Time Trials

Just a quick post. Said I was going to do some time trials in sports to give me some times and numbers to improve on and analyse. Never really been into this before but it is defiantly an essential tool. It gives you a time to chase, motivation to train and some hard facts to track your progress.

So here are the times:

Swim 400 metre. Around 9mins. First lesson, always check your kit is working! My waterproof watch appears to be not waterproof! Used the pool clock so prob slightly out.

Bike 10 Mile time trial. 25min 36secs. On the famous Levens course with the Kent Valley road club. Very windy on way out. AVG HR 175bpm.

First lesson I need to take from these efforts is learning to pace myself properly. This will come with experience. When I try to swim hard I seem to tighten up and my stroke becomes shorter and I move slower whilst putting in more effort. Very similar with the bike. Pushing a little to hard early on means I slow down in the last couple miles, despite working much harder.

Some solid times to measure progress with. Only issue I can see is the need for some longer time trials. This would simulate my goals more closely. These two are really full, eye popping lung busting, anaerobic efforts. Still very important as the higher your threshold the faster you can go for longer amounts of time. But as Ironman is a predominantly aerobic race, developing aerobic capacity should be the main goal. Go slow to get faster in other words!

Any comments, tips, discussion or whatever are most welcome!

Oh yeh, recorded my weight and body fat this week too. Bit personal for the world wide web though! Obviously I would like to reduce this.

Need to get my heart rate monitor and watch sorted asap!!