Week 4 (20 Jan - 26 Jan) - Recovery week

Swim: 3:55 (8.600m)

Bike: 2:30

Run: 2:37

Strength & Core: 0:00

Total: 9:02

TSS (bike/run): 362

Monday

The recovery week started out with a full day of recovery which I for sure needed.

Tuesday

Tuesday my legs felt a bit heavy throughout the day. I joined a club swim in the evening  and got in around 2.500m. 

Wednesday

Wednesday morning called for a tempo run:
- 15 min warm-up
- 15 min tempo (HR zone 3)
- 5 min jog
- 15 min tempo (HR zone 3)
- 15 min cool down

In total 14 km in 1:05. Unfortunately my watch deleted the data, but I remember being a bit disappointed about the pace during the two 15 min efforts.  I should be able to keep a pace a bit faster than  4:10min/km in HR zone 3, but it was more around 4:17 min/km as I recall.

Thursday

Thursday I had an evening swim after work. I was not to motivated, but got through the planned 3.200m nicely.

Friday

On Friday I had 45min recovery ride planned and I decided to do them after work. In the morning it always seems like a good idea, but in the evening it sucks. It definitively works best for me to get as many workouts in in the morning as possible. It does however also require that you do not get to bed to late.

Saturday

On Saturday I had the "usual" endurance run of 1:30. I am suppose to run the endurance runs in zone 2, which means a heart rate of 146-156 BPM for me. This is slightly higher than when I have been training for marathons in the past where I usually had an average heart rate around 140 +/- 3 on the long runs. Now I am instead aiming for an average HR around 150 +/- 3 and so far I have been quite surprised of the pace I am able to keep without the workout feels hard. On Saturday it was obvious that my body was not as fatigued as in previous weeks and I was able to time the breakfast before the workout which gave me optimal conditions and I was able to keep an average pace of 4:32min/km with an average HR of 146 BPM over 20.2 km.

Running fuel

I also believe that the many interval sessions I have been doing the last couple of months have had a significant effect. However, as mentioned above I have not seen similar improvements when doing runs in zone 3 (157-163 BPM). Maybe it is because I am doing most of these 6AM in the morning on an empty stomach - maybe it just need some more time.

In the afternoon Søren stopped by on his way to Mexico. We toured the city and had a nice dinner before he took off. 12 hours is probably in the low ends when it comes to visiting Tokyo, but it was great seeing him again.

Sunday

Sunday I had a 1:45 bike session in zone 2 with 6x5min efforts in zone 3 included planned. As I also had swim session with the triathlon club planned at 10AM, I decided to get up early and to the bike workout on the home trainer. I got off the bike at 8:15, had a shower and a smoothie and was off to the pool in Odaiba.

The swim with the club went well and consisted of:
- 150m warm up
- 250m kick
- 200m 10 kick one stroke - 10 sec rest
- 200m one arm crawl: 25m L/ 25m R - 10 sec rest
- 50 easy 4x 100m pull - buoy between feet - 10 sec rest
- 7x 100m (3/4/5/6) pull 2:00 (1:45 - 15 sec rest)
- 2x5x50 1:00 (1st set decreasing stroke count, 2nd set decreasing times)
- 9x50 - 1:05 (0:50/15 sec rest)

I feel I am able to consistently do the 50m on 0:50 with 10 sec rest which I am quite happy about.

It was also good to see coach Kuwabara-san again - it has been some time since I have particiapted in sessions headed up by him. As always we was ready with some good advice in case someone needed it.

All in all it was a nice recovery week. Next week will start out with 12 hours af fasting before the yearly mandatory health check. On next friday I will go to  Europe, so I think coach PJ has planned to  squeeze in some tough bike sessions prior to that.

Week 3 (13 Jan - 19 Jan)

Swim: 2:10 (5.900m)

Bike: 7:16 (0:32 as part of a brick session)

Run: 3:02 (0:30 as part of a brick session)

Strength & Core: 1:00

Total: 13:27

TSS (bike/run): 729

Monday

Week 3 started out with a national holiday which is quite convenient one week after the long vacation. I had morning intervals planned and I was still a bit worried about the calf so I extended the warm-up from 10 to 20 minutes. Maria joined me so the most of the warm-up was done at recovery pace.

The main set of the session was 8 x 400m tempo where each tempo effort was followed by 200m where you push the pace and the recovery between the sets was jogging. So continuos running. I definitely prefer this over the hard intervals sessions. I did the set in Yoyogi park which is a great place to run in the morning and it is a good alternative to my local circle at Meiji Jingu. The calf tighten up a bit during the first half, but it slowly went away. Did 30 min strength and core in the evening.

Tuesday

Tuesday morning I did a turbo session consisting of 10 min warm-up followed by a set of short 30 sec all-out intervals. The main set was 2 x 10min at 90%CP30 with 5 min recoveries followed by 4 x 5 min efforts at 100%CP30 with 2min recoveries and some cool down. A great set that definitely left the legs a bit tired (in a good way!).

Wednesday

Wednesday evening I had a swim planned that started out with a lot of kick-drills which I really hate. Especially when I have tired legs and I had to take a lot more breaks than planned to get through it. I even had to do some breast kicks once in a while to not completely cue up the slowest lane in the pool. I did however manage to get in all of the 2.700 planned meters.

Thursday

Thursday started out with a brick session where 6 min hill climbing and 7x30 sec all-out efforts with 90 sec recovery on the turbo laid out the foundation for the run. The run was 10min @10k pace followed by 20min easy jog. No calf issues at all, so the recovery seems to be progressing nicely.

Once again I could definitely feel my legs had been working when I went down the stairs to the subway on my way to work.

Friday

Friday morning called for another turbo session. This time 45min tempo @ 85%CP30 with some warm-up and cool down. About half way through I could feel that my legs had been working a lot this week and started to look forward to next weeks recovery week.

PM I had another swim planned. This time 3.200m mostly intervals of various lengths. I can feel that I am getting better in just accepting the longer swim workouts and I do no longer doubt that I can actually get through them. Although my arms and shoulders a bit tired i the end it was a nice way to end the Friday.

Saturday

Or actually the swim did not end my Friday as I had to attend a meeting with some colleagues from Europe/US from 22:30 Friday evening. So Saturday morning I slept a bit longer than usual. Sunday Maria and I had been invited for brunch by one of my colleagues and hence I decide to do the long weekend ride on Saturday and then take the long run Sunday morning as it would be easier to squeeze in before the brunch.

Biking Saturday also means I have to go somewhere else than Oi Futo which is both good and bad. Oi Futo is convenient as it only takes me 15 minutes to get there, however it is not the most inspiring place in the world. Below you can see a video I shoot some months ago when going there.



On Saturdays I would usually head out to Arakawa River. The flip-side of this is that I have to go through the city which usually takes around 45 min, but I decided to go there anyway. After all the trip through the city can be quite nice when the weather is good and today it was cold, but sunny.

I had a fun experience at one of the first stop lights. I was waiting for the lights to turn green when a runner interrupted my podcast by saying "nice bike!". It turned out that he was the fast guy on a P5 that have been lapping me in Oi Futo the last couple of weekends. We had a short chat about him training for Ironman New Zealand, shook hands and said "See you at Oi Futo" :)

Later on my way through the city I came a cross some sort of mini snow festival. Someone had transported snow into the centre of Tokyo at put of snow figures along the road.

When I came to Arakawa river I just headed north for one and a half hour, turned around and headed back. I felt a bit like Forrest Gump, but I enjoyed the nice weather, all the sports life around Arakawa river, my new homemade energy bars and the Rich Roll podcasts that I had started listing to during these long rides. If you have not yet read Rich Roll's book 'Finding Ultra' I would definitely recommend it. It is a very inspiring story about how he went from being alcoholic to completing 5 Ironman races in 7 days in a very short period of time.

The first thing I met at Arakawa river was some kind of kite-festival...

And as usual you can find food stands around events like this :)

There are many people playing baseball along the river, but it was nice to see that there are also room for soccer

...and then I biked...

And in case you are into it you can continue on the golf course.,,

 I decided just to take the ride easy and as you can see from the pictures above it was a very nice ride. I was out for around 5 hours (riding a little more than 4) and my new winter clothes from  kept me nice and warm :)

Ready to go :)

Sunday

Sunday morning I did my long run and besides a few minutes and tightening up around 10-12k I did not noticed any calf issues. The legs got a bit tired after 15k, but I feel I could still end the run strong.

I did 30 min strength and core in the evening and I am really looking forward to the recovery day tomorrow.

Week 2 (6 Jan - 12 Jan)

Swim: 2:30 (5.300m)

Bike: 5:16

Run: 2:28

Strength & Core: 0:30

Total: 10:44

TSS (bike/run): 478

Monday

This was the first day after the long vacation. I started out with a morning interval session of:
10min warm up, 8x 20sec strides with 40sec recovery followed by 8x 1min hard efforts with 2min walk / jog recovery before ending with 10min cool down. The work out went well and it was nice with some longer recovery periods in between the efforts. I managed to keep a good pace during the efforts averaging 3:15 min/km. My left calf tighten up a bit during the cool down, so that is something I will need to keep an eye on.

In the evening i joined Aoyama Triathlon Club for swimming where we did a lot of horrible kick drills (I hate those!) before ending with 20x 50m (0:50 / 50m with - 10 seconds rest). In total we did 2.300m.

Tuesday

Only a short swim was planned for Tuesday. Probably because coach PJ wanted me to be fresh to the CP30 bike test on Wednesday. In general I was looking forward to get my FTP/training zones updated (since I haven't done a test since August or so last year), but definitely not looking forward to the test it self. 30min all-out is a mess.

When I woke up my calf was still hurting from the intervals yesterday and it felt like it made me limp a bit. Not good :( When I returned home after a long day at work I felt tired and probably a bit sorry for myself and the fact that I had that damn test the next day made my skip the swim session.

I texted coach and asked for advice on whether to go ahead and do the test when my calf was causing trouble and as long as I did not feel pain on the bike he told me to go ahead.

Wednesday

I got up around 5:40 and was ready on the trainer at 6:00. The calf still hurt when walking, but there was no issues on the bike, so I got my sh*t together and did the damn test. And it was tough. I have never tried to do a 30min all-out effort on the bike before (have previously used 95% of a 20min all-out effort as FTP estimation). However, afterwards it is nice to have an updated baseline and I am actually looking forward to the next test now since I want to improve and I am confident that I can do so.

Coach PJ has asked me to record some data prior to the CP30 test and I will include it here as well:
Weight: 75,2 kg
Resting HR (5 minutes on couch prior to workout): 42.
Average HR during 30min effort: 166
Average power (CP30): 208 watt.

Thursday

On Thursday I did a 30 min (including 10@zone2) easy early morning ride on the turbo. After reading a discussion around foam rolling on slowtwitch (you can see the discussion HERE) I decided to give it a go, as I have recently got one of the fancy things, to see if it could help the calf recover faster. So I did 10 minutes of foam rolling after the bike. Later that day I could feel my legs were still a bit tired from the test on Wednesday, but the foam rolling seemed to have helped since I could no longer feel the calf issues when walking.

In the evening I had dinner with some colleagues from Denmark, which also meant I had to do my strength and core exercises after a few beers. Not optimal, but it worked out ok. I ended the night with more foam rolling.

This thing rocks!

Friday

On Friday I had the second nasty test of the week. A 1.900m swim time trial. I had never before swum that far in one go, I had to do it Friday evening after work in a crowded pool where you can not overtake others. And I was supposed to do it fast. Honestly, I did not really believe this to turn out very successfully. But it actually did.

I managed to leave work around 16:30 and got to the pool before it was too crowded. Did 500m warm-up which initially just confirmed that the 1.900m was going to be a long swim. After some drills I went for it; I decided to start out easy as survival was priority number one. In the back of my mind I had an idea of a target of sub38 (average speed up 2:00/100m), so I tried to keep an eye on the pool clock after each 100m (you are not allowed to wear a watch in the pool here).

And I was happy to see that I was able to keep the pace around 1:55-1:57/100m. After 5-600 meter I settled into a nice rhythm and it felt like I could go on for some time. I did the first 1.300m on 25:00 and decided to see if I could increase the speed a bit. The overall time for the 1.900m was 36:10 which I am very happy about. I only got cued up for around 5 sec during the swim and I probably speeded up after that, so no issues here.

It went a lot better than expected and just like with the bike test I feel that I now have a good baseline to work from and I am confident that I will be able to improve in the next test (hopefully as a consequence of improved form and fitness, but most likely also just for having done the test before).

After swimming I squeezed in a bit of foam rolling on the left calf :)

Saturday

On Saturday I had one of my favorite workouts planned: the long run. However, due to the calf issues I had this week I was a bit unsure of how it would go... After app. 4 km I could feel the calf nagging a bit, but decided to continue and hope that I would not make things worse, but still recover as long as I did not push the pace and did my foam rolling afterwards. I managed to get through the run without major issues and I could see from the pace and my HR data that all the intervals coach has been throwing at me have paid off. It us great to see progress already and I cant wait to see how my running form will further develop throughout the year.

Sunday

I had one main goal for this Sundays long ride: I wanted to avoid bonking. The last two weeks I have gone out after having only a banana for breakfast and only brought water. And that mistake have made the last rides extremely tough in the end although they have only been around 2:30 hours.

So this time I managed to get in some energy in terms of some homemade paleo bread with peanut butter and a banana for breakfast. Also, I brought with me three of my homemade energy bars! :) And I tell you - they rock! Made them yesterday from a recipe I found HERE and I can highly recommend them.

The 3:30 hour (9 laps @ Oi Futo) went well and it is incredible how much better your body performs when you fuel it right. Last week when I returned home from the long ride I had to lay down on the couch for an hour eating to recover after 2:30 hour in the saddle and this week I could easily have gone for another hour without any issues.

All in all a good week (as long as the calf issues do not get worse) and I look forward to add some more volume next week and do some turbo sessions with the refreshed power zones.

Week 1 ( 30 Dec - 5 Jan)

Swim: 1:20 (3.600m)

Bike: 4:34 (0:58 as part of a brick session)

Run: 1:44 (0:34 as part of a brick session)

Strength & Core: 1:00

Total: 8:38

TSS (bike/run): 346

Monday

Rest day. Returned from Hawaii in the evening and needed the rest.

Tuesday

As the local pool was closed the planned swim was cancelled. Not optimal since I did not swim much in Hawaii and have a 1900m test coming up next week.
Did 30 min strength & Core.

Wednesday

Turbo intervals #6 which means 10 minutes warm-up, 6-7 x 3 min in Zone 3, with the final 30 sec of each interval fast/ accelerating effort and 3 min recoveries between efforts.
Cool Down 5 minutes. I did 7 time 3 minutes in the high end of power zone 3. Looking forward to get my power zones tested on the turbo next week (although not looking forward to the test it self!).

Thursday

Brick session #1: 1 hour bike followed by 30 minutes tempo run. The session went well and was sufficiently challenging. MY legs started to feel tired on the bike - still I was able to keep a pace of 4:03 min/km for the 30 minutes tempo run. I had issues with my HR strap and probably ran faster than planned. Coming off the bike already warmed up probably made it feel less tough.

Friday

I was set up for the longest swim I have ever done. 3.600m. The set was pretty easy to follow:
Warm up (continuous swim):
400m front crawl swim
Main set:
1x 600m FC SWIM with 30secs rest
2x 300m FC PULL with 20sec rest
3x 200m FC SWIM with 15sec rest
6x 100m FC PULL with 10sec rest
12x 50m as 25m SPRINT / 25m EASY with 30sec rest
Cooldown:
200m easy relaxed swim

It went better than expected although I early on doubted that I would be able to complete according to plan. I still don't feel I can just reduce the speed and go all day in swimming as it is with biking and running. However, the variety of pull and swim made it easier to get through. I had to take a break of 10 minutes after the 3rd 100m effort as the lifeguards in the local pool need to check the pool several times a day and so everybody has to get out of the water. After this short break my arms felt really heavy, but after a few lanes they were back in action.

Saturday

Run - intervals:
10min warm up
20x 200m off 15sec rest
10min cooldown

This was one of the toughest interval session I have done.The 15 seconds feels like no break at all and my heart rate just stayed elevated. I did however manage to get through without slowing down to much.

Did 30 min strength & Core in the evening.

Sunday

2:30 hour endurance ride. For the second time I made the mistake of just having a single banana and then head out. It was cold and windy, and my new heavier and less aero training wheels did not made it easier. I felt tired in the end and had to take a nap after I had something to eat when I returned home.

New training wheels with a new cassette (12-25) which is a good add on to the 11-27 that came with my bike

2014

Returning from a nice Christmas vacation on Hawaii I am well rested and hence decided to kick-off the 2014 season with a blog-post (so far the blog has only been race reports :))

Hawaii was great and although most of my planned swims got canceled due to high surf and I did not have a bike and manage to get in some quality training with a couple of long runs and a interval session. I forgot to bring my HR strap and it was actually a nice experience running without it. I think I will try to focus less on HR during the runs going forward and use the data mainly for training analysis.

2014 race schedule

The planned races for 2014 so far are:

Ironman Cairns 70.3 (June 8th)

I want do this race for several reasons. First of all, I want to do a race in Australia while I am in Japan, as there is no way I will go there when I am back in Denmark. Secondly, if I am going to do an Ironman in 2015 the full distance in Cairns (which is on the same day) is a good option and I thought it could be nice to check out the venue first. Thirdly, it is fairly early in the season and it is nice to have something to train for which is not too far away.

Ironman Phillipines 70.3 (August 3rd)

This race is extremely popular  and I was lucky enough to sign up before it sold out (within a day). I think they might hold slots for the 2015 70.3 worlds championships here (which will be in Europe) so it could be worth giving that a shot.

 

 

Ironman 70.3 Worlds Championships - Mont-Tremblant (September 7th)

There is only one reason for doing this race: because I qualified :) Besides the fact that it is the WC and that Mont-Tremblant seems to be a nice place there is really not much good about this race - from a practical point of view at least. It is 5 weeks after the race at the Philippines, I have to go to Europe for work in between the two races, Mont-Tremblant is pretty far from Tokyo etc. etc. The venue does however looks very nice and despite the above I really look forward to going. Especially since both my parents and brother+girlfriend plan to make the trip to see the race.

Photo: Ironman.com

New coach

As I feel I need to push myself a bit more to take my performance to the next level I have decided to hire a coach. It is not that I cannot push myself without a coach, but I want to make sure that it is done the right way minimizing the risk of injuries. Moreover, I have come to realize that it is very convenient having someone doing the training schedule for you. All you have to do is execute :)

We started out right after two weeks of rest after Taiwan and the period from mid-November has been transition period giving my new coach Paul Jones from www.f4lcoaching.com a chance to get to know me (and my body!). Focus as been on slowly getting back in the game while working on increasing my speed on the run. This has meant a lot of intervals which I basically did not do while training forTaiwan 70.3. I still don't like the high intensities, but I am getting more used to it. To make things "worse" the recovery periods between the efforts have been a lot shorter than what I was used to when I was training for marathon.

New year resolution

I plan to try to do a post every now and then (hopefully on a weekly basis) with an update on how my training is progressing. Besides keeping the blog in a more up-to-date state, I hope this will make skipping a workout even harder for me since I then know I will have to share the defeat with you :)