Big Run Week

I'm currently in Bright for the Alpine Classic but sadly I'm just a spectator because I'm banned from riding hills due to my knee.  Elaine has finished her ride up and down Mt Buffalo (70km) and is very happy with efforts.  The fact that she still looked relatively fresh at the end bodes well for her Olympic Distance at Geelong in 2 weeks.  We are staying in Bright with Jeremy, he is currently still out doing the 200km ride.  He popped back in after 130km (Tawonga Gap, Falls Creek, Tawonga Gap) to have a shower and change clothes before heading off to tackle Mt Buffalo.  He was looking pretty good (not as fresh as Elaine), but said the heat had been pretty bad.  It had taken him 7 hours for the first bit and was hoping to do Mt Buffalo in under 4 hours.  So an 11hr mountainous ride is pretty good training for the Ironman bike leg he will be doing as part of a team in Ironman Melbourne.  We suspect he'll sign up for the whole race next year.

The week is finished.  It only contained 2 bike rides totally 211km and 4 swims for 7.1km.  But other than the Race Simulation Event on Thursday, the focus for the week was on running and I did 6 runs in the week including an 18km run today bringing the weekly mileage up to 55km. I'll have to check through my records, but this may be my biggest ever run week.

I ran in my larger runners again, this time wearing the thickest running socks I own.  My left foot is fine, but the 2nd toe on my foot now has a huge blister.  I don't know if this has resulted because the blister started from Thursday's run or whether it would have happened anyway.  Maybe next time I'll try the run with medium thick socks.  Even though the blister looks bad, I never felt it on the run.  However I'm sure it would have grabbed my attention if I had of run 42km, so this is an issue I need to get on top of before the Ironman (I've since popped the blister).

My knee doesn't really seem to have improved, but more importantly it has not deteriorated. In fact my ITBs and quads are starting to feel worse - I'll definitely need another massage next week. I'm now starting to find that running no longer seems to bother the knee much, so much so that I did two 10km runs on consecutive days without a problem. The main problem at the moment appears to be the bike riding. However this might be aggravated by the fact that the seatpost on my Triathlon bike keeps slipping. I've put some tape on the post so that I can see when it has slipped and I now carry an allen key on my rides so that I can re-adjust it any time. The post only seems to slip about 3 or 4mm, but this seems to be enough to upset my knee.  Hopefully I'm now on top of this problem.

If all goes well, next week should be my biggest ever week and possibly the biggest week of the Ironman campaign.  Again the focus will be on running (planning a 20km run), but I'm hoping to get in several rides of around 100km and if I'm feeling good I may even do an extra long ride on Sunday.  I'm very happy with my swimming at the moment, but realise I have to get the training up to maintain my current form, so there will also be plenty of swim sessions next week as well.

The following week will end with the Geelong Long Distance Triathlon (2km Swim, 80km Bike, 20km Run).  This means a mini taper on the Friday & Saturday before the race and around 5 days of recovery after the race.