I had a rough night last night, my little girl Charlotte has a hell of a cough and is teething so needless to say Em and I saw pretty much every hour during the night. Thankfully however both my girls ( and the cat ) were flat-out asleep when I left at 6.30am to get to the pool. Though heavy with sleep there was a certain sparkle in my eyes as I prepared to begin quite possibly the most important and tough 23 weeks of my life ( in terms of Triathlon ).
Today is the first day of my Lanzarotte Ironman plan, designed to get me round the hot, hilly and windy 140.2 miles of volcanic rock. I’m being coached by the COLT founder and Captain, Richard Mason who is also a personal trainer.
Each week I get sent my schedule, including details of what each session should be, why I’m doing it and what the goal for that week is. I’m also receiving detailed data on what heart rate zones I should be in, what pace I should by training at and what cadence I should be spinning at on the bike / turbo. I’m really excited by it all.
It all kicked off at 7am when I was the first to break the water in the University pool. It was an hour workout, during the warm up I started slowly and built up the pace and effort with:
1oom swim, 100m kick, 100m swim, 100m kick
Then the main set was a 1000m really concentrating on pace ( my pace isn’t quick! ), recording my times every 100m and trying to keep each lap in a consistent time frame. Here’s the breakdown of what I managed:
(Remember each lap is 100m so 4 lengths of the pool)
Lap 1 : 2.16
Lap 2 : 2.23
Lap 3 : 2.31
Lap 4 : 2.23
Lap 5 : 2.24
Lap 6 : 2.26
Lap 7 : 2.23
Lap 8 : 2.22
Lap 9 : 2.23
Lap 10: 2.21
TOTAL : 23.57
So as I said not the fastest, maybe I was tired because of the night I’d had, there is room for improvement and progress as the plan continues. However 8 of the 10 laps were within 5 seconds of each other so that’s not a bad start for pacing.
I’ll be following this up with a 30 minute tempo run later and my first week will finish with 9 hours training banked…..not a bad start really.
