The Road to Roth – Project 2017 – Week 4

Week 4 of training already! I seem to have lost a little weight last week, I had a couple of weigh ins at about 78.4kg, hopefully I will see 77.x soon.  My knee is sore during and after my faster/longer runs, which is aggravating me. I wore my knee brace to bed last night but it hurt a bit still!  I will try to sort it out before the season starts.

Monday

Cycled to the pool, we swam lots of kicking drills, I tried the push and pull kick method I had seen online. 400 in, 4×100 kicking, 5x100m arms, 4×250 with 150m crawl 50 other, 5x100m flippers 100m out. 2900m?

Cycled home with the wind, was fun.

Tuesday

78.2kg this morning.  Straight after work I did my 1h run with 6×3 mins faster. It did it fartlek style, just running faster, then jogging for 90 seconds. It went pretty well and I did 14.2km in 1h04. My knee was fine too, though I did take an ibu at 4pm to prepare.

Wednesday

I noticed at the last minute that I actually had to ride longer than the normal 45m this week. I did 1h, with 6x5m being in the plan, but I wanted to train outside and I don’t have a 5 minute hill near me, so I did 6x3m in Laubenheim, before taking a hilly route home to fill up the hour. Then I bricked for 30 minutes at 4:30/km. The workouts were fine, but it was a stressful day.

Thursday

I cycled to swimming, then we swam a long session. I was in the water for 1h29, can’t do much more in a 90m session!

400m in, 16x50m drills, 4×200 arms, 4x100m breathing exercise, 100m easy, 3x200m flippers, 300m breathing exercise, 100m out. 3500m?

Then an easy cycle home. Weighed in at 77.9kg on (good) Friday morning.

(Good) Friday

After waking up quite early, I went for my ‘long run’ at about midday. I stuck to my 9m15 running 45 seconds walking, but my pace and knee were much better this week. I ended up running 23km in about 1h48. It felt quite easy, except for Laubenheimerhöhe, but that is always tough.

Later on I went for a little leg shake out 45 min mountain bike ride, nothing special, but did its job.

Saturday

I didn’t really fancy riding with Vorwärts Orient for some reason, but I did it anyway. The group was much smaller this week, probably because it was a bit rainy and cooler. Everything was fine until on the way home the pace was getting pushed. We were doing 45km/h for quite a while, then suddenly my legs started to go. I dropped back a bit embarrassingly, especially when my HR wasn’t too high. I think I need to work on some high gear stuff. Anyway after 3h25 I was done with almost exactly 100km on the clock.

Later on I nipped into Taubertbergsbad for a short 50 minute swim. It was ok, mainly band work and some drills at the end.  It is just keeping/improving my feel for the water by avoiding the 4 days between the Thursday and Monday group swims.

Sunday

I got up and out by 10am and went for a ride with Konrad from TCEC. I was worried enough knowing that he is a very good cyclist and an aggressive rider, but then he said he would be riding his TT bike, whereas I would ride the road bike (up until Liege Bastogne Liege). So we set off and it was all nice enough, the average speed was 25km/h as we chatted and got stuck at lights all the time. Then the pace picked up. It was ok but hard to keep pace, near the end I fell off the back once or twice. Anyway, it was just over 91km at 31.5km/h.  As I already had 17h training for the week, I binned the run.

So yep, it was a good week. 16h57 total time with a long run, 2 longish rides, bike intervals and 3 swims!  It was 2.5h more than the plan though.  Next week will also be over plan due to Liege Bastogne Liege, so I will keep my eyes open to make sure I don’t start to over-reach or burn out. Right now everything seems good 🙂 My knee is better, just the (up until now not mentioned) saddle sore is annoying me, but not when I ride strangely, so it should be fine.

No photos again this week, I wouldn’t make a good instagrammer!