Friday, 28 April 2017

Shredded legs!

The weather is definitely getting better.  At least in the short-term.  This week has been amazing.  It's light at 6am.  The birds are waking me up with their song and I'm even running without music so I can tune in to them.  This is the time of year that I really enjoy waking up and heading out to train.  Tomorrow will be a 6am start as I get ready to tackle the pool.
It's been a tough week of training and my body is feeling the effort.  On Thursday I had to do a 7 mile run in the morning.  My wife dropped me off on the way to work and the run was mainly down hill.  Easy peasy and the pace was faster than normal which you'd expect.  In the evening I had another 3 mile run and again the pace was fast so I was feeling great.  The next morning I jumped out of bed to go swimming only to find my quads were like bricks.  I walked down the stairs as though I'd ran a marathon!  Running down hill shreds your legs.  I knew this from the highland fling but this was a very sharp reminder.  Very important as the Grand 2 Grand has 14,500 feet of descending!
On Saturday I still had the DOMS and I had a 2.5 hour bike ride.  So I took a couple of pain killers and headed out.  My legs felt great, until the pain killers wore off and I was hobbling again.  I'd better get used to this as the training is only going to get tougher.
This morning I had to head out early on the bike for a 2 hour ride followed by a 30 minute run.  My legs were heavy and the speed confirmed that I was "cycling on empty".  However my 30 minute run was my fastest pace this year - just shows my body seems to cope with running better than cycling when tired.
Afterwards it was off to celebrate my son's birthday with a juicy steak and an overdose of liquid carbs!  I'm not a professional athlete, far from it, so I can have the odd "session" - can't I?  Next weekend the forecast is for snow