Practising to eat

Last night was a 2 hour turbo which was pretty difficult but it was nice to do a 'long bike' and while staring at the back of my garage door is hardly the same as pedaling on the lava fields of Kona (never likely to do that anyway) it was great to try to push a big gear for a long time, and still made it in bed by 10. Result.

This morning was a long paddle which ended up being 2hrs 20 mins. The 2 really nice things about it was that it was very stress free; just a good, solid paddle on the Wey Navigation at DW effort, out and back with a few portages thrown in and Adam's core held up. Normally after 90 minutes we start twitching all over the place. Gee, who'd have thought core exercises would work? ;-) It was very blustery in places which slowed us a lot but we were able to practice in these tricky conditions in a relatively easy environment. The other thing we started experimenting with was food, mainly to get Adam used to eating during aerobic exercise. I just kept it simple, taking along some cheese and marmite sandwiches cut into small squares and some nuts and raisins. We'll introduce gels at a later date. I know which ones I like but they can take a lot of getting used to.

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Hodge - It's really worth spending the time getting your core fully engaged in the stroke. Like you, I tend to switch off and during a slower paddle revert back to arms only. That's where the tempo paddles we are doing where we have a 1 hour paddle that consists of 3 x 15 minutes with 5 mins rest really help because in a 1 hour paddle  we are  doing 45 minutes where we really focus on our technique. On each rep I'll focus on one thing e.g. rep 1, pressing fully against the footrest / rep 2, getting my lead shoulder forward / rep 3, hands high and fully extended. Gradually it begins to become more natural.