Author: Buck

Sufferfest’s mental toughness programme says you need to set quantifiable weekly and monthly goals. Then review how your training went that week so you can reward yourself for success and try to learn from failure. So here goes. I split my goals down into the disciplines. Swim: (For the week: ) Arrange 3+ swims per week. (Month: Learn not to sink. Learn to breathe.) Bike: 3 sessions per week (2 Sufferfest, 1 long ride.) Run: Increase fast (sub 3 marathon, 5.48 m/m) by half a mile a week.   It was my first week, I worked 6 days at work, doing a 12 and a 13 hour shift (with an hour’s commute, so two rest days). That having been said I did 2 swim sessions and am making great progress towards my monthly goal. I have floaty pretty much sorted, and my breathing is really coming on. It’s harder than it should be because I have to overcome the way I have been doing it. If I don’t concentrate for a second I slip back into it.    I didn’t manage the outdoor long ride because I’ve only had the one day off and it’s cold and blowing a gale, but I did 3 tough sessions on Sufferfest. I increased my max power burst on The Shovel (a 1 hour 6 minutes intervals beasting) from 580 watts to 897. That was a good job.   The running was another mixed bag. Now I’ve decided to get serious and have rest days, then work battering me with hours, I’ve only done two runs this week. That’s after 2 months of running every day. Which is what I feared. However, I did achieve greatness. I set out to do a 5½ mile fast run. Instead of a mile warm up, a sprint, catch my breath, then do the fast run, I tried to go at pace from the off. It was a mistake, frankly. It was so hard. At the end of 2 miles I thought my pace had dropped off so much I was going to have to jog and do it again. I looked at my watch, still 6.50’s, so I put my back into it. Then it was just a matter of not letting it slip. Horrible, horrible. I decided to make it 6 miles as I haven’t set my watch for half mile intervals. The last mile has a short but steep hillock. I looked at my watch at the top of it, wearing my lungs externally, and I was on 7.40 pace. So, on my last mile, totally shot, I had to claw back 50 seconds! And I did. I should look into a proper speed plan. But I’ve gone from 4 miles, joint best ever distance at race pace, to 6 miles, in 2 weeks.   Some good achievements: broke my duck with the swimming, have worked out best times to swim, and started to make progress on a proper technique. I’m really digging in on […]

Sufferfest say I should concentrate solely on my goal, so sorry if there’s anyone reading this, it’s all going to be tri. Except to say I rebuilt my VFR750 motorbike fairing (again) with a new subframe and the cannibalised best of two sets of clocks and all it all went back together properly this time. Now the bloody thing is running on 3 cylinders instead of 4, and being a V4 engine the carbs are a total pain to access. I’ve ordered some tools, when they arrive I’ll sort it. Anywho, that’s not focusing on my goal. I had a moment a few days ago. The Tour de France guy who did my bike fitting last year heard I was after a sub 10 Ironman and said I’d be looking to maintain a 25mph average on the bike. I was surprised he nailed it, but agreed readily. My plan was to get up to 20mph average for this year, 22.5 for next, 25 for the sub 10. Since I’ve been beasting myself on the Sufferfest I really think I’m in with a shout. I won’t be happy with less than a 20mph average this year. The last 3 attempts have been 16mph. I looked back on an old blog and my 3 year plan was to get to an hour for the swim (too ambitious, say 1.10), a 5.25 bike and a 3.26 marathon (about right.) Then I did the maths again. (I am thick as brick at maths, so I generally avoid it.) If I can average 20 mph this year, that’s 5.36!  In one year. If I could get to 25mph that would be 4.30! That doesn’t seem possible. Just looking at 2017 results (2018 was blowing a gale) the guy who won the race, in the male, 20-25 year old category, did the ride in 4.33. Hmmm, I may have to lower my expectations. Or just win the race outright. That would be a hoot. Time’s to beat are 49 minute swim (never going to happen), 2.15 transition (T1), 4.33 bike, 2.23 transition (T2), and a 3.12 marathon (8 hours 39 overall!)   Well, that was a short-lived goal.   The winner of my age group did a 9.44 tri. That’s about the very limit of my ballpark hopes/ expectations. She did a 1.05 swim, 3.00 T1, 5.10 bike, 2.42 T2, and a 3.22 run. Those are my targets now. I’ve just written them down and propped them under my monitor. Right. *Game Face* Actually, she was the winner of the 50-54 age group, by the 2021 race I’ll be 55, the winner of that age group was a 10 hours 39 time. That’s obviously outside my sub 10 hour goal. Interestingly, he was only 5 minutes slower on the swim, 2 on T1, 12 on the bike, 1 on T2, but then blew it massively on the run, 36 minutes slower. Or to put it another way, still 20 minutes faster than my PB last year. […]

Another boring training entry. Well, boring for anyone else, exciting times for me. Sufferfest is proving to be a revelation. I thought it was going to be an app for peddling away on your turbo trainer without getting bored. Like watching a film or something. Zwift pretty much was. People were streaming past me, and I’d chase some of them, but mostly it was just watching the scenery as I pedalled. Sufferfest has videos to accompany the workouts, but it is a workout. It’s not pointlessly pedalling for an hour. It’s workouts so hard I didn’t think I could complete them. I had a go at a virtual spin class at the gym, it’s a bunch of people on bikes, while a video screen tells you what to do. The thing I didn’t like is there are no gears, or power meters, or speedo. The riders on the screen tell you to increase the resistance (twist knob on the bike) and decrease it, but there are no settings. How much should I increase or decrease? There are no metrics or feedback. Sufferfest on the other hand, monitors your power (watts),  speed, heart race and RPM. After you’ve done the fitness assessment (4DP) it sets everything to your ability. The workouts are designed by Olympic winning coaches so it’s brutal but scientific. A proper warm up then a bunch of intervals at different intensity, duration and amount of recovery time. And, unlike when I was doing Zwift, it will say to hit 230 watts at 110 RPM for 55 seconds. There is only one gear that will let you spin at that speed and put out that amount of watts. Again, on Zwift, if it got hard you could just shift down a gear and keep at your desired watts. In Sufferlandria it will say 265 watts at 60 RPM, STAND UP, so you have to put it in a really high gear, stand on the pedals and grunt like a pig having a heart attack. So, so brutal. I really think it’s going to work wonders for me. Then there’s the other stuff. It has a mental toughness programme that’s a freebie thrown in. I was, in all modesty, sceptical that they could teach me much about mental toughness, grit is all I’ve got, but I started the course anyway. Amazing. It’s not just stamina, it’s focusing your entire will to an end. And setting quantifiable goals to reach that end. It’s made me address my weaknesses and make plans to overcome them. Set a definite goal per month, and per week to get you there. Then have the mental strength to achieve them. One of the things I may have to be ruthless about is my run every day thing. It’s making me do stuff when I’m knackered and it’s done wonders for my run fitness, but every training plan agrees that you *have* to factor in rest days. They are when your body heals and rebuilds itself stronger. […]

That chesty feeling and loads of swallowing I said about on my last blog? It was the onset of an awful, enervating bug. I kept my training up but it knocked spots off me. Wendy had it worse, she’s been off work for four days. Not a cough and cold thing, just a hideous weakness. Nasty. I managed to maintain my running streak, but speed runs have been out of the question. It’s been coming and going so I managed to get some bike training in as well. I thought I was fully over it yesterday then felt lousy on a 5 mile run. Today I had a day off booked, it was toasty warm (15C! In February!), the sun was shining, so I decided to run a marathon. Like you do. I had to take my warm top off after 2 miles and ran the rest in just my sleeveless compression vest. I’m not sure I’m fully right after the bug. I wanted to keep to 7.30 m/m but even in the first few miles I was struggling to keep it at 8. After 16 miles I was really battling to keep going. It took everything I had to finish the 26.2 miles. The last few miles it was a huge achievement to stay under 9 m/m. I was stumbling and had nothing left. I did it in 3.41:34. I’m trying not to be negative and therefore belittle people who are slower, but that was so hard and not the time I was expecting. To be fair, I was basing my expectation on short, fast runs. And I’ve not actually done any long run training this year. A few 10 mile runs and one 18. And I’m possibly not well. But that was long, slow, painful and so, so hard. Good for mental toughness if nothing else. While I’m getting my excuses in, can’t forget to mention I only had an energy bar and a banana before I set out. The rest was energy gels on the hoof. Amazing that an 89 calories sugar/ sludge gel can keep you going. 2 of them an hour and you can just keep on keeping on. My watch said I burned 3000 calories on the run. So how do the gels keep you going? The rest of my day has been a write off. I’ve just moped around in a world of pain, inhaling calories. I was looking to do a 100+ miles bike ride tomorrow, but that can wait. I’ll do some other jobs on my list, like stripping and fixing my motorbike, then do the ride when I’m rested. Well, I set out to run a marathon. I ran a marathon. And learned a valuable lesson on the way. It turns out a basic level of fitness and a monumental amount of bloody-minded stubbornness are no substitute for long run training. Who knew? Right, bed. I’ve so had enough of today. Later, Buck. PS: quick addendum. My pushbiking: I took […]

Just a quick update on my tri training as my watch is not logging my achievements in a fit of techno-spite. I really think I’m on to a winner here. At last. The motorbiking into work, doing a run every day and separate bike/ run sessions is really working for me. I’m trying not to be bitter about all the time I wasn’t doing it. I had different goals last year. And the month or so I was pushbiking then running every day was good general fitness building. But this is where it’s at. This week I did an average of 11 hours a day at work for the first 3 days. So 12 or so hours with commuting. When you get home you just want to crash out. Because I’m committed to the run every day I got out and did it. Even if it was only a mile it was keeping the training going. I did that trial-by-ordeal thing for Sufferfest. They kept giving me target power and revs and I was smashing it. Saying put in 100 watts, I was doing over 200. For the five second sprint I did 400+ watts. An hour of tests and recovery. 5 seconds, 5 minutes, 20 minutes, and 1 minute. I went all out. I finished it, proud as Punch, then got my results. Look at the scale. The outside line is “exceptional”, right the way down to “modest”, I nearly killed myself and scraped into Modest in one test! Ooh, 1½ tests, I just noticed. Big whoop! Anyway, that is the baseline for my training. Knowing those figures they can beast me to greatness. The big one remains the running though. It was two weeks ago I couldn’t maintain an 8.30m/m pace. Since I’ve stopped pushbiking I am battering it. I did that 4 mile run and surprised myself by only being 20 seconds off my best ever time for the distance. I did a three mile run the other day. I’d had a long day and couldn’t be bothered, but like I said, once you are actually forced to do it you start getting into it. I thought I’d make the last mile count so I went for it. My previous PB for a mile, when I was doing speed training, was 6.44 (I think), I ran it in 6.27! Wow. That’s without speed training, just using the fitness or running everyday and the stamina and breathing from the turbo pushbiking. I was/ am delighted. I did a 55 minute session on Sufferfest, the went out for the bare minimum mile. I was expecting dead legs so wasn’t going for a time. a quarter mile in I realised I was on the pace so went for it. I did that in 6.54. Today was a run day (actually a swim day, but the pool wasn’t doing lane swims tonight) I went out to do a 10 mile run, trying to maintain a sub 7.30, I think I may […]