Icicles

It's been a cold week in Melbourne. No clouds in the sky and nice weather in the middle of the day, but without the cloud cover the overnight lows and morning temperatures have been literally freezing.
- Wed morning ride: 2 degrees Celsius
- Fri morning swim (outdoor pool): -0.1 degrees Celsius
- Sat morning ride: -1.1 degrees Celsius

Last week I pulled up sore after my ride up Arthur's Seat. After having rest days on Sunday and Monday I was feeling great on Tuesday night's run session doing 200s and 400s between 3m15s and 3m20s pace. Being a little over confident I then did the North Rd ride on Wednesday morning - a very fast group ride where I averaged over 43kph for over 17km. Unfortunately my knee pain returned which reduced Wednesday and Thursday nights' runs to recovery runs.

Friday became another unscheduled rest day before the Club ride on Saturday. Did I mention Saturday's ride was cold. Although the temperature only got down to -1.1 (lowest I can ever remember), the 'Feels Like' temperature was -3.3 (and that felt f#&king cold). Elaine bought me a lovely pair of Campagnolo winter gloves several weeks ago which have been fantastic on cold Winter rides, until Saturday. Turns out all their effectiveness disappears once the temperature drops below zero. I cut the ride short at 62km (when the ride conveniently passed my house). Considering that once home, it took over 30 minutes before my hands resembled anything like normal, I think it was an extremely wise decision to end the ride when I did. I'm told your capillaries shrink when your hands get really cold. Once you come back into a warm environment, the blood tries to squeeze through these shrunken capillaries - this is extremely painful. Once home, this extreme pain lasted for over 20 minutes.

To make matters worse, my knees were sore again after the ride. I've been using the foam roller and stretching my quads all week, but I've now discovered that it is my VMO (Vastus Medialis Oblique - shown in blue on the diagram to the right) that are the most tight and sore. In hindsight this is obvious, because the VMO is one of the main muscles used when cycling and I was already pretty sure it was cycling that was causing my problems. I'll now concentrate on massaging my VMO using knuckles, golf balls and any other objects of torture.

Next weekend Elaine and I have a 5km Trail Running Race at Studley Park in Kew. Today I did a course reconnaissance but I still struggled to identify the exact trails we'll be using next week. However I did get in a 12.5km run without any soreness which is very encouraging.

Originally I was planning to train right through without any taper for the Trail Run (what I would refer to as a 'C' race). But with the knee injury I'll now back off the training this week which will effectively result in a taper before the race. Not ideal, but not terrible either.

I'll still do all my swimming sessions, in fact I plan to do an extra swim on Wednesday night. However I'll drop all cycling sessions and only run on Tuesday and Thursday. Sometimes an early taper will trigger a premature peak in performance, but with 12 weeks of training left before the World Championships in London I don't think this will be a problem. And getting over the knee injury is far more important.

Mark's training for the Half Marathon at Run Melbourne has been going very well with Mark continuing his excellent habit of following the training program perfectly. I've had a recent addition to the training stables with Stef who is also training for Run Melbourne (she is doing the 10km). After only 1 week it is still very early days, but she's started off very well with a good first week's training. Unfortunately, Elaine's training was non-existent this weekend with a non-triathlon related issue on Saturday and other engagements on Sunday. She was very disappointed to have lost some of her training momentum, but on the bright side, she managed to avoid a ridiculously cold ride on Saturday morning.