Mais Oui, Paris – Week 12 – Slowly Recovering?

Lets not dwell on how shit my training is going, lets just see how this week goes.

Monday:

I had only gotten home at 1am from England the night before, so was tired. My hips are still tight and sore, I guess they won’t feel great when I am working them out as much as possible!  I was going to go on the trainer for an hour, but wasn’t feeling it so rested.

Tuesday:

I went to 1817 after work and tried another 3x2km T. I could actually run my T pace of about 3:42/km more comfortably today. I did the 3 intervals fine, with a poopmergency only coming on after about 5.6km, so I could hold it for the last 400m before going to the (open today) toilets.  I feel like it wasn’t great running today, but also not dreadful, certainly much better than Friday.

I cycled to kastel and then home after the run for another 30mins or so of work. In the evening I tried 1 leg hip bridges for the first time, I had muscle ache in my hamstrings the days after!

Wednesday:

I went to the weight training session of TV Hechtsheim. They have really old equipment, but they have the main bases covered. They also have a stepper, an eliptical, spinning bikes and a treadmill. I did a round of the leg based machines, then did 6 minutes on the stepper. I felt better after doing the workout than I did before.

Thursday:

My hips felt better than they have, it is mainly a slightly nagging right hip flexor now, with my piriformis still be noticable on occasion. Anyway I went to do my now standard 3x2km T session after work.  Everything was fine, my HR was lower than in the last couple of sessions, but I felt short of breath. I managed my times (7:25 or so for 2km) without pushing too hard.

Friday:

Rest

Saturday:

I wanted to do an easy run, I haven’t done any for a while so I thought it would be worth testing myself on a nice easy loop. TCEC were meeting at 10am at Römisches Theater, so I thought I’d join in.  After a few km of warm up, I met up with the group and we set off. I could feel by glutes were a little sore and my heart rate was higher than it should be, but otherwise the run was fine. Actually I enjoyed it as it was just about 90 minutes of chatting about triathlon and other crap whilst having a nice easy, scenic jog.  When we got back to the start I had exactly 20km on the watch, that’d do for the day.

Later after going into town with Katja, I went to TBB to try my first T26 swim workout.  I know you should do the A workout, then if you swim twice a week you should do A-A, then A-A-B, then A-A-B-C, but I felt like the A sessions look a bit big for me, they are generally 4500m or so, comfortably my longest swim ever!

So I picked a B swim. It started off all good, lots of snorkel work until I actually was looking forward to taking it off. Then came some speed. It was 8x50m at 85%, which was fine, but then came another 8x75m at 85%. The last of which took me over 3000m for the session. I swam the easy 150m in the plan, then I should have repeated the 8x75m + 150m easy, but I was done!  My times were only going in one direction if I carried on.  So I did 3150m, a long workout for me, but a shortened B workout in T26 world!

Sunday:

The weather was nice, 10°C and sunny with little wind. I took my chance to actually cycle!  I know that I can’t or shouldn’t just jump on and do 100km, I also didn’t have time, so I just rode an easy 1h20 or so. It was nice to be out in the sun and my legs felt better than expected, though I don’t know if I’d manage 3h+ right now.  I did about 35km on the cross bike all in.

Overview:

Well it isn’t exactly how I envisaged my marathon training going!  I ran 3 times for a total of about 37km, but I did 2 (easy) sessions and a longer run, so it could have been worse. With a swim and a bike and a gym session it wasn’t the nightmare that last week was.

I feel like I am having a bit of hayfever at the moment. I have fairly constant headaches after exercise and am a bit snotty and can feel that my breath is hot. I don’t want to sound too positive, but if that clears up and I start Paris feeling healthy, it might not be a nightmare, there were a few ifs there though.

Next week I want to do my last sessions on Tuesday and Thursday, I will bike and swim on Monday. It is easter weekend after that, I’d like another swim and maybe a longer bike and another 20km+ run. I don’t want to overdo it with less than 2 weeks until Paris, but in a 4 week taper I should be able to do a bit more!