Whats that you say? A 'recovery' week.....must have a differant meaning!!

This week Rollo sent through a 'recovery' week for me to follow, and looking at it, it certainly on paper looked lighter than previous weeks, however I still had some pretty tough sessions to follow....namely the swims (okay they might not be as tough as the others for me, but one has to remember, just because the swim is my strongest leg does not make the training easier for me....plus Rollo expects me to be doing the splits quite aggressively). I did 3km again, mostly with the pull bouy, which incidenly does not make my swimming easier, it in fact slows me down, and I crossed my legs toegther so was dragging them for most of the 3km at near threshold, I was rather fecked by the end.
Tuesday night I had a strenght test with Rollo at his place. I was expecting to do the test runing, but the cheeky bugger had me on the bike...probably because he knows this is my weakest discipline. The test is called 'Conconi', and essentially I had to cycle on the Turbo Trainer, increasing the power output at given intervals, and see how far I could go whilst maintaining a cadence of 90rpm....well, 14odd mins later I was finished...literally, I was breathing heavily, steaming, and completely farked. I got to 360watts and was done....not bad I think, especially since I have only been riding since January, but it does mean I hhave a lot more strenght work comeing my way....i.e more hills :-(
To give you an idea though, I think the riders on the Tour de france can get to 600 or 700watts, dont quote me but its some ludicrious number like that, which really shows you how incredible athletes they are, how much training they must do, how much they must hurt through each day of the race, and really how strong and fit they must be! Its also not so surprising how mich drug use has been found lately with the riders because its really super natural what they do....if you dont follow cycling, you should really watch this race (I have only just got into it since Triathlon) and I am truly amazed.

Anyway, back to my average jo's week, and I did a run and swim on wednesday. I atually felt really sick on Wednesday night, nearly spewed in the pool, was pretty much up all night with a really high HR - weird, took all my will power on thursday to get on the turbo trainer, and Friday a great swim at lunchtime (enjoyed it for once) and then went to Terrigal Trotters on Saturday and ran with Freney. We pretty much for the entire 80mins talked about the Iron Man and the experience. Freney has done a couple, this year he had to pull out during the urn because of Kidney issues...just shows how this race can f*ck you) Freney, Andrew M (strong bugger, he can ride and run so he will do well), Smithy and 'Skinny Wiggle' (aka Tim - so called because the blouse did the wiggles finger pointing thing at the end of the IM this year + he is skinny!). We did hill repeats agian around Mooney Mooney which is always tough. The good thing is we are all getting higher up the hill on each 8min repeat so Rollo's training is certainly paying off! In Rollo we trust!

So a busy week at work, busy week at home, and a pretty decent bunch of training sessions (apart from Wednesday night) it was another enjoyable week, and another one less to go before the Half Iron Man....its coming quickly now....I think around 3months....jeez!!

So, in summery :

Swim - 2.5 hours (aprox 8.5km)
Run - 2.5hours (aprox 26km) (thats a very low week for me and I felt it was a light one to!)
Cycle - 5.5hours (aprox 70km today rest on Turbo Trainer)

So you can see, I still did a fair bit even though it was a recovery week.

I am looking forward to this week, some more challanging sessions, with a ride from home to work on Saturday (probably about 100km of hills), and then sunday I am running in the Hunter Valley Half Marathon. I am using it as a training run, so will not be out to hammer it, but I am guessing between 95mins and 105mins would be good....will just have to check with Rollo about what he wants me to keep the HR at, polus its apparently a hilly course, so quite tough. Vlad will be doing it to, he could very well win this based on last years time, so I will let you know how that goes for him.