the muscular load does not and, after a week of heavy training, my legs feel like lead.

What about swimming? I hardly ever mention it, partly because I do much less of it than the other two sports (it is a relatively small part of the Ironman) and partly because it is what I am worst at. Still, that means that the improvements I am making are all the more dramatic. When I can, I have a private swimming lesson with Luis from the gym at work. The good thing is that he has done the Total Immersion course so at least he knows what I am trying to do and can help me develop a style that includes the best of all worlds, hopefully. There are times when it "clicks" and I feel like I am swimming on top of the water - it is a very rewarding sensation when you get it right, but it is also very demoralising when you are slugging it through the water. At one point I started to worry that I was getting one of those dreaded swimming related injuries like Swimmer's Shoulder - it turned out that that the burning sensation I was feeling in my shoulder came from my beard rubbing against it every time I turned to breathe!

Anyway, all this to say, so far so good. Next week I have the mother of all weeks as far as volume goes. I've decided to take a couple of days holiday to be able to train without getting unduly stressed about it: I have been building up to being able to handle this volume for the last couple of months so I really want to be able to tackle it head on. After next week there will be a relatively light week and then a build towards the Half Ironman in Lisbon at the end of April and, after that, a final build towards the Ironman in Brazil itself. That's not to say it's going to get any easier but I'm hoping that it will be easier to keep motivated.

From my commute: Some of these olive trees are over 1,000 years old!

Shouldering the pain

The pain in my shoulder has been getting too much lately so I decided to get some help. I normally see a physio at work, Paloma, who is brilliant but the other 6,500 employees seem to think so to, so it is often difficult to get an appointment, unless it is in the middle of the work day which I am reluctant to do. Instead, I called A Mano Fisios who are able to come to my house at whatever antisocial time best suits me. Marta turned up with a foldable massage bed and, despite her unassuming size, she gave me a very tough massage which was just the right side of being intollerably painful. I'd rather have to put up with a lot of pain during a concentrated and controlled period of time than have it creep up on me during an otherwise taxing training session (or competition, for that matter). It made me realize, though, how serious the problem was - the muscles in my shoulder blade were knotted like an old sailor's rope. I find it curious how much pain you can tollerate by breathing heavily - I wonder, where does this link come from? Is it an evolutionary trait inherited from the labour of childbirth?

Marta prescribed me some exercises to do with one of those big rubber bands to strengthen the muscles but, what was most helpful, was that she pointed out something that was probably obvious to anyone but myself. The shoulder separation I have not only means my shoulder hangs down slightly lower, but my shoulder blade itself tends to stick out the back - something I wasn't aware of as I can't see it myself. She showed me how, by bringing my shoulder back slightly, I could reposition it and she told me that this is what I should aim to do while on the bike. It makes perfect sense: when I am doing active work with my shoulder it tends to position itself correctly - swimming and running are not a problem, for example - but on the bike, the work is more passive, the arms and shoulders have to balance the work of the legs and respond to shocks in the road. As a result, I tend to have a "lazy" posture, one which means that the muscles are at a disadvantage when responding to what is required of them. I have to make a conscious effort to position the shoulder correctly when I am on the bike, without tensing it up, of course. I also have to be aware of my posture while I am at my desk at work for the very same reasons.

I also bought some bar ends for my mountain bike, which give me an alternative (and more comfortable) hand position. Its too early to say whether all these measures are enough to tide me over until the Ironman, but I had no shoulder pain this morning during the two hour ride I did before work, so the early indications are good.

Note to self...

Remember to cut my toenails regularly...

Its a privilege

I was reading a book of accounts of Ironman Finishers and DNF'ers (Did Not Finishers) when I was struck by a comment of one of the authors. She said that we were privileged to be able to enjoy the level of fitness that training for an Ironman gives you. I had never thought of it like that; I had previously thought that my fitness was my right and what I got in return for the price I paid in training. I don't have to go so far as to compare myself to people with physical discapacities. Firstly, the "price" is not something only I am paying for, it is something that my family is also paying for. But not only that, the fact is that I have the room for maneouvre to be able to dedicate lot's of time (and money) to something which is for a purely selfish benefit - there are many people who are already under too much stress just to be able to make ends meet, to think of doing something like this on top of it all. Of course, there are some side benefits - I'm sure I am better able to handle stress at work, better at managing my time and generally more alert as a result of the training I am doing - but, let's not kid ourselves, I would have those benefits with a third of the training volume I am currently doing.

No, reading that comment has really made me think. I am very fortunate to be able to do this "experiment" of seeing what happens to my body if I subject it to all this training. Every week it seems like a new vein has popped up - even my weedy arms are starting to look a little bit more muscley - and, most importantly, it is a great feeling to be able to run fast and long almost effortlessly. Its a shame, of course, that as soon as I drop down to a reasonable amount of training, the veins will go back into hiding below a layer of subcutaneous fat, the muscles on my arms will drip off like melting wax and the long runs will go back to huffing and puffing. Although I am going to do everything in my power to not do another Ironman (for the time being), I would like to keep things ticking over so that when the kids are off to university I can take it up again, this time as a 50-something age grouper (with the best tri bike that money can buy in 2022!).

Week 9 / 20

As usual, not much to say about the training during the week which was pretty uneventful - most of the "action" was at the weekend, when we went to Ciudad Real (home of Don Quioxote). I drew up a couple of routes on bikeroutetoaster and sent them to my Garmin in preparation. The weather promised rain so I reluctantly decided to take the mountain bike with me - in any case I like to avoid sticking my road bike on the roof of the car as much as possible. The idea was that the mountain bike would be more robust, especially on roads that I didn't know - ha ha, the irony!

On Saturday I got a puncture at the furthest point from "home". Not to worry, I had a spare tube, patches and a top of the range pump that had hardly been used. I connect the pump to the valve and all the remaining air comes scooting out; this is when I find that the pump doesn't actually work. I call my wife - this is the first time I have had to play this card because there were no other cyclists out to help me. Its a real hassle for her to come because she is supposed to be working - of all the weekends, what bad luck! I start to get quite cold waiting for her to come but thankfully I spot another cyclist - Manolo - passing by. He very kindly stopped and helped me get going again, and was also good company on the ride until he himself got a puncture! It seems like I am jinxed by the Puncture Demon: everyone who stops to help me seems to end up falling foul of it too. My shoulder was extremely painful during the first half of the ride - so much so that it made me shout out in pain a couple of times. This, coupled with getting the first puncture on the mountain bike in about 9 months and the fact that I had an hour and a half run to do immediately after, put me in a very dark mood. It doesn't take too much imagination to guess what I was calling the company that made the pump that let me (and my tyre) down - Crank Brothers. At least the run was very good quality - the last 20 minutes at medium heart rate I completed at 15km/h, after three hours riding and an hour running. I worked out my run in such a way that I could pick up a new pump and inner tube from Eroski on the way for my long ride the next day.

The ride on Sunday was supposed to be 5 and a half hours long. In the end it was 6 hours of pedalling and more than 7 hours of elapsed time. During the ride I didn't get just one puncture or two, no, I got FIVE punctures! I checked very carefully each time inside the tyre to see whether there was something lodged in there but the answer was much simpler than that - the tyre was wearing out and it chose this weekend to make its last stand. Not to worry, I had a spare tube, patches and a brand new pump. Now, the Chinese can make good quality items if they put their mind to it but they are the experts at making disposable plastic crap. Normally you can expect to get at least a couple of goes out of something "Made in China" but the pump (9€) turned out to be utterly useless (worse than the W*nk Brothers one) and the spare tube - get this - split immediately as soon as I pumped it up the first time! I needn't have run 10km the day before clutching a pump and a spare tube after all, not to mention the waste of money. Anyway, I had learnt an important lesson from Manlolo: instead of trying to pump up the tyre with the hand pump and risking being left with completely flat tyres, better to soldier on to the nearest petrol station and pump up the tyres with the machines they have there. It meant that I ended up cycling about a third of the 140 kilometers I managed to cover on a partially flat tyre, with that annoying growl it makes rubbing against the road and with the seat bouncing up and down, making fun of all the energy I was putting in to moving forward. On top of that I made the classic mistake of not noticing that I had the wind with me on the outbound leg; the return journey was into a headwind most of the way. At one point, the road I was riding along petered out and turned to mud. I had the mountain bike so I decided to plow on regardless. Actually "plow" is exactly the right word for it - this wasn't mud but some kind of sticky red clay - I'd never seen anything like it before. Soon my wheels had an extra 5cm diameter and were so clogged up they wouldn't move. Amazingly I managed not to gunk up the gears or the disc brakes so I was able to pull most of the stuff off and carry on.

Amongst the usual roadkill - rabbits, hedgehogs, birds, etc - I saw a dead dog lying in a field and it made me realize how far away I was from anything and anyone: I didn't see a single cyclist in the 7 hours I was out. If my tyre had deflated completely then I really would have been screwed and my wife would not have been amused to have to do a two hour round trip just to avoid her husband joining the dog in the field. The amazing thing is - and I am rather proud of this - I didn't lose my temper once! I was a bit nervous that I would end up getting lost as my Garmin ran out of batteries after 90 kilometers and I had opted for a circular route rather than my usual out and back style. I started to go off the beaten track as far as nutrition went and, instead of my usual Mule bars, started to eat Snickers, M&Ms and drink Red Bull. Perhaps this was why I started to "bonk" (run out of energy stored as glycogen) in the last 8 kilometers or so. I was so happy to see Ciudad Real looming before me - I felt nearly as elated as I have done to see the finish line of a Triathlon. Food was waiting for me when I got back and I gratefully wolfed it down. Meanwhile, my back tyre sighed as it let out its last breath.

Tonight I will be buying some new tyres and a new pump, made anywhere but in China.

Painting the town red

This shows where I have been in and around Madrid on my bike and running; it by no means is comprehensive - I've lost data here and there or I've just simply forgotten to take my trusty Garmin with me. It's actually quite useful, now that I can see where I have been, to help me find new routes as I am getting quite bored of the tried and tested ones.