Hello Easy Week!

Wahhhooooo! Hello to the easy week of training! After my first few weeks back into the swing of things and a number of weeks with back to back baseline timetrials it was nice to see the 'Easy Week' appear on the training programme - the focus of which is rest and recovery! Perfect! So all the sessions this week have been low intensity aiming to tick the boxes and get to the end of it feeling recovered!

Easy weeks are good oppertunities to take stock of where you are at and what still needs focus! The gym remains a challenge to factor into the training schedule around the shift work! So I have been making a concerted effort to get there and to book some one on one session with Paul my personal trainer at the Olympic Gym! It's a fine balance between getting what you need to out of gym work, strength and power, and leaving yourself unable to perform optimally in all the other sessions you need to tick off for the week! Each swim, bike, run session comes with performance targets of their own so if your arms are so fatigued they can't make the prescribed swim send off times, or your legs are too fatigued to hit the power targets in a cycling session or a required run pace then it becomes a bit of a false economy! Some Ironman athletes have never seen the inside of the gym and others couldn't imagine a training programme without it! We are all different! Personally I need to work on my strength so the gym is the ideal environment to focus purely on this however hitting my performance targets for the week is something that as an athlete I value to a greater extent so I am not believer in leaving my muscles so fatigued that they can't function for the next 3 days optimally! I've found using a recovery stack after the gym helps to combat the gym hangover the next day and also working with a trainer that understands the complexity of my schedule!