Damian's Training Blog
Training for IM France

Week ending Sunday 20th December

Monday- In the past few weeks I’ve managed to get out on the bike a good bit so now it’s time to get back into the pool regularly. It’s not that I’m a bad swimmer but when I haven’t been in the pool for a while I lose a lot of fitness. So at the moment it’s just a case of getting into the pool as often as possible and building up the mileage. I managed to get into the pool this morning but would say I only did about 500-700 meters. But from small acorns and all that!!

Tuesday- Went for a spin with a few Retired/Weekend workers. Tuesday suits me to go for a long bike ride so we are getting a bit of a group together. John Darcy tends to know the routes inside out so we usually turn up and tell him how long we can go out for and he makes up a route that should have us back in time. It was a horrible day so John pulled out. Which left myself, Liam Dillion, Craig, Karen and the great Paddy Ryan. We ended up doing pretty easy to remember route and because the weather was so bad so it was out towards Brittas and back. None of use would be as experienced as John so we didn’t cop on that there was a good tail wind with us, so when we turned around at Arklow and headed back the N11 it was tough! (lesson learned)

Wed- There was a plan to do a run and swim but got neither done.

Thursday- Run and swim. Parked in the shoreline in Bray and ran up Bray head. Was going ok pace running along the road but once we hit the trail (and steep hill) the pace went down to 8 min kilometer pace which is very slow. It is only my second run since the marathon so no need to put pressure on myself. In fact I was making a point out of not going too high on the HRM. Did a swim afterwards but again wasn’t up to much!

Friday- Again missed two sessions on this day that were planned.

Saturday- Was supposed to be a day off. Didn’t have time to catch up on Yesterdays sessions as we had planned a wetsuit test night in the NAC. Went pretty well but training this week has been poor.

Sunday- Was supposed to do a 3 hour spin today. The weather was clear but when I went to get the bike from the shed it was just far too cold!! Thought I’d get on the iMagic and do my new route I bought Mount Ventelox (or something). It’s like 3-4 hours of climbing. Imagic crashed so I ended up just doing a swim for 40 mins instead.

All in all it wasn’t a great weeks training. Next week with Christmas it’s prob going to be harder again!!