After my upbeat last post, it all went horribly wrong again.
I started feeling weak again. I did some runs but I couldn’t maintain any sort of pace and it was so, so hard just to keep going. I endured it for a week, I did 3 runs, then decided I’d had enough. I wondered if it might be the anti-inflammatory pills the doctor gave me, so I stopped taking them. 2 days later my foot was hurting from the inflamed tendons again, so I knew the pills had rinsed out of my system. I tried to do the Sufferfest.
As I’ve said, I had just really raised the bar, so all my workouts were a lot harder and they’d moved me on to endurance blocks because that’s my most glaring weakness. Then I was ghastly ill for 3 weeks and lost all my fitness.
Before I was ill I was doing sprint workouts, which actually played to my ‘strength’ (such as it is). My sustainable limit is about 200 Watts. The sprint workouts would have you me riding for 20 seconds to 2 minutes at anything up to 320W, then easy for 30 seconds or whatever, then the next big one.
I aced that on the fitness test just before I got ill, with them saying I have “exceptional” sprint to [utterly pitiful]sustainable level power.
Rather than kill myself as I’m trying to make up for a lost month’s training, I decided to do the sprint workout again, rather than the endurance blocks.
Ha! Sufferfest were on to me.
I started the routine with a graded warm up, then in to the sprints, “hold 679W for 30 seconds”
What?! Seriously, WHAT?!
I didn’t have my glasses on so thought I must have misread it, my power being around 200W and all, but no, 679W.
It looks like I’m going to have to build my fitness up on the other training thing, where it’s not tailored to you specifically, before I can start back properly.
The long and short of it being I had to quit, wearing my lungs as scarf, halfway through the workout. I just couldn’t. To try and redeem myself a little I went out for a run. I was only going to do 6 miles, but after the first mile, on traumatised legs, at 8.20 I realised I had loads more in the tank, so I put it under 8 m/m and held it there, comfortably. (It’s a relative term. I mean I wasn’t having to claw back every mile from 8.30 or whatever, I just kept going and stayed under 8.) I was impressing myself after the last bunch of runs not even being able to stay at 8, so kept going for 5 miles, then turned around and smashed the negative split.
10 miles, on thrashed legs, after an 8.20 first mile, and I averaged 7.41. I’ll well take that.
I was buzzing. I thought I was all well again and not too far behind on my training.
Sigh.
The next day I was weak again, then sneezing and nose streaming, eyes running. It’s just not fair. I think it was some sort of hay fever, Mr Google said there was “pollen bomb” as we went from nippy 5C to a four day weekend of 25C. I took some anti-histamines and I dried up within hours. That’s odd, I used to get an itchy nose and sneezy, but I don’t remember ever having full-on hay fever.
Today I’m just suffering from tiredness, (not much sleep, then up at 04.20 for a course), fatness and laziness.
That’s the thing, the more training you do the more you want to do, the less you do the harder it becomes to motivate yourself to start.
Tomorrow is my day off. I am writing all this down now to try and vanquish this incredible run (over a month) of being poorly ill, and refocus my chi. Tomorrow is a new day, a fresh start, and, so far, I’m not feeling ill.
In other news, I’ve put my black VFR750 motorbike up for sale and got a bid on it, so hopefully that’s sold. Which will leave me with just one motorbike.
Like. A. Caveman.
Tomorrow it all gets real.
Crack on.
Buck.
Leave a Reply