Finally Doing All 3 Sports! Oh, and 1 more…

I’ve continued with a good block of training since returning from Christmas. A brief overview of my swimming has seen my times come down nicely in my drill sessions of 10 x 200m, 20 x 100m and 20 x 50m. All good progress since I spent 3 months of building base fitness and working on technique, its now all down to adding some speed and strength in these sessions. All worked into a 3, 000m overall session.
The weather has been fairly chilly for too much cycling, but I enjoyed a jaunt over the pennines to Leeds to visit my sister. A hilly 40 miles each way which I did back to back Saturday and Sunday. A good chance to work on some climbing and also make me face riding in adverse conditions. It was wet and windy which made me get over myself about going out and crying off bad weather days.

Snowy Cannock Chase

Then the snow came, so I decided to make use of the mountain bike and hit the hills of Cannock Chase. A mecca for MTB, just outside of Stafford, which consists of a great 14 mile loop of great single track climbs and technical decents. The snow made this great fun and quite demanding for what isn’t a huge distance to say out loud!
My running is a continuing confidence grower. I have completed my rehab runs of 3 x 1 mile, 3 x 2 miles and now 4 x 3 miles. I have done the first of my 4 mile days which felt as close to being back to my old-self than ever. It really has been a conscious effort to respect these distances even though they don’t sound too heavy.  With the constant niggles around my knee, caused my ITB, I can feel and actually see positive results coming from all the work I’ve been doing, which is a great feeling. I basically foam roller everyday and do a series of stretches around the roller and also use a theraband to do some resistance exercises. I did mention I was going to start this in an early post here and it is actually working.

On top of the training, my diet has also become much more consistent and regimented. Flax seed, goji berries and muesli for breakfast, less coffee and more smoothies mid morning and to help cut back on the spending Ive been taking in my own lunch. A bowl of brown pasta or rice, with grilled peppers, onions and mushrooms with grilled chicken in turmeric, gram masala and garlic. It tastes ok, but is great when two hours later I’ll be doing my training.

I’m trying to protect myself from getting sick, so the garlic, onions and turmeric with salmon, chicken and pork dinners are a great source of all I need to get full and keep fuelled. Fruit is plying me with all the sugars I need and a balance of fish and meat is a great source of protein. Cod liver oil tablets and the flax seed also help me a bit less creaky around the joints and ligaments. There are some great bit on nutrition I have read on Livestrong, Trifuel, SIS (the bars of which I take out on my cycle rides).

I made a makeshift helmet cam for my snow ride, check it out below. I felt a bit bad for how I reacted to the slow guy getting in my way, but he did see me 3 times and still not pull over!

Lance Armstrong, Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Hamilton & Ayrton Senna walk into a bar…

Shall I go on about Lance? I think we all have an opinion on it, good or bad but personally I don’t think we learned anything we didn’t already know in Lance’s chat with Oprah. Only that a quick check of Oprah’s wiki page that she was actually meant to be called Orpah, yet for a spelling mistake on the birth certificate. Unfortunately the single mother, poverty stricken family she was brought up in weren’t able to back date any important and official documents, maybe Lance could’ve checked his address book for her? Anyway, out of all I read the day after the broadcast, this article was one of the best written ‘How To Play The Confessor Without Actually Confessing’

I read Tyler Hamilton’s book ‘The Secret Race’ in a week. It was a fascinating read, very well written and very honest. If Lance wasn’t such an aggressive and nasty person, perhaps he may have emerged from this whole affair with an iota of respect that his accomplices have done. There are two pieces from the book that really stood out to me. First of all:

“You can talk all you want about BB’s (Blood Bags) and the Edgar (EPO); you can call me a cheater and a doper until the cows come home. But the fact remains that in a race where everybody had equal opportunity, I played the game and I played it well. I took a chance and I pushed myself as hard as I could, and when the day was over, I finished first.”

Really honest and strong words from Tyler Hamilton talking about himself. Did everybody have equal opportunity? Or did they (Lance, Tyler et al) immerse themselves in a culture that created a circle, or an exclusive club, where doping wasn’t available to everyone. Or not at least on this scale. Lance’s private jet to Valencia wasn’t chartered for the entire peloton was it? Either way, this one extract really emphasizes the need and desire to win at all costs. There is no beating around the bush – they needed this to win, a spiraling out of control environment that ripped through peoples lives and left the nice guy finishing last.

Secondly, what brings it back to a slight twinkle of humanity is towards the end of the book:

“James (a special needs pupil) did great. He was strong and determined. When we got to the top, James was as stoked as if he’d just climbed Alpe d’Huez. I was too.
“Now that I’d told the truth, I was tuning into life again. I could talk to someone without having to worry or backtrack or figure out their motives, and it felt fantastic. I felt as if I were back in 1995, before all this bullshit started.”

This full circle of enjoying the basic and most fundamental part of why you took up a sport is apparent in this section. It also rings bells of the tear jerking truth in the film ‘Senna’. This incredible biopic from 2011 tells the story of Ayrton Senna with the most incredible footage and real life story. This film starts and ends with Senna’s early karting days.

“’78 I came to Europe to compete for the first time. It was pure driving, it was real racing. That makes me happy”

When asked at the end of the film about his most precious racing memories – baring in mind the guy had won countless Formula 1 races, drivers titles , driven the best cars in the world beyond their limits, developed the sport beyond the realms of sport itself – he recalled his memories of karting being the best and that he held most precious. There were no politics, no cheating, no egos. It was pure racing. It’s great to read that Tyler Hamilton had the same wave of emotion when he rediscovered the grass roots of why we take up sport. We all have a bit of the great Ayrton Senna in us. That’s why we bust a ball everyday, every week, every year to compete at whatever level.

Cycling Comparison

Back into some hard training after the New Year festivities and I started the year off with 2 fairly long rides back to back. First of all I put in a 40 miles ride on one of my old favourite routes out to Wilmslow in Cheshire which takes in the near full route of the Xtra Mile Wilmslow Triathlon, held each May. The following day I went out towards Lymm, which is just shy of 40 miles but a bit flatter and again one of my old fail-safe routes.

It was an accident I chose these routes, just out of familiarity, but when I got back I looked at the charts on my GPS tracker from Adidas MiCoach, and I hadn’t actually done the Wilmslow route for a while. It was back on 6th April 2012 and this is now the 5th of January 2013.

I dug out the charts from my April ride and compared them with my recent January ride. I tried to take away the anomaly of traffic lights and pick a point where I was on a constant pace around a hilly section of the route. This turned out to be a 15 mile section which made up the majority of the Wilmslow Triathlon route.

Wilmslow 6th April 2012

In April I did this 15 mile stretch in 53 minutes and now in January I had done the exact same route in just under 50 minutes. Lets round it up to a 3 minute improvement over 15 miles. I can’t remember what the weather was like in April, but no doubt a darn sight better than the winter January chill I was out in this weekend.

Wilmslow 5th January 2013

I’ve found it more difficult to track any cycling improvement than my swimming and running, mainly because of the variations in each ride and the outside factors – wind, rain, traffic etc.Swimming is an exact measure of distance vs time and I have the watch on me and someone else built the pool. Running is straight forward on the canal path, but putting the hours in on the turbo trainer has been more difficult to measure its gains.

This however proves that I have got some kind of result. OK, 3 minutes. Nothing earth shattering, but over a short stretch of hilly road I’m quite happy to see something is happening in my cycling as well.

No knee’d for an op

I had my appointment at the docs brought forward by a week, so I saw the orthopedic guys on Friday and they told me some good news. My knee does not need an op. I just had a build up of fluid on my knee that had developed after a bit of scar tissue on my ITB had rubbed against the knee. This came back from an MR scan so I’ve got the green light to begin running again.

I managed to sneak a pic of the scan when the doc left!

I’ll be taking the same course of action as when I recovered from my right ITB a year ago – 3 x 2 mile runs / 3 x 3 miles runs / 2 x 4 mile runs per week, with a new stretching and strength routine on top.

I had a look into this and came across some ideas of the exercises I can do. I’ll try and do these as daily as I can, around my run and turbo sessions. Nothing new, but worth writing down as a means of a reminder.

– Clams

– Lateral Leg Raises

– Donkey Kicks

– and the theraband balancing drill

There is a download of these exercises available here at Runners Connect

I’ve not had to use my brain properly for a while, so when I started doing a bit of physiological research, it felt a bit like the old uni days! I came across these 2 guys. Firstly at Runners World, this article shows that prevention is better than cure and talk about ‘Getting The Band Back Together‘ – very clever title – and all about the research this dude called Ferber has done.

Then when I tried to find a bit more on Ferber, I came across this blog ‘Weak Hips, Weak Theory’. Hardly the digging and research of a first rate solicitor, but with the vast information available on the internet, in a matter of minutes I had found conflicting views by people in the industry. I think it’s really important for us to work out what we think is best. Nobody knows your body like yourself, so whether an academic spends years in a lab or a guy at a gym discovers a great new method, it’s all about doing what suits you best. I have my favourite stretches that I do daily, but I am also open to trying new ideas.

I think Ferber’s work sounds incredible and a value to know for any nerdy athlete who wants to know more about the science of their movements. It’s a bit tight on this other guy to question everything, but again a worthy argument that sparks debate, enough so to give his own information. So the benefits for the keen observer like me, mean I can take both sides and work out a grey area inbetween that suits me best. Get out the chamois cream as I’m going to sit on this fence for a bit longer!

What I’m trying to say is we can make our opinions quietly in the background when two guys go off and debate enough to do research that backs up their own idealistic endeavors. Let them do the hardwork.

Just saying.