Quest Adventure Race.

It's my 4th Week of training and following a consistent plan and I am starting to feel a good deal fitter. This week I had the small matter of my first adventure race at the end of the week. The rest of the week went very well training wise, actually hit all the sessions. Now the plan I'm following is just generic Ironman plan so there was no mention of an Adventure race in it so  instead of my long run I did a 5 hour race.

I've never done an Adventure race before but a Neighbour (Ken Noonan) was keen to do it and signed us both up for it. I hadn't really been paying too much attention to what was involved I knew there was cycling, running and Kayaking in it but wasn't sure how much. So I started to learn a bit more mostly from chatting to customers coming into the shop and found out we were going up three big climbs so I was sort of ready for the bike to be tough but I had no idea the runs were going to be so tough.

So first cycle was from the GAA pitches in Laragh to the top of the Shay Elliot climb, I've done this climb many times but I've been much fitter doing it. When we got to the top we had to do a 6k run in Shay Elliot park, i'd never been there before and all I can say is it's very hilly. I ended up having to walk some of the steeper parts. This race was giving me a serious kick up the ass!!

When leaving this park Hilary one of the Orgainers said when the road splits go to the right if you want to do the easier option. I was down to do the 57k but after going up Brown mountain and Slieve Mann I was thinking if I see a chance to take an easier option i'm taking it I don't care about the slags at this stage i'm just wrecked. The jelly legs were really killing me at this stage.

So another long enough cycle then onto another very steep run and i'm told after that we've one more bike section which is about 23k and then we're done with the bike and there's only one climb in that. So we were joined by the people from the shorter version on this cycle and I started thinking i'd missed that turn off that Hilary was talking about so I may as well keep going. The next run was to our kayaks it was about 5k in length I was really looking forward to the kayak just to get a few minutes to rest my lower body. I assumed the Kayak would be about 30 mins. It was much quicker than that think it took under 10 minutes but resting the legs in the ice cold lake of Glendalough was pure bliss for the 5 or 10 minutes I got to rest my legs.

It's usually around about this point where I start to question my weight. I'm usually just under 95kg so whilst there are a few people bigger than me doing these things most people are lighter than me. Carrying weight when your swimming isn't such a big deal, like you lose the weight you don't go any faster but cycling and I think running even more so you drop a few kilos and all of a sudden it's so much easier. At the moment I'm 96kg the heaviest I've been in quiet a while. The last time I did a full Ironman I was 86kg I think realistically I need to get close to that weight. I'm even finding recovery from these events is slower cause my diet is actually so bad at the moment.

So now that I've got into the habit of training pretty consistently over the last 4 weeks  i'm going to start looking at the diet a bit more. No drastic changes as I don't believe they work but just knocking some bad habits on the head week by week. Doing this blog on a regular basis may just put enough pressure on me to keep the eating clean.