Cramming it in!

I’m supposed to be doing the CRC Crickhowell Mountain Bike Marathon on Saturday and then the Schwalbe Road Sportive on Sunday, but it didn’t quite fit into my training plan.

I’ve therefore made the classic mistake of trying to fit all my training in before the weekend so that I can do these two events. Really I should have replaced a number of my planned trainign sessions with these events. But not me, I didn’t want to miss out on my quality run or swim session that I do on a Sunday morning, nor did I want to miss out on the hill reps session I had planned on the bike for today so I juggled things around.

Monday was a rest day and it stayed that way.

Tuesday was my usual circuits training session and a sea swim.

Wednesday should have been a 50 minute recovery run. I did that first thing in the morning but then decided to also do all of Thursdays sessions in the afternoon. That was 2 hours in the gym plus a 4000m swim in the pool. I was beginning to feel a little tired by the end of the swim though and my calves were cramping up.

Thursday should have been a gym and swim session but I’d already done the day before so I shifted hill reps session on my bike that I had planned for Friday to today. The hill reps were pretty hard and I was beginning to suffer but I stuck with it and even tagged a little bit of easy spinning onto the session in order to ease my legs off a bit. I did a quick core workout as well.

Friday was supposed to be a bike and core workout but I’d already done that on Thursday which gave me chance to fit in the run and swim I would normally do on a Sunday morning. Trouble is that would usually come after a rest day on Saturday but today it came after 4 consecutive hard days. The run went well and I managed to hit my target pace for all of the four 6 minute intervals that I was doing, but by the time I got in the pool I had no ‘ooompf’ left.

I should have been doing 15x 200m but only managed a warm up, 1000m drills set and then 5x 200m before giving up and heading home. I could have kept going I guess but my pace was slowing, I was too tired and probably wasn’t doing myself any good.

I don’t know how that bodes for the events over the weekend though. Hopefully I’ll be able to have a really easy, slow ride around the MTB Marathon on Saturday and recover enough to be able to tackle the longer of the Sportives on Sunday – We’ll see. It does of course mean that I miss out completely on my Saturday rest day so next week could be a struggle as well!