Well, after a very disappointing race over in California compounded by getting food poisoning the next day just before flying home, I’m back into the swing of things again; And at last this year I feel like I'm properly training. The hip flexor injury I suffered from December last year to mid march has completely gone now; largely due to changing my trainers. Having bought another "make" which should have been very similar to my Asics, but £20 cheaper, it took me till the end of February to realise they were the culprits and had created the problem. My frustration at this is obvious, but putting a positive spin on it all, without the injury I would never have realised the difference in my swimming brought about by the enforced increase in pool time due to the injury.
Having reflected on a lot of things after California I’ve made a few changes to my training plan. You can see exactly what my typical 14 day training cycle looks like in the training section of my website. In short though, I’ve done a lot of thinking about what hasn’t been working recently, and what has. Or rather, I’ve looked back at when things HAVE been working and tried to re-order things to re-introduce that “stuff” that “worked”. Its funny, but over time you slowly begin to drift away from thought processes and sessions or structures that had been getting results. Trying a new thing, tweaking here and there and before you know it, 6 months have passed and suddenly things aren’t what they once were and you’re not where you thought you’d be.
For example, my running has always been my strongest discipline of the 3, but over the last 12months this has dropped off somewhat. There are a number of factors to this such as my old job, letting other commitments get in the way of training sometimes. But I’ve realized that actually my training structure had changed from when things were going well and I was very much improving on my two feet. This is where the beauty of logging things over time comes into play. Being able to go back and look at what I was doing then, the things me and my coach were working on is truly invaluable and has served to jog my memory and redirect me hopefully back on track.
I’ve used the time off (due to the food poisoning) to do this for every part of my training. Asking myself, what’s worked, when, why and what’s changed? When was I at my best in each discipline? Out of this and working through it all with my coach we’ve hopefully hit on a few real nuggets that will see tangible improvements across the board in terms of performance and results.
I’m now really excited about the next 6 weeks leading up to Austria 70.3 and Switzerland 70.3. if I can get my previous PB levels of performance in each discipline, to all come together at the same time I KNOW I can see a breakthrough performance and this excites me!!! Already after only 2 weeks of returning to “the things that worked” I’m feeling stronger, faster and generally fitter.
This is after all my first true year as a “Pro” and so I need to very much think, live and train like one. Hopefully these tweaks will bring me back in line with how this should be for me in order to get the results I believe are possible.
