Have had a fantastic training week - cannot believe the Ironman 70.3 is less than a month and a half away!!!!!!!!! How exciting!!!!
On Tuesday, my FABULOUS first and new bike coach came over with a turbo trainer, set it up and we did a Lactate Threshold Test. The concept is that you go FLAT OUT for 20 minutes to determine "the maximum steady state effort that can be maintained without lactate continually increasing". I did not know pain before I did this. ;)
It went as follows:
-20mins "warm up" (ha!) to get my heart rate steadily up to Zone 4
-20mins FLAT OUT (tying not to collapse!... I had to count to 10 a looooooot in my head ;) The seconds seemed to pass like hours but my coach did a great job of making me laugh - well, laughing in my head because I was working so hard!)
-At least 10mins spinning on the bike to cool down
We were meant to get data from the turbo (like speed and power) but alas it malfunctioned! :=) To which my coach responded with "Well, we are just going to have to do it again! ;)"!!!!!!!! (which we will do after the Ironman 70.3 Rapperswil race as it is best to do after a rest week). So the only data we got was my heart rate (I had it connected with my Garmin 910XT watch). But with that I could determine my Maximum Heart Rate (195) and that I can get through 40 minutes of pure pain. Yay! ;) But it does help make all the other workouts look easy (er)!
Refuelled with 1L of apple-celery juice (50/50 ratio) - perfect, full of simple natural sugars from the apple to restock my glycogen and organic sodium and minerals from the celery to replenish my electrolytes And surprisingly (in a very good way!) I felt absolutely amazing and very strong after the test and thoroughly enjoyed my yoga class (even with lot of Warrior poses!) afterwards. However, I did feel it all week in my legs on the rides, so the rest week (as part of periodisation of my training cycle) is well needed so that my legs can recover and get stronger, as it is during the recovery not the activity that we become fitter.
The weather suddenly dropped 10°C today complete with rain last night making for wet roads and strong winds. But that didn't stop me and my bike group going for a 45k ride (well, only three of us showed up :=D)! ;) For the first 22k, we were going against such strong winds it felt like climbing a mountain and the unexpected crosswinds had me thinking I was going to get blown off of my bike on a couple of occasions! Then we had a man down with a puncture, so I got a good educational session on how to change a the inner bike tube! :=D We turned around at half way point and had a hoot with the tailwind and averaged 35+kph. What an adventure!
I haven't been doing a lot of running apart from short transition runs, so wish me luck on my 10k run tomorrow! :=) I am super stoked as in the health food store today, they had cherimoyas!!!!!!! I sold them out of all the ripe ones and got 2kg - looking forward to that tomorrow! :=D
Hope you had a beautiful week and create a magical upcoming week!,
AJ