Review of the Year Part 2

Part 2: Bike / Run

Biking is perhaps the discipline where there’s the most time to be made currently. With really only 3 years on the bike, there’s a lot of miles I need to make up in order to get good. So base this year also focussed on increasing my weekly bike volume. This was the sole aim – pace and specific sessions were set aside in favour of bike time. Epic as an incentive definitely made me get out on the roads a lot more! (motivator: FEAR!).

Whilst my times in races didn’t show much improvement, my ability to run closer to my potential off the bike has definitely shown some improvement.

Aims for next year: consistent work on the bike, focusing on zones of effort as well as base volume. What I didn’t do this year was spend much base time above easy heart rates. Some testing in NZ prior to Epic showed I’d been spending most of my ride time below a heart rate that should have been base training. Oops. But my riding has improved to the point where now I probably am more capable of training in zones on demand! Target bike volumes: average 400kms+ a week in base. Get some decent advice on bike training too – a return to Epic NZ in January should be good for this.

Running has had some ups and downs. Epic certainly taught me to bite the bullet and get out there and run – no excuses! Have put together some decent blocks of 80 – 100+ km weeks, which I was pleased with. 3 years ago I went off running a bit after being plagued by injury (I had to have 2 months off running going into IMAustria ’05 and still had problems going into IMGermany ’06, despite another 3 months off running over the winter, physios and orthotics etc etc). This year has been a good one for consistency (since Epic, anyhow!). Note: ALL my running has been nice and slow!

For the coming year: I’m going to try to put some more speedwork in (like 1km reps etc) at the end of off season and see if it works for me. This may well just dissolve into tempo runs if it fits better with ongoing volume training. Obvious goal for next season is a sub-3 hour marathon.