Five weeks to race day – Hawaii 2009

We’ve been through a few battles this week. It usually takes us more than two days to get over a big Sunday session. We always have Monday as a rest day. All I do physically is take my girls Mollie and Missie (dogs) for our coffee walk. We walk about two km, they get to say hello to all the school girls and boys passing the coffee shop. We sit on the footpath which is right near the underpass to the train station.

I’m sure those dogs know it’s Monday. If it’s raining on a Monday morning they’re still keen. They wait outside the back door on the deck and as soon as I step onto the internal stairs they beat me down to the front door, and they go the long way round.

Monday and Tuesday were spent fighting off a virus. Several of my squad members were crook last week and Sandy works with a bunch of people who are always sick. I swam easy on Tuesday and skipped my run, just too close to the edge. We take every vitamin supplement in the health food store.

Wednesday Sandy and I slept in and  both of us woke up feeling OK. We did a three hour run. Felt a bit tired at first but finished strong, visualising the Hawaii course. It was Sandy’s fiftieth birthday. She’s looking good for fifty.

Going out to celebrate her birthday was a bit of a non-event as we were both tired and keen to get to bed. I had to be up at 4.30am for coaching. I was flat and fighting off the virus again. I used one of my “blue cards” (get out of workout cards) to skip the swim.

Friday I woke feeling better, 95% on top of my health. I did an easy workout of cycling around a loop to the pool and an easy 2000m swim followed by a ride home. Off to see my health Guru and then straight to see my accupuncturist, Jiang. It was such a nice day, I took my Harley for the ride to see Jiang. She loves my bike, she always comes out to hear it start up, like a little girl. She straightens my muscles out after a week of torment.

I rested Saturday, good thing it was a rainy morning. A lot of the squad members chose to drive to the pool that morning, except for the few who did their big Sunday workout on Saturday morning to free up Sunday (Fathers Day).

Father’s Day was fine with little or no wind. We did an epic workout. A one hundred and fifty km bike with at least forty km of climbing in it. (probably more) and a run session of 14 x 1km repeats on a five minute time base.

It’s one of my favourite sessions. In fact the whole squad look forward to sessions like this. When you finish them, you feel like you’ve done something. In fact, waking up this morning, we both felt like we’d done something???

My total hours are down this week but the week has been a great success, both physically and mentally. 13.5 hrs total doesn’t tell the story of how hard it was.