Race ready? In February?!

Just over a week to go until my first race of the year – the qualification race for the World Duathlons Championships in Denmark in July – so now seems like as good a time as any to reflect on how my training has gone over the winter and assess the shape I am in heading into it. First point to note, winter is far from over yet and, judging by yesterday’s negative temperatures, is still in full swing. Next weekend's race, the Anglian Water Standard Duathlon, comes very early in the season, unusually so; all the other duathlon qualifiers are four weeks later, mid-March. This has brought about challenges in terms of timing my training build up to peak at the right time. Usually February would be the middle of a big block of winter base training, where I put down some steady, big miles without much intensity. Timings have thus had to be tweaked to accommodate a mid-February race and everything brought forward a couple of months. This meant no backing off over the Christmas period, trying to still get out on the bike once a week to keep up the endurance, and introducing high intensity workouts in January in the form of hard intervals sets on the turbo / Wattbike, multi-brick sessions and tempo runs. As this has all been done whilst the weather is still freezing, it automatically ups your injury risk as muscles are liable to tear much more easily when cold. (No small coincidence that all three of my left leg calf tears have been in either January or February.)

The second point to note is that throughout this winter build up, since November 2017, I have been under the watchful eye of a qualified triathlon coach: Chris Dominey of Tri Coach Cornwall. (No, not coincidental nomenclature, he is in fact Matt’s cousin). If I was going to pay for the services of a coach, I might as well keep it in the family! I have mentioned before how much of a change this has meant for me in terms of my training. I am many things, and stubborn is most definitely one of them! Giving myself over to a coach who has a completely different approach to training to the one I have always employed myself, and allowing him to take control of my entire training regime has represented a HUGE upheaval to my familiar modus operandi. Trusting that someone else knows what is good for me better than I know myself has been a monumental challenge. At first, I freaked out slightly at the lack of control I had over my own schedule. The lack of freedom to do what I want, when I wanted, as I had always previously done, annoyed me somewhat in the early days as I struggled to adapt to the new routine. Having my running volume cut back from four runs a week to just the two when I am actually doubling up in distance this year to tackle the standard (10k run, then 5k) has been a cause for concern! As has doing three swims a week (more swimming than running? but I am training for duathlon?! And I hate swimming!) and being told that I couldn’t do my beloved parkrun every Saturday morning was another change I took a while to get on board with! (I confess I may have tried to find sneaky ways around this latter, like incorporating a parkrun into a brick-set or into a longer tempo run!) BUT, and this is a big but (almost as big as my butt after 3 months of hard turbo sets!), I have stuck with it; I have stuck with the plan. Chris’ oft used saying is ‘Trust in the process’, and whilst it is hard to do that initially, when the process has only just begun and you have yet to see any positive adaptations resulting from it, I trusted that Chris is a professional with far more experience than me when it comes to knowing what athletes need to do in order to improve. And now, almost four months into the program, I am totally seeing the benefits.

The main focus for this winter was to improve my biking as Chris felt that this is where I could make the biggest time gains. I thought my biking wasn’t too bad, because I do a lot of it, I am good on a hill and I have a high fitness and endurance base, and am not afraid to hit the hurt locker and raid the pain parlour. My potential scope for improvement on the bike was highlighted by the two FTP tests I have done as part of my coaching plan. My only previous experience of an FTP test was in January 2016. I had only owned my road bike for 6 months, I hadn’t even got the cleats for it and was still cycling on flat pedals. The result I posted was apparently not too shabby for someone with such little experience. When Chris had me do the test in November 2017, I was miffed to have only increased by 3 poxy watts. Less than a 2% improvement. I couldn’t understand it: nearly two years of cycling at least 70 miles a week, much more in summer, for only a 3 watt gain?! It came as no surprise to Chris, who told me on one of our telephone catch ups, ‘You’ve been training as a runner who does a bit of cycling as cross-training and commuting; you’re not a cyclist’. At the time I was mildly insulted! Not a cyclist? But I posted the fastest bike split in my age group at the European’s last April! It’s only now I have gone through 3 months of specific cycle training that I concede he may have been right… I hadn’t previously done any cycling-specific training, so how could I expect to improve my FTP? In January, after 2 solid months of structured watt-based training, I did a retest and was up by 15 watts, which equated to an 8% improvement over the eight previous weeks. Not a shock to Chris, but a nice surprise for me!

From the outset I was always a little fearful that a shift to focusing on cycling would mean that my running would drop off. And yes, it did a bit initially in terms of top end speed, but the endurance hasn’t deserted me and the strength I’ve gained in my legs from the bike translates well onto the hills and off road running: the fact that I won all six of the hilly, muddy, multi-terrain races I entered last year and yet didn’t place higher than 3^rd at the fast, flat tarmac stuff is testament to that. Over the past 6 weeks though, as Chris has had me doing twice-weekly brick sets with the runs done at target 10k race pace, I have definitely sharpened up and this resulted in the fastest 10k (39:44) I have run since May 2016 and my fastest parkrun time (19:05) since July 2016; I also set a new female course record at Seaton parkrun (19:20), all within the last couple of weeks. Since January, Chris has introduced a weekly multi-brick set (bike-run-bike-run-bike-run-bike) into my plan and this has been an absolute killer! Both the cycling and the running had to be done at tempo effort (Z4 H/R, 8 RPE scale) and they left me ruined each time. They also garnered me some rather interesting looks when I did the bike element in the gym on the Wattbike and then kept charging out the door to use the cinder track next door for the runs and repeated this four times in succession! But by God do they make you fitter and used to running fluidly off a hard bike. No more jelly legs for me!

Tackling one of the three energy-sapping pebble sections on route to setting a new course record at Seaton parkrun.

I would also like to add in here a big shout out to my physio, Nigel Wilman of Honiton Physio, as he has managed to do what I was beginning to think was the impossible and get my battered, broken body to a place whereby it is strong enough to cope with all these workouts. I previously avoided brick sessions in my own training regime as running off a bike on tight calves would have been a big injury risk for my weak left leg. After 4 months of dedicated strengthening exercises, lefty is still weedy but less weedy than he was and getting stronger by the day. Before seeing Nigel I had tried humpteen other physios, all of whom had come up with a different diagnosis on the cause of my lower left leg issues, but none had hit upon a long-term cure. I had been prescribed two sets of orthotics by two different podiatrists: neither set did any good. It has been a combination of some great advice by Lou Nicholettos of Cornwall Physio (St. Austell), who analysed my gait and found that I was over-striding, and got me to modify my running style by lifting my cadence from 170 steps to an average of 185 (190+ for speed workouts and racing) to bring my leg underneath my body when it makes contact with the ground, and Nigel’s strength program that identified inherent weaknesses in my whole left side, meaning it was just too feeble to cope with the impact demands that running puts upon it, that has seen me running pain free, niggle free and with confidence for the first time in 5 long years of repeated injuries. I cannot tell you what a joy that is.

The other massive up side to having a coach and a set plan is that Chris is very careful to monitor my fatigue levels and make sure I have adequate rest and recovery between the hard sets; a) so I don’t get over-tired and ill, and b) so I have the energy to hit the hard sets hard and get more out of them. I almost daren’t say this with 10 days to go until race day, but I haven’t been ill at all since Chris has been setting my training, when last year I was picking up a bug every single month, no exceptions. If left to my own devises, I will always convince myself that I am not doing enough. I look at the handful of female athletes on Strava who train for 20+ hours a week, along-side their work, motherhood, a social life and whatever other array of super-human feats they effortlessly seem to juggle. I seldom notice the hundreds of other athletes who do less than me: they are inconsequential. If Chris tells me I’m doing enough, I believe him. I trust he knows what is best for me and that sneaking off to an extra spin class will be of no benefit to me whatsoever…. in fact, it could be detrimental. The body needs down time for adaptations to occur: you get fit when you rest. It wasn't until I experienced this for myself first hand these past few months that I now believe it. So, even if having a coach means having permission to be what I would otherwise class as lazy, then this is another benefit, because I would never give myself permission to lounge on a sofa all afternoon doing nothing: far too indulgent!

So, thanks to my timed-to-perfection training plan, I am virtually race-ready and raring to go. The question now is: can I translate all of this improvement onto the tarmac? The other downside to a race so early in the season is that I have not been able to do much riding outside to gauge my form on the road. Apart from the staple weekly 2-3 hour coffee ride with my buddies, all my cycling has been done indoors, on the turbo or Wattbike. No wind indoors, no rain, no hills, no potholes to avoid, no traffic, no crap on the roads… I have only ridden the bike I will race on a couple of times at the velopark circuit as I haven’t wanted to risk clanging it through a pothole. With just over one week until race day and the weather looking very cold and grim, I am grateful that I have given myself a back-up option in case something goes wrong at Anglian Water. It could be icy on the day, I could be ill (this time last year I was in the throes of a two-month long cough-cold-chest infection combo that derailed my training from Boxing Day right up until the end of February). There are just a lot more things that could potentially derail your chances of a good result when racing on the open roads in the middle of the British winter.

The ideal scenario is that I finish in the top 4 of my age group at Anglian Water and gain automatic qualification. Incidentally, I have just gone up an age-group this year to the 35-39 (eeek) and it is waaaaaay more competitive that the one I’ve just come out of. Last year I came fourth overall at Clumber Park, but I won my age group…. Why? The first three ladies were all 35 – 39 year olds. There are many reasons it is so talent-rich; one is that this is the age at which the pros get past their best and “retire” from elite level competition and step down into the age-group stuff. Two, lots of women aged 30 – 34 are out having babies (…. Humph, chance would be a fine thing…) and come back better than ever on their post-baby, breast-feeding boosted bodies. Thirdly, 35 – 39 seems to be the peak age for a woman for endurance, so women who previously competed in single sport events and who have lost their speed edge branch out into a sport that allows them to utilise the endurance they have built up over the years. Either way, a glance at the ‘intention to qualify’ lists on the BTF website reveals that the F35-39 category is by far the most represented of any of the 12 different 5-year age groupings. Terrific.

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail: I have a contingency plan! If I wake up feeling ill, or if the race is cancelled due to ice, or if I puncture, then I have Clumber Park pencilled in as a back-up option, one month later on March 17^th. Advantages of this are that I know the course and the layout of the transition area, and it’s a hilly route, which suits me. Disadvantages are that this year it also incorporates the British Championships, so all the elites and pros wanting to add a national title to their name will be lining up…. Lucy Gossage is already on the start list and just happens to be in my age group, so that’s my chance of repeating my age-group wins from the previous two years right out of the window! Best case scenario, I qualify at Anglian Water and then use Clumber Park as a pressure-free run out to gain more experience over the standard distance prior to the world champs in July and to pit myself against the best duathletes in Britain and see how I fair. It also means another weekend break at the delightful Clumber Park Spa Hotel, which is never to be sniffed at!

The downside to having a coach is that there is an added pressure to do well to reward all his time and efforts with a good performance. Previously, I was only accountable to me (bad enough, as I am a notoriously hard task-master on myself!). I will be racing in his kit and representing TCC as a brand, and so I want to do that justice as a thank you for all the faith he has put in this strong-willed, stubborn, swim-hating, run-addicted cousin-in-law of his. I can only control the controllables though and if something like a puncture spoils the party, well, just got to pick myself up and look forward to the next race.

Please send your finest anti-illness, anti-puncture, anti-ice, anti-rain, warm-weather good luck vibes my way on February 18^th!