16th September 2007

This week is now officially the lightest week I’ve had yet. The schedule had factored in a slight decrease in training volume for this week on account of us moving house. But still my actual figures were well below target. And yet I feel really tired. Still the week wasn’t a complete loss and there were some good points along with the bad.

So what went right and what went wrong? I’ll start with what went wrong (because its always best to end on a positive note).

The week started with me getting up at 5am in the morning to drive for two hours to get to Auckland airport (which interestingly enough involves me driving through three cities to get there – North Shore City, Auckland City and Manukau City – who would live in Auckland?). I then caught a flight down to Wellington to spend two rather full on days relearning the art of “selling”. It was then back up to Auckland for one day in the office clearing emails, before taking a further two days off to shift houses from Whangaparaoa to Albany. The weekend has been largely spent unpacking. Needless to say this hasn’t left a lot of time for training. While I did think about asking my understanding and saintly wife if it would be OK to duck out for a few hours on Saturday, happily sanity prevailed and I kept my mouth shut (love you honey).

On the plus side, the workouts that I did get in were all really good. On Tuesday morning I managed to prize myself out of bed bright and early and got out for a run along the Wellington waterfront on what turned out to be a stunning Wellington day. The change of scenery was inspiring and the numbers of other people out running was great as well. Always having someone out ahead of you to aim for, catch and drop is very motivating for someone like me (who is pathologically competitive). My swim lesson with Hayden Woolly was really good and I’m making some definite progress, particularly in technique and efficiency. I also managed a couple of short runs (1/2 hour) and had no problems with my ITB, which is very encouraging with the Auckland Marathon just around the corner, also, even though the runs were short, I felt really strong (probably a reflection of the rest). Still early days, but it looks like the rest, stretching and massage is paying off. Hopefully I’ll be able to stretch out the distance and running time of the next few weeks.

The other positive thing is that now I’ve had a number of fairly easy weeks (unintentional, but sometimes even the best laid plans don’t work out) I’m super motivated to have a big, positive week next week. Happily next week just happens to be scheduled in as a big week, so being super motivated and super rested I’m confident that its going to be a cracker! Watch this space.