It’s been a while…

I last posted here on this blog in late 2011. One of my last posts was my ambitious schedule for 2012 which needless to say, didn’t happen as planned…

It all started off so well in January with the Resolution Run, the annual 8k snow-fest around Fort Henry. I was 15th in 32.45. Then in February, in the 5k Twosome Run, I was again 15th in 20.08, and my race partner and I won our combined age-group. In March, I ran the CDC/HDH 10k and came a very respectable 3rd, in under 40 minutes, and then in April I ran my best half-marathon for a while at the Limestone Race Weekend, where I did 1.32.03 and was 27th. I don’t know what happened in May but I didn’t do the early sprint-tri I had planned or the trail run, but in June things were okay for Beat Beethoven, another 8k race in Kingston, in which I finished 22nd in 31.53 (a clear improvement from January’s race of the same length. Things seemed to be going in the right direction.

I finally started off my tri season at the Smith’s Falls Tri, where I did the Sprint Course. The swim was dire – I wore a wetsuit and it turned out to be very warm in the water, so I almost couldn’t swim at all and came out dead last. Of course I made up all that on the bike leg, and the 5k run was fine, but being in the Top 100 was not exactly the level of achievement I had wanted. Then in July it was the my usually hot home race, the Wolfe Island Classic, in which everybody runs about 10% slower than they usually do for 10k. About 3km from the finish I felt something go in my knee, but I’m stupid when these kind of things happen and I wouldn’t stop. It didn’t help that this other guy who had caught me up encouraged me to run harder, and I even put in a sprint at the end to finish 5th, and 1st in my age group, in 42.43.

I could hardly walk afterwards, and it turned out my knee was really bad. I didn’t run again for the rest of the year and into 2013… but I’ll save that for the next post.

 

Two Weeks Wasted

Although I had a good time, in training terms, my time in Japan was two weeks wasted.

Firstly, I couldn’t swim regularly because most of the public pools in Tokyo were closed in order to save energy as ongoing nuclear power problems, post-earthquake and tsunami, continue to dog the country. I did get one 40 length (1km) swim in at a health club at the hotel we stayed in for the last two days and that was it.

Secondly, I didn’t have access to a bike, so I did no riding at all.

And finally, I just didn’t have enough time. It was the first time we had been back for two years and it will be another two before we go again, so we had a very full schedule of meeting friends and family, and lots of traveling. I managed to run 4 times over the two weeks, the first week in intense heat and humidity, two of which were quite substantial sessions of around 14km. I also did one intense interval / sprint session and one very hard weights session, both of which left me virtually incapacitated for a couple of days afterwards – I am not as young as I was!

The lack of training and an ongoing Achilles’ tendon problem means I have decided not to do the Canadian Triathlon this weekend, and concentrate from next week on preparing for the County Marathon at the start of October, and then take a break before starting on preparation for next season’s full program.

A frustrating week

I’ve been feeling washed out and bored this week. I guess it’s the downswing of my depressive cycle. Anyway, it means I have not been feeling like doing much.

I went swimming on Monday, and tried to do 60 lengths (1500m), which is the Olympic tri swim distance, as fast as I could. This wasn’t really that fast, 37 minutes, in fact pretty much the same slow pace as I did the 2km at the K-Town the other week, so I have plenty of work to do over the winter.

I will get out on the bike and do a fairly substantial brick sometime this weekend because this will be the last time I will be able to ride for two weeks, as we are off to Japan on Monday. There, I might be able to get some swimming in, but I will certainly do plenty of running, and I want to start upping the distances again in preparation for the County Marathon in October.