Jackie D - Weeks 21 & 22

Week 21 - starting Monday 5 February 2007

Scheduled hours: 10hrs 20mins
Actual hours: 10hrs 24mins

I made masters swimming both times this week which is a pleasant change. It is soooooo hard to drag myself there in the evening when I am tired and it is so cold outside and then to take off clothes when all I want to do is put extra sweaters on and curl up under the duvet with a book and a hot chocolate. Darling hubby (Fred) was very supportive on the second session because I really was considering not going and he just said “Get on and get over there, you have to do your training and you aren’t swimming next week”. Good point and it got me out of the house (of course the scheduled alternative was to do our tax return so that may have helped too!). He thinks I have S.A.D. especially as the prior few days I had been doing stuff at the gym/ inside instead of outside. Once I am at the pool though I am OK and glad I got there. And, the time really flies when you are swimming a scheduled workout with someone.

Another “longest indoor ride ever” at 2hrs 30mins. I had the 3 hr spinerval DVD (look if I put spinerval without the s it doesn’t change it to sinkerballs) which I loosely followed. Couldn’t follow exactly as it was too intense for my planned HR and also I physically couldn’t do some of the standing stuff on light gears. That brought me down to earth with a bump as I clearly have a long way to go to become a decent cyclist!

No long runs this week and I left for my holiday of Caribbean Cruise on the Saturday so the final workout of the week was running roads of Fort Lauderdale around the hotel. Nice thing was it was shorts and T shirt. But it wasn’t very scenic.


23 WEEKS TO GO

Week 22 - starting Monday 12 February 2007

Scheduled hours: 2hrs 50mins
Actual hours: 3hrs 00mins

Yep, that is not a misprint - total training hours way down. Mary is determined I enjoy my holiday without training. On the one hand that is just as well as the ship’s “jogging track” is tiny - my boys (age 7 and 9) could run around it in 20 seconds! I think it said it was 0.06 of a mile - that would be a lot of laps!

Anyway I needed to do something to justify the eating and drinking of the cruise and luckily the ship had a very well supplied gym. I did 2 strength sessions and they had most of the machines I used, free weights and mats etc so I could practically do my normal session.

My first run was scheduled for 20mins and I confess I just couldn’t do just 20mins. I did it on the treadmill and I did stop at 30mins - it was hard but cocktail hour was calling. All the aerobic machines had a 20min max set on them so I hope there wasn’t anyone there training for a marathon as resetting every 20mins could get tedious.

The funny thing about the gym’s facilities were that it was all in kg and km which I am not used to so it was all done by “feel”. I think that was kind of a good thing ‘cos sometimes it is too easy to get hung up on numbers.

Big relaxing sigh and now to tell about some cross training. Kayaking through a lagoon on St Thomas (Virgin Islands) to a little uninhabited island to go hiking, hermit crab racing and snorkelling. I logged this as my planned 30min session - in fact it was a 3 hour trip but it was pretty leisurely except for the kayaking in and out of the lagoon which definitely counted! I was a bit smuggins though ‘cos darling hubby (who had the other kayak with 9 year old son) complained about his arms being sore for the rest of the day. I was fine! Thank you training plan.

I also had my first experience and use of a gym stationary bike since this Ironman training began. That was interesting. I strapped my feet in as well as I could but the saddle - it’s so wide.

So all in all a lovely relaxing week and of course just to make all the snow bound people green, I should finally mention the bits that I didn’t count for my log - the hours swimming around beaches and reefs looking at all the pretty fishies. It actually wasn’t much effort as the sea water was really buoyant so you could just float around.

Back to reality next week


22 WEEKS TO GO