As the year draws to a close it seems a good time to round up the last few months of training and racing that we've put ourselves through. As mentioned in previous posts we've been working with the team at Pure Sports Med to give our training some structure, and personally I've found it a god send. Mixing up plenty of running with strength work in the gym, wattbike sessions and even REST DAYS. In between that we've turned up at various corners of the country in apocolyptic weather to race in the fantastic Coastal Trail Series by Endurancelife.
It's fair to say that as a group of men our athletic CV's until recently have been largely as part time rugby players, football players or bicep curl experts. So as we've started to really turn up the mileage that we've been doing, each of us has found a few little niggly problems that have surfaced. Nick has been hit hardest with a knee problem that has actually required a small arthroscopic surgery to remove some cysts from the ligaments. The warrior that he is, he was laid up only for a day before he was back on his feet, even attending our Christmas Party (avoiding the break dancing this year). Two weeks later he's back now into light training and we're hoping this will end up being a small road bump on the route to MdS glory. I've had some issues with my achilles and general ankle pain, which means I'm getting out of bed like an 80 year old, Zac's back has forced him into a few days off, and Will seems to be fine...
The training programme we have now is far less haphazard, we're mixing up the types of stress we're putting our bodies under and we've also started to appreciate the merits of hear rate training. We were all assessed to find out our V02 max, our power output on the bikes and our overall strength. I topped the V02 table, and Zac with these Popeye legs you can see on the left was king of power output (shocker).
After we were assess by Dean at Pure Sports Med we were given heart rate 'zones', so some days we'll train to improve our fitness running or cycling in Zone 4 or 5, and some days after long runs or races we'll spin on the bike in Zone 2, exercising and keeping your heart rate that low is actually quite hard to do, but does noticeably aid recovery. It's also been good to add some strength work, focussing in legs and balance and also some core and light upper body stuff to help cope with the weight of the packs we'll be carrying. Will though has been mainly hitting the trails of Cote D'Azur as he is based down in Monaco, so while us lot have been suffering the types of conditions you can see in the pictures, Will is running topless on the beach getting bronzed and generally annoying us all. So overall training is going well, we've hit some problems but that is very much to be expected. And it has made it glaringly obvious that half the difficulty of this event is not just surviving the desert, but to make sure you get there fit and healthy and trying to get our bodies to deal with the huge stress of the training.
To break things up, and to give us things to aim for in the diary we've taken part in a few of the brillliant Coastal Trail Series races hosted by Endurancelife. So far we've got medals from the Gower Peninsula Half Marathon, and the Dorset Half, the latter one pictured above was particularly testing. Some of the terrain was so steep you had to reach up and grab grass to haul yourself up it, and with Storm Desmond hitting the UK the wind was so fierce it was blowiung people off their feet. Not to mention that the organiser are basically liars, as by my GCSE C in maths 18 miles is NOT a half marathon, especially when there is almost 4,000m of ascending involved. But they are brilliant races, genuinely testing, fun and also held at various picturesque locations around the UK, we would recommend them highly.
While the weather so far has been very close to what we'll get in the Sahara, the hills, the backpacks, the blisters, and the teeth gritting have been great for our preparation, and we're looking forward to tucking into the next one at Dover on 16th Jan 2016.
One foot in front of the other.
