Well last week marked the start of the serious stuff and a crossroad in my training - I had a choice to make - head down or lay down. I opted for the head down approach - roll through the weeks training and start the search for my mojo.Vital statistics for the week therefore came out as 16km in the pool, 266km on the bike and 60km of running. The majority of sessions this week were at steady state to try and limit the stress on my body - I had a crack at a couple of high intensity sessions and made it through - they weren't particularly pretty and although I didn't quite find my mojo this week I know it is out there somewhere!
Towards the end of the week I realised that my running shoes were not going to make it to Kona - I have tried a few patch up strategies but I think I have to accept they are well and truly gone burgers! The growing holes along the side have begun to let the rain drops in and at the end of my run on Saturday the insides were more wet than the outside!! I always end up dragging out the life of my running shoes beyond what is reasonable which I know is far from sensible given the fact my feet tend to have a habit of acquiring stress fractures! I just hate the feel of new trainers on my feet, the process of breaking them in and the fact that they don't feel like your own for a few weeks! But if I start now by the time Kona rocks around we will have knocked out a fair few kilometres together!
I had to squeeze in a few tests amongst the training to try and discover the route cause of my anaemia! I think every lab in Auckland probably has some piece of me sat under their microscope at the moment and as the week progressed I decided that to work in a lab you have to be a special sort of person!! So far the results aren't in but my GP made the decision to start some Iron supplements in the interim and then hopefully when some results come back we will have a clearer action plan - most likely an Iron infusion or a series of high dose intramuscular injections. I leave New Zealand in just under two weeks and won't have access to blood tests whilst I'm in Kona so if I can leave knowing that the iron levels are on the up that would be a good place to be.
I've been met with a few interesting vibes and thoughts this week! Some people have assumed that Kona is now not going to be a happening thing or that it isn't going to be the race I'm hoping for - already writing me off 6 weeks out from race day. That has been a little surprising - I guess I'm the sort of person who will back my team regardless of whether they win or lose or have a good day or not so good day - so it has caught me a little off guard! Others have asked if I thought the anaemia was enough to make me DNF a race - perhaps that is more a lack of understanding about the relationship between iron and haemoglobin more than anything else! I think the fact my GP was surprised I was even managing to get out of bed brought it home to me just how close a call I had had!
Put simply iron is needed to grow haemoglobin and haemoglobin is the part of your blood that carries oxygen to where it is needed. My haemoglobin in April was 140 so well above the 120 lower end limit. Since April my haemoglobin has dropped to 90 so by just over a third. I have therefore been limited physiologically to 65% functionality - it doesn't matter how hard I try to go - my body can only deliver 65% of the oxygen it is use to getting to where it is needed. So my poor little muscles have been struggling a little in recent weeks and I have been feeling pretty trashed. However here is the plus side - you always have to look for one - if you have been following my blog for the last 6-8 weeks you will have seen that I have pushed out some big weeks already and now in retrospect I've done that and built up a good fitness base over a period of time where I've been getting increasingly oxygen deprived. So you could look at this a little bit like altitude training where athletes train where there is little oxygen available to them - the goal of altitude training is to encourage the athlete to produce more haemoglobin so they are more oxygen efficient when they come down from altitude - so applying this to me - I've spent somewhere in the region of 6-8 weeks 'at altitude' and now as I start to munch my way through the Iron supplements so I can grow more haemoglobin it's a bit like me coming down from altitude :) It takes roughly 2 weeks of Iron therapy before your levels begin to increase and then around another week for the body to back this up with haemoglobin production - So when I do finally start to grow some more haemoglobin I should notice a pretty big difference in how I feel whilst I'm training........more oxygen = better performance!
So just to clear up a few random speculations - Kona is still very much a happening thing - my goals for the race have not changed - and I plan to go as bloody hard and as fast as I can on race day with my new and improved blood levels! Wahoooooo!!! Bring it on!!
I've been met with a few interesting vibes and thoughts this week! Some people have assumed that Kona is now not going to be a happening thing or that it isn't going to be the race I'm hoping for - already writing me off 6 weeks out from race day. That has been a little surprising - I guess I'm the sort of person who will back my team regardless of whether they win or lose or have a good day or not so good day - so it has caught me a little off guard! Others have asked if I thought the anaemia was enough to make me DNF a race - perhaps that is more a lack of understanding about the relationship between iron and haemoglobin more than anything else! I think the fact my GP was surprised I was even managing to get out of bed brought it home to me just how close a call I had had!
Put simply iron is needed to grow haemoglobin and haemoglobin is the part of your blood that carries oxygen to where it is needed. My haemoglobin in April was 140 so well above the 120 lower end limit. Since April my haemoglobin has dropped to 90 so by just over a third. I have therefore been limited physiologically to 65% functionality - it doesn't matter how hard I try to go - my body can only deliver 65% of the oxygen it is use to getting to where it is needed. So my poor little muscles have been struggling a little in recent weeks and I have been feeling pretty trashed. However here is the plus side - you always have to look for one - if you have been following my blog for the last 6-8 weeks you will have seen that I have pushed out some big weeks already and now in retrospect I've done that and built up a good fitness base over a period of time where I've been getting increasingly oxygen deprived. So you could look at this a little bit like altitude training where athletes train where there is little oxygen available to them - the goal of altitude training is to encourage the athlete to produce more haemoglobin so they are more oxygen efficient when they come down from altitude - so applying this to me - I've spent somewhere in the region of 6-8 weeks 'at altitude' and now as I start to munch my way through the Iron supplements so I can grow more haemoglobin it's a bit like me coming down from altitude :) It takes roughly 2 weeks of Iron therapy before your levels begin to increase and then around another week for the body to back this up with haemoglobin production - So when I do finally start to grow some more haemoglobin I should notice a pretty big difference in how I feel whilst I'm training........more oxygen = better performance!
So just to clear up a few random speculations - Kona is still very much a happening thing - my goals for the race have not changed - and I plan to go as bloody hard and as fast as I can on race day with my new and improved blood levels! Wahoooooo!!! Bring it on!!
Just need to go out and find my next pair of running shoes to do it in first :)
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