Status Update - took a while to write

It has been a while since my previous post, no not a while it just took too damn long!! A two week holiday to Croatia was one reason for the gap between the blogs, another is just the lack of quality time to write a piece of text. This post will simply update on the current status of training. Hopefully not too booring, I promise to deliver some more interesting posts on materials, fitnesstests, numbers etc in the following weeks.

Current status:

People are asking me if I get in shape or if I am ready for the Iron Man. No, at this moment I am not yet “ready”, there are still 4 months left for training and then I will be prepared. However, at this moment I have the feeling that it will become possible to complete the three parts of the event within the time limits that are applied. 

By the way, Croatia is a great country to visit. Not that far from Netherlands, nice old cities and very beautiful lakes and waterfalls. I managed to do one running training over there, although the intention was to go more often. Swimming is great in the sparkling blue sea over there, but it was too cold at this time of the year. 

Meanwhile, more and more preperation events are finding their way into my agenda, more to read about that in this blog at the different sports.

Swimming is mostly about technique for me. Last couple of weeks I was able to train mostly on the Wednesday mornings, with Richard as a trainer walking around. He put the focus a lot on my arm movement: High elbow above the water, and also keep the elbow high under water. This should result in an efficient and straight movement of my arm. Meanwhile, I did around 3.2km of swimming within one hour and 20 minutes of training, this includes rests and drills. My legs are lacking behind in technique, the leg movement is low and not adding a lot of speed or even stability. So there is still a lot to gain because I believe that there is more than enough power available in those legs. At least two test events are in the planning: The swimchallenge beginning of July at Kijkduin, 2.0km swim in the sea. Secondly, end of August I will compete in the Ijswim in Amsterdam, 3.8km in open water. Just before my holiday I bought a nice wetsuit that I will use during these events.
 

Cycling is still fun to do. There has been a little dip because of the two weeks of rest, which caused sore legs the first 2 rides. But last Thursday I rode the Klimclassic in the Ardennes, together with e.g. Arjan and Twix. This 166km bike ride started in Maastricht and went to the south over some steep hills (>20%). The ride went pretty well, with a nice speed and good feeling in the legs. Next stop will be the Trois Ballons in the Voges in France half June, 220km ride with 4300 altitude meters and the goal is to ride this within 9 hours. A bit of improvement in the endurance part will be needed for this so a couple of long rides on low intensity are planned for the coming weeks.

Running keeps being the bottleneck part, it is improving but the volume of running training is a bit fragile still. Although a 7x12 minutes training resulted in almost 18km of distance shows that the length of training is increasing. Also the 44.22 minutes on a 10k trainingrace some weeks ago was faster than ever before. Both were not at the limit, which is a good thing. But, although I lost 12kg of body weight, my knees, ankles, hips and muscles are sensitive for little pains after such efforts. So I keep on extending training length, but not each outing. I train a bit of speed, but not too much. And the running races are the little tests to run without rests. End of June I will run half a marathon in Usuch a race, hopefully with a steady state race as a result of good training the coming weeks.

Next post will follow a lot sooner, is the intention. That shall be a topic with more facts and numbers. Meanwhile, you can follow pretty much all my activities on Strava.