Work, garden, construction

All three have been keeping me busy lately, plus some time for training a well.

At work, there is one workstream I'm involved in that has a government imposed hard deadline of 31st March for our clients to submit data to the regulator that has been externally verified i.e. by us.  Generally it goes well, but we have one client who never holds up their end of the deal, and another one who had a major emergency on one platform about a week before the deadline, which was more important than them getting one final piece of data to me.

Still, at least it keeps me at home.  With one trip in the last week of March cancelled that means I've been at home for 7 weeks apart from a couple of day-trips to London.

I've also had a couple of days vacation time to use up, so I've had a couple of long weekends with some time in the garden doing annual maintenance tasks, repotting a few bonsai and starting to move planst out of one very narrow, dry and not very useful flower bed ahead of a project to remodel part of the garden later in the year.

We've also had the builders in to do th ework on splitting the garage in two to give a sitting room and a smaller room at the back that I'm fitting out as a gym.  The room will be large enough to fit bike on the turbo trainer, the rowing machine and a pull up bar on the wall.  I'm also shelving the walls out for storage of odds and ends related to cycling, running and other training.  There'll also be a rack on the wall to store at least one other bike.  My part of it is now largely complete structurally, with all painting done, floor down, windows in etc.  Shelving is nearly complete and should be done this weekend all using either reclaimed wood or old shelves I had in the shed, bike rack should be up, but the pull up bar will not, which is not on the critical path anyway.  I'm getting pressure to move stuff in, but there is still some electrcical work to do and I don't want the equipment to get damaged in the process. Photos will follow in sequence when it's all done.

I've managed to get a decent bit of training in over the last 2 weeks or so with over 7 hours per week, despite a bout of tendonitis in my left foot, which is sore, and inconvenient, but not a show-stopper.  That's been in the picture for about three weeks, and now I know what it is, self-treatment over the last week has improved it greatly.

So in the last 18 days I've been sticking to my general pattern of 10-12km runs on Tuesdays Wednesdays and Saturdays , with yoga on Thursdays and a long session on Sunday.

The Sunday long session is building time on feet towards July.  I'll be trying to stick to a pattern of long runs for two weeks, with a third easier week on the bike, still similar duration, but without the impact component.

The mid-week runs are nothing to write home about, either steady state HR capped sessions or speedwork, tempo type runs or long intervals with elevated HR.  The cycling club TT season has also started again, but Tuesday was a wash out with heavy rain all afternoon.  I'm sure the hardcore raced, but on the course in question, there would have been too high a risk of crashing for me.

So the long sessions have been

Sunday 25th March - nice long ride on my carbon-framed road bike, with the aero bars now fitted.  Split the ride in two with a brief 5 min stop for drink and snacks and a stretch mid way. 

1) 1:22:47 / 42.03 / Ave 30.5 / AHR 148 / MHR 159  
2) 1:23:50 / 42.14 / ave 30.2 / AHR 142 / MHR 155
Total) 84.17km / 2:46:38 / 30.3kmh / A145 / M159
For this point in the season, I'm happy with that at around 19mph for three hours.

Sunday 1st April was a long run, the plan for this one was to test out nutrition, hydration and run/walk strategies.  Plan was to run the first 10km then walk 1minute every 2km.  That worked well, but this week I'll do the run/walk from the start and see how that works as I don't think I drank enough or took in enough calories in the first 10km.  I also made a balls-up when I had a call of nature in that I lapped, but did not pause the watch, then paused it when I finished, noticing my mistake about 500m later.

Overall, this told me that I need to increase my calorie intake, but it also broke a psychological barrier of three hours on my feet.  Now that I've done it once it's no longer daunting.  The New Balance 00 trails performed well as well, and the calves and achilles held up very well.

31.03km / 3:08:47 / 6:05 average / AHR 146 / MHR 167

The legs were feeling it at the end, but mentally I was OK, with my low point coming about 20km in.  The DOMS was not bad at all on the Monday, but Tuesday was worse, which is typical for me.  That was the day I didn't TT and probably could not have done well anyway, but had a gentle run instead. 

Ready for another long run tomorrow. Then packing on Monday ready to catch a flight to Indonesia for 10 days.  I'll be in Jakarta for my birthday, but at least I'll be onshore.  Plan while there is to try and get in as many 10km to 1hr runs as I can, plus a bit of yoga, but I think taking three hours out on Sunday is going to be difficult.