Fighting Fatigue

It's been a scheduled rest week and boy, have I needed it. I've felt like $hit all week with my usual fatigue symptoms hitting me really hard. I can best describe it as like having a mild hangover with a low level headache, sore stomach and extreme tiredness. The really horrible part is getting over 8 hours sleep but still waking up shattered. No one said Ironman training was easy. So after the last fortnight of 13 and 14 hour training weeks, this week was cut back to 10 and all of it was much more steady state aerobic stuff rather than hard intervals. It was topped off with a very steady 3 hours in the Surrey Hills with Simon, this morning. He was dancing on the pedals going up Ranmoor,  Combe Bottom, Leith Hill and Crocknorth, while I lumbered up a good few seconds behind, but it was a good social and low stress ride which didn't take too much out of me by the end.

Big week coming up

This week will be a test week, so as long as the pool is not too crowded I'll be doing another CSS swimming test tomorrow. To be honest, I doubt there will be that much change from the last one, but there might be a slight improvement. Tuesday will be an ftp test on the turbo. Again, there should be an improvement and I'm really going to focus on hitting my scheduled turbo sets hard. At the end of this week is the Houslow 100 mile TT. I still can't decide what intensity I should ride this at. In theory I should stick to my <0.75 IF Ironman cap but it is a race so I might well go up to 0.8 IF and see where that gets me. I've also been tinkering with my position, aiming to get lower and longer and this will be a test to see if it will be sustainable.

Running's back on track. My left achilles is grumbling but it's under control so I'm confident that I will get back up to around 16 miles / 2 hours by the time I need to start tapering. I went out and did 13 solo miles in around 7:30 miles so I had finally completed a run a bit faster than my projected Ironman shuffle pace and I really enjoyed running just thatt little bit faster.