So that’s week 1 of the 30 week Fink program for The Outlaw completed. What is more amazing is that I did all but one session. It was a 15 min Z2 (Z2 refers to the target heart rate) run session. It’s sadly a function of my job, although having just had 7 months without a job, I’m more than relieved to now have one to get in the way, But I’m currently responding to 2 different tenders each requiring submission before Christmas, and work tends to come before training so a 15 min session lost out.
The whole issue of Ironman racing is the balance between work, home life and training, and when you leave for the office at 7:30 in a morning there isn’t much chance of getting a 45 minute training run done, and getting home 12 hours later, it would be lovely to go for a run, But by then the body is starting to weaken. It has been said many times that IM racing is as much mental (yeah you have to be mental to do it) as it is physical. Plodding along in the gathering gloom at the end of an Ironman takes mental toughness, by then the legs have gone every fibre is telling you to stop it’s the brain that demands one foot going in front of another. There is though no substitute for training and putting the hours and miles in.
Had a decent weekend though, Usual Saturday morning in town doing bits and pieces than Saturday afternoon settled down to train, I could easily have spent the afternoon watching rugby but ……….
Really good 60 minute turbo session, nice to be back on a proper bike, rather than the fat tyre’d monster, then a nice easy 30 minutes on the treddie at the gym (watching the rugby 
) before plunging into the pool for a 30 minute session. I can’t have swum that far since the Bala Half Ironman on 12th June, in fact I haven’t swum any sort of distance since the Bala Olympic in Sept. But I managed a great session, worked really hard to try and keep some sort of form thro the water, and finished with a long lie in the sauna drinking high 5. Before heading home, for my favourite Saturday night après training meal. T Bone steak and a bottle of merlot although in the interests of training got nowhere near finishing the bottle even though Sue had had a glass.
Sunday morning started with an easy run round the village (5km) before heading over the Pennines to the wasteland to meet up with Sprog 3 and his g/f. Pleasant wander round the shops before a long long lunch at Jamie’s Diner and then back over the hills to safety.
The title of this missive ? Well The Outlaw is run by a company called OneStepBeyond and the event is in part sponsored by Buff, The company that makes the strip of cloth of the same name, and they decided that the club with the most entrants would each receive a specially made commemorative buff. You wouldn’t believe the amount of column inches written on the Runners World Forum dedicated to these buffs…… You would have thought that people who had just committed several hundred pounds in entry fee, a fortune in travel and accommodation and thousands of hours training would have better things to write about ? But nope the buffs got all the words.
Right, Well Fink calls for Mondays to be a rest day, But it’s Sue’s long day (she leaves home at 8:30 am and usually gets home at 9pm), So rather than sit around on my own, and go training on Tuesdays when she is home, it gives me a little flexibility as well if work gets in the way later in the week, so it’s Fink swim set #37 and a 45 minute run on the cards for later.
Good training Dave, looking forward to reading about your progress.