Sunday 11 March 2012

Ironman journey begins

This week is the beginning of my Ironman journey and my plan is babysteps, especially for the first 4 weeks as I'm struggling to overcome a sacroiliac injury which has made my training broken and inconsistent and running hasn't even been on the agenda for 2 months. However with over a week spent doing 45mins of mobility work, stretching and general strengthning of the pelvic area I feel ready to try a run today so cross fingers!

I did devise a 20 week programe which I was convinced gave me the correct balance between maintaining some sort of social life aswell as training my ass off but this injury has disrupted things. So my new plan is to use the old plan as a guide but be flexible with when I do certain session. Also at the moment I think anything more than one run a week is too much for me and too much volume is also too much. Running and long rides are going to have to have a few days between and the 'inbetween' session are going to have to be short and high intensity. Strangelly it seems like I can handle HIT cycling fine but volume session make my pelvis a shambles the next day. However hopefully in a few weeks I will improve.

Basically this is my plan -

1) First 4 weeks will be rehab for the injury and an attempt at some easy short training session just to try and get some consistncey back. I'd have a guess at about 4 days training 3 off for now.
2) After 4 weeks I would like approx 12 weeks of base building where I will gradually build up some training and give me some sort of fitness back - May consist of 1 long ride, progressing (ish) as we go on, and the same with a run and swim and if I can I want one conditioning session in.
3) Then 4 weeks where I will try some of my longest rides and runs then the rest being speedwork to get sharp again.
4) Final 4 weeks taper where I shall do as little as possible just to keep me going. I would like to think I'll be down to about 4-5 days here as I know from experiance, less is more in the taper!
5)I'm going to training in 2-3week blocks with mini tapers as such on the 3rd or 4th week. This depends how I feel really and what I will have done in these blocks. Definitelly though I'm adament I don't want to get in to overtraining rut this summer like happened last year. I would rather be a bit under done than over as I'm sure staying motivated carries someone forward that extra few weeks alone.

Starting from this week I will post weekly training updates about what session I've done and how it's going on the journey to becoming an Ironman.

Finally, I have a rough plan of how I will train but as ever things will crop up, I will shuffle and change session if I would rather do one session than the other. So long as I'm heading in the rite direction and enjoying it I'm happy.

Goal - sub 12 hrs BUT mainly to get to the end!

Thursday 8 March 2012

Injury nightmare!

It's been a while since I've blogged, mainly because I've finally met an injury! I say this because since I started my endurance/fitness/competing/health interest or whatever you want to call it four years ago I've been lucky and had to have nothing longer than about a week off due to injury. I've run marathons, a couple of ultras, done 100+ mile run weeks, done a lot of high intensity training be it running/cycling or on the weights but had nothing major until now!

Since the first week in Januray I've not been able to run for more than 10mins and there have only been 3-4 of them, by last week I couldn't even run 200yds. Cycling has kept me sane as well as swimming but recently I've struggled in the pool due to the twisting motion of the pelvis and after 2 months of cross training have finally been told to stop completely and only work on rehab exercises and at best low intensity (disco weights/pointless weights) upper body weights for as long as it takes!

I know there is more important things in life but to me this is a serious downer - In to the 3rd month of injury and when you train day in day out the weeks suddenly become ridiculously boring.

On the plus side my Ironman Wales training doesn't start until April 16th so my best option is to work on rehabilitate my sacroiliac joint (pelvis area) over the next four weeks and slowly start getting stronger again!

On top of this I'm ridiculously motivated and am positive if I can string a good month together come May the I'll be well on my way to getting back to fitness!

One goal - become an Ironman! (even if I have to do it slower than planned)