TOBY RADCLIFFE

Professional Ironman Triathlete
http://tobyradcliffe.com

Monday 19 November 2007

Beasties in Oz















Photo as promised of William (above) who turned 2 this week.

Just finished week 4 of the new schedule. Settled into it and finding that the 'on' button for the pace intervals is coming a little more easily on the run and the bike. Weather's been beautiful - hot and sunny, with windy days to keep some of the rides interesting. Found a couple of good swim squads who are making hitting 20km a week in the pool fairly easy (and sociable!) - one of the squads seems to hit 5 km no problems, though the wednesday session after typically a 4-5 hour ride and 2 hour run finds me a little flat!!!

I'm staying in a caravan park round the corner from the pools and track, on the river which has kilometer markers along both bank paths, and - essentially - only 500m from a large supermarket :) Its perfect. Except for the MASSIVE spider that decided it wanted to live between the front door and the fly screen yesterday. Luckily it has now relocated - to where I do not care. I was reading in the local paper about a brown python (or something like that) found in someone's back yard in Victoria - over 2m long - I now eye large sticks on the road with suspicion, and at the open water swim yesterday there seemed to be a lot of chat about great whites... I think I prefer to live in ignorance.

Toby

Saturday 3 November 2007

Lessons in endurance

Staying with Liz and Ian has been an eye opener. I thought I had loads of energy, but William (a few weeks short of 2 years old) can run circles round me! He does take afternoon naps, which may be key - I might give these a go over the next few weeks. The commitment and dedication of Liz and Ian are also a bit of lesson - am trying to learn in order to apply to training :) I've also been renamed (rather unflatteringly) Toady as this seems easier to say than Toby. Will definitely get some photos tomorrow and post them...

This week's training has gone well - nearly completely on track. The lack of a good nearby pool has hampered volume swimming, but that all gets fixed from monday when I'll be 5 mins from a decent pool in Geelong. I'm pleased with the new schedule so far - I'm doing a lot more specific stuff and it feels like every session has a purpose, whereas before more often than not I'd just start a session and see what it turned into, trying to accumulate overall mileage (especially on the bike) rather than worry about pacing etc. Having said that, this time last year I'm not sure I would have been able to do such specific workouts most of the time.

Off to the You Yangs state park tomorrow - I'm riding up (gets the scheduled 2 hour ride done), might do the run there too - sounds like there might be some hills :) Apparently they allow open fires (rather unusually) on some of the sites there, so we're going armed with marshmallows.