PJ's Back in the Hood

Week 11 PJ ‘s Training Summary 10-10-11 to 16-10-11
A Big Bike Week this week. The key here is to build on bike strength. Four bike sessions but I will be backing off the run a bit. I’m ready to get cranking again after a nice break in Far North Queensland. The key session is a six hour ride on Saturday.
Monday
This morning I slipped down the Freeway Path South. I went out from home and got on the path at South Street. The plan was simple 1 hour easy then one hour @ IM effort. I almost made it to Wally Bridge before turning and heading back. Legs felt good. It meant I got to work a bit late but so be it.
Evening was a solid swim set at Melville. Nice to have the pool so quiet with the kids on school holidays. I bought another 20 passes, wow….seem to be getting through them!

Tuesday
Fairly windy for “World Champs” this morning. I had some efforts to do so I departed the Left Bank 6 mins before the Groupo. At Canning Bridge Pete Rash caught up to me and we rode together. He gave me some good IM nutrition tips a few weeks back when we rode to the Hills. He had a few more gems for me today. The group caught us on Jutland Parade we sat in till Christchurch where us Fluro guys “ran the Gauntlet”. We were beaten by the train crossing barriers again. We pushed it back to Freo. A quick change and it into a 45 min run off the bike. I ran out from the Left Bank and almost made it to the Point Walter Reserve before turning around and heading back. I made sure that I wasn’t going too hard this week.
Wednesday
The plan was to do my long run today. However as it was a bike focus week the run was only 1 ½ hours. It was a glorious morning for a run and I had my tunes on for company. I did the old out and back from work heading west. I turned at about halfway along Tomkins Park and headed back towards work. Legs were good again today.
Back to Melville Pool in the evening for a 2.9k set. Quiet again….I’m loving this !! I was thinking to myself I need to start doing some open water swims with the wettie on. I may approach Brian Kempson and see if he minds if I join his squad for their weekend open swim or try to find a swim buddy.
Thursday
I met the boys at the Left Bank but Fluro was not there as he had a crook back from a 4 hour horse ride he did whilst on holiday. I found out later that he had got dressed to come but physically could not put his socks on !!! A fair bit of confusion arose without the leader there but finally the boys decided to do a reverse RTR ride doing 6x8 min efforts which I had in my programme. Bloody hard to execute on a RTR ride due to stopping and starting for traffic lights and traffic etc but we did get 4 solid ones in. No one keen for coffee this morning so straight to work.
I made a quick trip in to the “Temple” at lunch. I wanted Phabbie to give the gearing on the Trinity a bit of a tune up and also got him to reverse the stem so the base bar was lower. He also put my new flat tri bars on.
A simple plan for run intervals tonight 2 x 3k @ 10k pace from current vdot +1 with 1k RI between. I set this up in the Garmin Fitness plug-in for my SportTracks training software and then downloaded it to my Garmin 310XT. So……warning countdown alarm goes off when there is a pace change and then I had pace alerts set ….low and high alarms for your pace. I decided to run from Canning Bridge to Mt Henry Bridge and return. Purfect as it was flat and 7.5k in distance. A beautiful evening to run as well.

Friday
Rest day today. I intended to do a swim session in the arvo but logistically it didn’t happen because I had to pick up the bike for Saturday’s use and needed to put the lights, battery, Garmin mount etc back on.

Saturday
An epic ride planned for today, 6 hours. The goal was to build strength, stay on top of nutrition and meet the distance of the event. The weather was perfect for riding. 27 degrees forecast with light winds. I was going to hook up with the fellow Amigos today. Great to do a ride like this with company. They had a 4 ½ hour ride planned so I left home at 4:55 am to do a RTR ride before I met the boys at the “Dodgy Dunnies” at the Narrows Bridge at 7:05am. This worked out spot on as I was 5 min early…..but so were the boys. We headed out to Shelley Bridge and back to the Freeway Path first up. I kept up a vigil of drinking every 10 min and eating every 20 min. The other tactic I employed was to ride with a high cadence (Pete Rash tip). We got off the Freeway Path again and did another detour along the Roe Hwy path out to Welshpool and back. Dazza was putting a few threshold efforts in but Rat and I kept it pretty steady. A good tip from Dazza that I have locked away…” if you don’t find the first 120k easy on the bike on race day…then you have probably gone too hard”. Once we got back to the Freeway Path we headed back to Mt Henry for a toilet stop and biddon refill. Time check and the boys were going to head to Freo then up the coast to Scarbs. I had another 1 ½ hours to do. I figured going to Freo then heading home would leave me short so I decided I would go as far as Cott with the guys and then peel off and head around Claremont, back through town, down the Freeway Path (again !!) to Mt Henry and on home. Ended up going over and it sure was good to demount the steed. My arse felt like it had been to Jail. I cooked up a huge serve of eggs and baked beans and toast I was starving. I was wanting to get a Nana nap in the arvo but it just didn’t happen with too many little domestic jobs to get done before the rugby started at 3:30pm. The first semi final Wales v France. A great game. Wales ripped off by having a man sent off in a questionable offence. They played gallantly but went down 9 points to 8.
Nutrition stats: 4 vegemite sanga’s, 2 banana’s, 2 Power Bars, 4 gels, 2 biddons of Shotz electrolyte, 3 biddons of Gatorade.
Totals: 6 hours 19 min and 186.75k 3401 cals burned.
Sunday
I pulled up surprisingly well from yesterday’s ride. I don’t know whether the higher cadence helped or what but I was happy with that. I had a run interval set to do. 6-8 fast downhills over 800m with a jog recovery up the hill in between. We had a cancer support brunch to go to at our neighbours house at 10am. She has had a rough trot with breast cancer. So the plan was to lie in a bit and run at midday. I feel I need to do more runs in the heat of the day….however it was forecast to be 35 degrees today !!! And bloody hot it was too. I chose Le Souef Drive hill to bash which is very close to home. I managed 6 repeats all around 4:30 min/k pace and that was me done. Legs were good after yesterday’s epic ride. The big event of the day was the second semi final between the All Blacks and Australia. The AB’s were on from the start and didn’t give the Wallabies a sniff. 20 points to 6 in the end and the AB’s book a date with France in the Rugby World Cup Final 2011. It was very tense and the beer fridge got quite a nudge……I guess it will be no different next Sunday for the BIG one.


Totals:- Swim 4.6k, missed one session, Bike 343.8k, Run 48.22k 18 hours 10 min