Tom's training diary... week 4 of 32...

Overall
A great final week of my initial four week block. Over this training period the goal was to get back in the rhythm of training twice a day with plenty of volume in all three disciplines. Key to surviving this stage was also to minimise the number of sessions of significant intensity. With 76 hours achieved, feeling strong with no illness or injury it’s definitely a case of so far so good. I do feel pretty fatigued now but this coming week is scheduled for some serious recovery time and volume will probably drop to five or so hours with two runs, two bikes, a swim and two complete rest days.

Swim
Biggest week yet with 16k. Felt good all week particularly in the drafting 300s with H where my last two were sub-4.30. I’m still confident about the potential benefits of the power-on stroke. Tumble turns are getting there… slowly ;)

Bike
Smallest week so far, largely due to the poor weather keeping me on the turbo and time constraints on Sunday limiting me to three hours. Feeling good though, ahead of this time last year with no serious bike focus until weeks 9-12.

Run
Biggest week so far, legs felt extremely fatigued by the Saturday hill session. Still feel I’m ahead of last year and will focus on the run over the next four weeks with the Brass Monkey on January the 20th being my first serious goal of the season.

Lifestyle
Made good strides with my weight this week, dropping from 73.1kg to 71.6 (around a 3kg drop over the four weeks). Still a way to go to reach my sub-66 target by March 15th but I’m certainly on target. Being light is extremely beneficial for endurance performance but power and health must not be compromised… this is an extremely fine line and difficult to manage effectively. Once the final 20 weeks starts it’s not ideal to be in an energy deficit, particularly with the related increase in training volume & intensity. Sleep was ok at 53 hours although 3 short of target. Food was good although the nutritional challenge comes this week!!

Workout of the week
The Tuesday tempo treadmill was pretty good and I’m starting to feel relaxed running at 16kph (6 min miles). As a performance measure I’ll be taking HR over the last five minutes, this week I averaged 170 and maxed at 171. Each week I’ll add a minute of 17 at the end with the hope to get to ten minutes at 17 with a sub 170 HR. If you’d like to repeat this session it’s 10-20 min warm-up followed by 10 minutes at 1kph slower than marathon pace, 10 minutes at marathon pace, 10 minutes at half marathon pace and ten minutes at 10k pace. Each week add a minute of 5k pace on the end (and remove a minute of the slowest pace) so that after ten weeks the session finishes with ten minutes at 5k pace. This is a great tempo session which should really improve your running economy at pace with fatiguing your legs to seriously.