Day off work after yesterdays Mag Trainer day of hell

Just got in from this mornings swim squad. I was feeling pretty flat when I got up at 4:40am but once I got in the pool I felt pretty strong and despite the aches in my legs, I had a solid session. I'm glad its the last day of the school holidays, because the pint sized pool demons that invaded our squad two weeks ago will go back to burning up the pool wherever they came from and let me rebuild my self esteem. I admire their swimming skills but being carved up by kids that look about 12-13 is killing my ego. Be gone little critters!

Yesterday morning was a strength session on the Mag Trainer which was reasonably painful, but was short and sweet. It was an hour including 10min warm up and down with a bunch of 20sec max efforts with the tension and gears cranked to the max, on a two minute cycle. Coach says that they will stretch out to five minute plus intervals as we get closer to Ironman, eek!

Last night I went along to the Mag Trainer group session. Usually its held in a gym in the city but we didn't have keys this time for some reason. when I arrived everyone was debating flagging the session, I said “Nah, we can do it outside over here.” So we did our session on the footpath outside the gym under the light. It was actually pretty sweet, I normally cook in the gym, outside last night was nice and cool. We did a 15min warmup then 4 x (3 x 5 min @ 90, 110, 120 rpm), it was a full on cadence session. The goal of the workout was to develop the ability to pedal efficiently at high cadences. The optimum cadence to cycle Ironman at is around 90-100 rpm, which is around the same cadence you should run at. The theory is that if you cycle at the same cadence you run at, you will adapt to running faster when transitioning from the cycle to the run.

I had a day off owing to me from Easter, so I thought that since I was struggling so much the last few days, that this would be a perfect opportunity to rest up and prepare for this weekends training. It feels good to do a training session then head home to relax and recover. I guess this is how a professional athlete feels, heh.