Life On Call

I’ve ended up writing this in 2 different plant rooms in to different suburbs while I’ve waited for high temp alarms to clear on systems. One part of my job is being on a rotating after hours on call roster. Not bad for the money if you can bag enough call outs but can wreck your training for not only the week on it but the following week after it if you don't manage your fatigue levels.

Seeing though I’ve had to have my phone on me and be able to jump in the work car as soon as a call comes though, my training is pretty much limited to the wind trainer and weights. With that in mind I made sure i had a few big, for me, swim weeks just before going on call. When it came around my upper body was thanking me for a week off. In those 2 weeks I did end up making some pretty solid gains and improvements so was please.

I was pretty happy with my weekend training block I was able to put together. Wind trainer session friday night, saturday, sunday morning and weight sessions based of what long track speed skaters doing in the gym saturday and sunday arvo. These gym session hurt big time and leave your legs like jelly and end up find some solid gains from doing them without needing to do a great deal of them. Started to find my old bike legs on Sunday which was great coz they have been missing for a fair bit. Hopefully I can get my bike back up to where it should be and not where its been for about the last 6 months.

Race schedule is now pretty much complete with Geelong Long Course and IM Melbourne being my 2 goal races with a few club races thrown in for training. I have been a bit iffy about doing Geelong but have decided to add it in for a number of reasons. One I would like to put together one really good race this summer and get a strong result. Banking everything on a Ironman when its your first time over the distance is a little risky. Two it allows me to build up my results list and gain some more exposure. Three I just love to race. Now there is key thing for Geelong, I will shut it down on the run if I have to if I’m not right. I cant afford to go to deep 6 weeks out from an IM. Swim and bike I’m not worried about pushing but my legs still haven't fully adapted to fast running just yet, they can go pretty hard but it comes at a high muscle damage price.

Thats all for now
Hopper

Getting Back Into The Swing of Things

A few weeks have past since my last update so thought I would give a bit of an update. Trainings been slowly progressing. I’ve been mainly working on my swimming these last few weeks knowing thats the thing I have to work on the most. I’m happy with how I’m progressing at this time, distance is going up and times are slowly coming down with the biggest improvement being that I’m getting more comfortable in the water. I'm not so worried about drowning anymore. These gains have come at a bit of a cost. Fatigue levels at the moment are fairly high and are effecting other sessions on land. At the moment I’m not to concerned as I know what i need to get down and how long it takes to get it done on land. Another thing behind the fatigue and the main reason for suffering with other training has been some changes to my diet that I haven’t quite got right. Diet changes being introduced are aimed at improving my fuel economy. I’ve eating very similar to this way before a few years back with a fair bit of success but this was when I was just a cyclist. I’ve got it dialed for one afternoon session a day during the week. Now that I’m swimming in the morning and then training again in the afternoon and my upper body muscles are currently inefficient which make both fuel volume and timing critical. This is the thing I need to work on and am slowly getting it to where in needs to be.

I'm just putting the finish touches on my program up to Ironman Melbourne and will update my race schedule when finalized as well as updating the rest of my pages. From Thursday I become a slave to the wind trainer and treadmill for a week thanks to having to be “on call” for work. Pretty much a week of waiting 24/7 for my phone to go off and head back off to work.

Until next time
Hopper