First Week Disaster

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So, I am at the end of my fist week. It did not at all go to plan as I had expected. I’ve only completed 3 out of 9 sessions from my training plan…

I stupidly thought starting the training plan on the 28th of December, a couple of days before New Year’s Eve would be ok. It was not. My race is on the 7th August next year and I chose a 32-week training plan which starts me on the 28th of December. I was lucky enough to spend the new year celebrations with close family. We had a small party; a lot of alcohol was drunk and I had a sore head for the next couple of days. With age the hangovers get considerably worse. One of the reasons I don’t really drink as much as I used to. This is my excuse for missing so much of the first week's training.

The first week of the plan is a fitness test week. You are supposed to complete a fitness test for the swim, bike and run. The threshold values from the tests are then used to set training zones for the next 6 weeks until you complete another fitness test week. Monday was a swim test followed by strength and conditioning. I am currently working in Northern Ireland and due to Covid, the pools are shut. So, I just did the strength and conditioning and left the swim. Hopefully I could come up with a plan for that later on.

Tuesday came and it was time for my bike FTP test. I had let myself go over the xmas period and still feeling a bit worse for wear, due to all the beer and bad food, I attempted the test. The test consisted of a warm up then a 20 minute, as hard as you can go, threshold test. I did this on the turbo trainer which, gives power output data.  I did ok but it was hard, I very nearly threw up. A shock to the system to say the least. My results came in, I achieved 246 watts threshold power and 166 bpm heart rate threshold. Not really knowing if this was good or bad, I put it into the training peaks app.

The rest of the week was a bit of a haze. Due to work I was sent back to England and was able to spend the new year with close family. This was great for the party, not so great for the training. New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day were a write-off. Still feeling pretty bad on the Saturday, I managed to get to a pool before lock down hit England. I did the fitness test, which consisted of a warm up, then a 400-meter best effort followed 5 minutes later by a 200-meter best effort. You then put these times into a calculator on MyProCoach and it gives you your threshold swim pace. I pulled out a 6 minutes 59 seconds 400-meter and a 3 minutes 18 seconds 200-meter. I know what I am capable of in the water and I was fairly disappointed with these results. The New Year’s celebrations had hit a little too hard.

The last test was the run fitness test. I had just completed training for a marathon I did at the beginning of December and I had also used MyProCoach for that as well. So, I have a good idea what my threshold is. This was all I needed to convince myself to rest, get over the hangovers and miss the run fitness test. I just used my previous run pace threshold of 6 minutes 58 seconds and the threshold heart rate of 176 bpm.

That is the week completed. 3 out of 9 sessions. Drinking and training do not mix.


 

Location: Belfast, UK

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