Mike’s Middle Distance Magic: From Here to There

Time Flies When You’re Having Fun

Another weeks training and things are going great. I feel I am improving in all disciplines and finally getting somewhere with training! I’ll be honest at the start of training with Ray I thought doing the low intensity wouldn’t benefit me. In my quest to get faster I’ve always done small bouts of intensity, but then either just stopped as they were “too hard” or I felt over trained and fatigued and had to take a week off as a “rest week” and did not really progress or get faster.

Now I’ve done 4 weeks of low intensity building and I feel great.  I am really pleased with how things have panned out and feel ready to tackle some intensity over the next block.

I say this as this week I have a bike and run session with intensity. For the first time, probably ever! I feel I am ready and actually going to enjoy bringing some intensity into my training and see where it takes me, hopefully to a better and faster athlete.

This week unfortunately didn’t entirely go to plan as I had a flood in the kitchen making me unfortunately miss the swim session this week so I am looking forward to getting back in the pool this week.

Run and bike training has been really promising this week, with my longest ever turbo session at 2 hours 40 at 163w Ave Power and 178w NP.  I am loving Zwift and the Cyclops Hammer Smart Trainer – absolutely fantastic!

I had my longest run in probably 6 months or more at 7.5 miles and 1 hour 15 mins. More importantly is in this run I had an average heart rate of 141Bpm and felt like I could go forever.   It has been a long, long time since I have ever felt like that on a run.

What’s in store this week?

• My bike and run are going to be progressing in length, up to 3 hours on the bike and 1 hour 20 on the run.  I am looking forward these sessions, upping the game again in length to build a good endurance base.
• Increasing time on the bike and run intensity session.  I will give this my best shot but will definitely not be doing them back to back this week as that was a bit of a killer last week. I moved them from the day Coach Ray originally scheduled them.
• The 400m swim repeats are going to give me a bit of an idea where my swimming is at currently. My first triathlon of 2019 in April is a 400m pool swim with goal pace of 6 minutes. So it will be interesting to see how far I am off that.

Check out my training on Instagram at #qwikkiwi and back here for next week’s blog. Until next time thanks for reading and I’ll check in next week.

– Mike Catton