April been and gone

April was the first full month of preparation so it was interesting to see how the hours stacked up.  In total I managed to rack up just over 30 hours.  Now depending on your viewpoint this will seem either a lot or nothing special.  In the context of what is needed in the months ahead it is certainly on the light side, but also looking back over recent months where the average has been only around 18 hours a month it is a good step up at approximately 65%. 

Any increase in the training load needs to be gradual so that the body can adapt to both the additional muscular damage and equally importantly to the general “tiredness” that accompanies the extra training stress.  The latter is potentially a real show stopper, especially for an old fella.  With individual muscular injuries triathlon luckily still allows you to substitute workouts. Run less- ride more, swim less-weight train and so on.  The consequence of general over stressing typically results in becoming run down leading to various sicknesses which prevent all training so avoiding this condition is paramount.  To prevent this occurring it is important to manage recovery well by taking rest days and ensuring adequate sleep.  The rest days are easy for me, sometimes too easy, because the weekly flights I take between Brisbane and Melbourne, for work, typically mean that Thursday is a day that is fully taken up with work and travel so is tailor made as a day off.  The sleep side of the recovery equation is one that I am not so good at, when I am away in a hotel room I really struggle to get off the couch and get into bed.  It is one I am trying to rectify.

Anyway back to my 30 hours in April.  Swimming accounted for 4 hours, running for 5.5 hours and cycling in total was 21 hours.  Cycling is disproportionately high for sure but it has the benefit of being a very forgiving sport, sitting on your bum the whole time.  Running particularly can be very debilitating due to its high impact.   The month of May should pan out to around 42-44 hours, with a split somewhere in the vicinity of 7/28/8 for swim/bike/run.  Basically an extra week’s work thrown into the timetable.

Interestingly the 30 hours in April equates to about 22,000 calories which in turn should be about 2.5 kg’s of bodyweight.  In reality all this training just makes you hungry so you don’t get full value for the hours put in; probably around 50% is achievable.  I managed to drop from around 84.5 to 83.4 so if that run-rate continues end of May I should be looking at something just under 82kg.  This is still a long way from a target race weight between 77-78 kg, but it also a long way from race day so no need to panic.  Racing weight is an interesting topic, maintaining muscle mass is important for power generation but every extra kg has to be dragged around for basically half a day come race day.  I believe that 78 is an appropriate target but I certainly won’t be driving myself overly hard to achieve any particular weight that is not dictated purely by the amount of training I am doing.

Anyway the pilot is telling me that that is all from seat 5D on flight QF631, filled the time in nicely.