Mais Oui, Paris – Weeks 13+14 – 2 weeks of very little

For the first time for about 3-4 weeks I am feeling slightly better about things now. I have severely cut back my running in the hope of getting myself right for Paris Marathon. Now it is the last 2 week, so I will do my threshold intervals on Tuesday and Thursday, then the work is done!

Monday:

I cycled to swim training, swam for 1h15 – about 3000m – and cycled home. I was in the slow lane, which was a good thing! I did one harder 400m pull set, which was in 7minutes flat. I am trying to actually kick properly in when doing breaststroke, I hope that makes me slightly less slow!

Tuesday:

Back to the 1817 track after work. As it is the school holidays it was pretty empty at the track (not many kids playing football), so I switched directions for each interval. I wanted to do 6km at T pace again, as I felt fine I split it into a 3-2-1. My heart rate was much lower than it has been, and I did the last km in 3:33 without going all out.  This was much more like a session I would expect to have than those from last week. I think that is a good sign that I am recovering!

Wednesday:

I should have swum before work, but I wanted to sleep (I didn’t sleep well). I had a nap after work, which was stupid because I then couldn’t fall asleep at night.. Rest day

Thursday:

6km T, I just did 6x1km as I wasn’t feeling great. All were about 3:40/km but felt far harder than they should have.

Friday:

Off

Saturday:

After hearing that Sebi and Peter were looking for a 3rd person to swim, I decided to go along and try a longer work out. I wanted to do a 90 minute swim, but they wanted to leave after about 60mins so I did what I could until then.  I think it was 3400m, a lot for me. I slightly extended my cycling home so that it was 20km or so, I would have liked a bit more actually, but it was fine for the day.

Sunday:

off

Monday:

I went for little 7km run just as a leg shake out. Now I will admit that I probably ran faster than I should have, but my heart rate was sky high from the start. Against the wind I was in the mid 150s when doing an easy pace.  It came back down a little with the wind behind me, but my piriformis hurt, the whole back of my right leg ached, and my heart rate was high. I started to consider not starting in Paris.

I cycled to the pool later anyway as it was Easter Monday and I could swim at 5pm instead of 8pm. It was a decent session, if only 1h again. The lane was pretty empty, but when Konrad is there it always shows me how much slower I am than I need to be!

Tuesday:

I had planned on doing some M paced intervals, but after the nightmare of yesterday, I rested. I feel like I am allergic to something, or have a long lingering cold. (I got my German B2 test results – I got 90.5 from 100 for a very good grade, quite happy with that!)

Wednesday:

Because of the French trains striking, one of our connections wasn’t available, so we had to get to Karlsruhe in a different way. We managed it but then saw that our train to Paris was cancelled. We scuried to try to get a slow train to Strasbourg, but missed it s were stuck in Karlsruhe. Or so we thought, because suddenly they announced that a replacement train would go instead. It was said to be on time, but actually was 1h40 late!  So we didn’t get to Paris until fairly late on Wednesday evening.

Thursday:

Tourist day in Paris – up the Eiffel Tower

Friday:

Another walking day around Paris

Saturday:

I ran for 15 minutes on the treadmill in the hotel, I did some slightly up paced stuff and felt ok, maybe I had recovered in time??

Sunday:

Marathon