Back on Track!!

What a mixed week! The kids have been sick, as a result they’ve been waking up in the night, and generally been pretty grumpy. That means that I haven’t been sleeping well (or rather I have no problem sleeping, its staying asleep for longer than 4 hours without having to settle down a sick upset child which has been challenging). However they’re all on the mend now, and just as importantly (although I can’t help but think that it sounds somewhat selfish), I didn’t catch what they had!

But of course there’s still the small problem of no proper recovery sleep resulting in generally feeling SHELLED all week. But its not all bad, because this week has been significant for two very big (for me) reasons.

1. I can swim! I went over 1.5k’s continuous this week, which is pretty fantastic for me. I still find it somewhat strange to think that only three months ago I could barely swim to save myself, and now I can quite happily splash along for length after length. It’s still not pretty or fast, but I’m happy and I can see the improvements happening all the time.

2. My knee, or more correctly my ITB band, after weeks of stretching, massage, new shoes and more than a few prayers (mostly by my kids) is now officially 100% again – completely fixed! So the full program’s coming back into play again.

Coming from a period of essentially no running its interesting to see how the body copes. The fitness is certainly there, in fact my heart rate is couple of BPM lower than it was when I was running, but the muscle conditioning isn’t. My calves have been telling me to take it easy, and my lovely wife has been working overtime to ease the knots away.

But its all good, things have come right in time for the final run up to the Auckland Marathon. I still find it odd to look at my training schedule and see that I have a Marathon marked down as a “long training run”. Not so long ago something like that would have been my pinnacle event. Providing I can get a few more trouble free k’s under my belt before the end of October, I’m really looking forward to it. It’s going to be a test for the nutrition plan that I’ll use in the IMNZ run, and I also want to confirm that I have the pacing nailed down over a full marathon distance before the big day. I just don’t believe that you can probably prepare for those two area’s without having trialled it by going the distance – something I learnt in the Rotorua marathon where I basically added an hour to my time by getting both the pacing and nutrition wrong.

So now with the ITB Band problem hopefully sorted, combined with a new found stretching compulsion, the grand plan is about to get back on track. For the time being that means that a lot of the evening wind trainer sessions have been replaced by evening runs and instead I’ve reassembled my mountain bike (long story) and 20 minutes to a park and ride to catch the bus (rather than getting it at the stop just around the corner). Once day light savings kicks in (in a couple of weeks) I’ll start biking the 40 – 50 k’s (I haven’t measured it yet) to Devonport and catch the ferry across the harbour to work.

Things are certainly gathering pace, and training volumes are heading up, so the trick now really is making sure that the family doesn’t miss out.