Finding solace in excel



Jamie prepping for a snowy paddle.



About a week ago I looked on the DW website, just to see if there was anything worth looking at. Helpfully, there is a little ticker across the top telling you, to the minute, how many days there are until the start. My mouth dropped when I saw the number '99' skidding across the screen. 99 days seems far too close and with the problems that Ad and I had been having paddling in a K2 together, impossibly close would probably be more accurate.

After getting over the shock, it was time to fire up an excel spreadsheet and begin the process of trying to plan out a schedule that could possibly get us to the start line of the DW in some form of shape. Last year, most of the paddling that Jamie and I did was done at DW pace and we just tried to ensure that every time we went out, we were on the water for at least 90 minutes, usually more. We put in the odd interval and fartlek effort, but the vast majority of it was 'DW pace', i.e. slow. Also, we actually only averaged a paddle a week, mainly due to the fact that last winter was extremely wet so we lost approximately 7 weeks due to the river being on red boards and flowing too fast for novices like us. It was not until the last month of our training that we discovered the Wey Navigation Canal where we could train when the river was inaccessible. Despite all this, we got through and finished the race. We went into it very undercooked as far as our training was concerned, but we also went into it having trained in every type of weather imaginable, prepared to endure and with faith in each other's ability. And we finished; just.

This time, I want to approach it with a bit more forethought, particularly as I have the benefit of last year's experience to draw on, hence turning to excel. I won't bore you with the details but it seemed wise to bring some basic periodisation into play.

I guess you would call the last three months as 'The preparation phase'. I.e. trying to stay upright. :-/

So, the next three months have been split into four distinct periods with period goals to achieve. Our weekly aim is to paddle three times per week, preferably four, with one long paddle, one interval paddle, one tempo paddle and an ergo/fartlek / core session. The faster work is aimed primarily at getting us paddling technically better rather than trying to go faster (although going faster is a nice by-product). Rotating, getting  high hands and recovery elbow and cycling our legs on the footbar is relatively easy in a 15 minute tempo effort, but then transferring that to our 2 hour long paddle takes a very high level of concentration which is much more difficult to achieve. ("Ooh, look, a heron. Ooh, look, a boat. Ooh, look..." You get the idea)

Anyway, we have a plan, in Adam's case it's even laminated and on the fridge door. Saddo. And, so far, it's working.

The plan for the Forestman is a little more organic. :-/  Today I did my first ride outside this year. And my second when I cycled back home from work. The only thing I have set myself is to get on my bike everyday for the next four weeks in an effort to get some semblance of bike fitness back. Swimming will have to wait.

Fab

Three paddles this week which have all gone far better than we could have hoped after the problems of the last couple of months. Sunday was or long paddle which I mentioned in the last post. Monday was an interval session involving 10 x 3 mins on / 3 mins off and tonight was a tempo session with 3 x 15 mins with 5 minutes recovery. It seems that rather than being two wobbly blokes trying to stay upright, that we have miraculously become a crew. Just need to shift this damn cough.

An improved state of mind

It's hard to believe but the incessant rainfall that we have experienced in the last couple of weeks has really worked in our favour. The Thames is up on red boards and it looks like it could be for a while so Adam and I have sorted out some V bars and for the time being we'll be paddling on the Wey Navigation, which Jamie and I discovered last year in the last month or so of our preperation for the DW. This morning was our first paddle on it and therefore we had to get back into the mystere which had become our nemesis in recent weeks. The fact is, we had no other choice, but if we couldn't paddle it on a canal then we were not going to be able to paddle it at all and I was hoping that it would restore some of our shattered confidence. Adam had proved last week that he had good stability on his own and therefore I had to relax and have some confidence in him.

As it turned out, we had a fantastic paddle. It was quite blustery but  being warm, with no boats, sculls, rowing eights, wash or current to contend with, we could just get on with the business of paddling. And you know what? We could do it pretty well. For the first time in a long time we smiled and enjoyed the session. On the way out we put in a few fartlek efforts which left me feeling hot ( I'm still coughing, although it seems on the way out at last) and with a few locks to contend with we were able to break the paddle up with a little bit of portaging. The main thing that we both have to work on is our core strength. By the end of the two hours we both had aches in various points of our lower backs but this is something that we can keep working on. The fact is, we proved to ourselves that we've got the stability but we need to work now on our muscular endurance. GAME. ON.

Wheezy by name....

wheezy by nature :-(

The last two weeks have been very frustrating. I have been itching to get on with some training and preparation but my weak lungs have not been letting me. Last week was completely written off; headaches, snot, coughing, high temperature, more snot and more coughing. I really had the full works. But trying to adpot a positive attitude I thought about doing the right things to bring it to an end as quickly as possible, so I ate as healthily as I could, took out shares in Beechams and consumed vats of day nurse and night nurse and most importantly, slept. I have now entered the dry, hacking cough stage this week and I am caught between really wanting to be doing something and knowing that do anything too strenuous will probably end up with me being worse off. Grrr.... Monday, Adam and I were due to paddle but the river was up on yellow boards and so we decided to scrub and go for a run instead. I did a very easy 20 minutes with Ad and felt ok, pleased to be doing my first training of 2011, but an hour later I was feeling hot and dizzy. Not a good sign. We were due to paddle again last night but I just knew it would be foolhardy, I am just not over my cold enough yet, so once again, my 'training' consisted of being in bed by 9 o' clock.

Adam, on the other hand, has been going great guns. He did 4 paddles last week and on sunday ran 8 miles; his longest ever run. At least he is getting somewhere. Hopefully, I'll be back on the river and back on my bike tomorrow, but this was not the consistent training approach I was looking for.

It was always going to happen

After spending most of the Christmas period with two poorly children who spent most of their time coughing and sneezing all over me, I was always going to come down with it at some point. I am in fact, quite surprised that it had not happened sooner so I guess that my immune system is actually a bit more robust than usual. Anyway, I am making up for it now with plenty of coughing and snot and in a weird way it's helped me focus on doing some work and preparing to go back. Every cloud, and all that...
Before it came on though I had a lovely, relaxed 40 minute run that felt really smooth, pain free etc. That was a good day! On Friday, I got out for my first outdoor ride in over 5 weeks, meeting up with Simon and doing two Boxhill ballbuster loops at a very comfortable pace. Another good day.

Obviously with the end of the year, it's been a time to look back at the highs and low and all in all, it's actually been a pretty good one.

The Highs

A new half ironman pb at the Cowman Tri (5.15). Still some way off a sub-5, which is still a big future goal for me but my first triathlon in a very long time where I felt that I had done myself justice and also left me with a feeling that there is still a lot more to come.

Doing the Devizes to Westminster Canoe race. One of the best things I have ever done, ever. A truly fantastic, eccentric, typically British event that tested our endurance, almost, to breaking point. Spending a lot of time with my brother Jamie and doing something completely out of my comfort zone when there was a high chance of failure. It's the type of event that you end up wanting to do again and again and again........

Time trialling. I was meant to do this ages ago and never got around to it or it just seemed a bit intimidating, but it's such an accessible, cheap form of racing that really makes you push hard all the time and the crowd at Kingston Phoenix have been great. Just what I needed to get a bit stronger on the bike and one of the small building blocks that led to the Cowman race. This has also meant that I have done more events this year which has given me some great intermediate goals and I am really looking forward to knocking off some time off my 10 mile tt pb this season.

The lows.

Running. Just not being able to string together a decent amount of training. The fact I ran a 1.40 half marathon at the Cowman off very little training shows me what I could be capable of. The problem is I have to have the discipline to do the boring stuff, like stretching and strengthening to bring that about which historically I have not done well enough.

Swimming. I just have not done enough. End of.

Now at this point I should make a whole load of resolutions about what I am going to do so that I can then break them all by mid-January. So I am not going to do that. That said, I do need to be consistent in my training and overall, this year, I have improved, but I need to be more consistent, every week in order to get where I would like. Watch this space....

A good one, at last.

Adam paddling back from Molesy Lock

After our trials and tribulations in the mystere over the last couple of weeks, we have finally had something good to report. On Wednesday last week we tried the Stratos; it's even more unstable than the mystere so after sitting in it for approximately 30 seconds we got out and went for a short paddle in the Laances. I was feeling pretty shaky still and did not relax until we were almost back home after 30 minutes. We had both decided that we needed to get out in daylight so this morning we headed out for an easy paddle up to Hampton Court. It took 2 hours, so it was pretty slow but it was just about re-building some confidence. The fact that the temperature was a dizzyingly high 5 degrees also helped and while I had a poor first 20 minutes it was what we needed to log some paddle time. Ad was feeling it a bit in the last 20 minutes with his back protesting but with work and a lot more paddling that will sort itself out. It was the first time in quite a while that I was enjoying being on the river.

Other good news; I have been running, pain free a couple of times. Only for 25 minutes but with no reaction at all so the stretching I am doing must be working and I am looking forward to maintaining this over the next few weeks. Turboing has been patchy and hard work and swimming has dropped off the radar altogether. On Friday I will be cycling outside for the first time in a long time, as long as no more snow arrives.

Time for plan B

Things came to a bit of a head yesterday after our latest paddle in the mystere. It started off badly, with Adam having a big dose of the wobbles as we pulled away and the first 10 minutes were as bad as we have had in the last 6 weeks. I was doing my best to keep relaxed but Adam could not get comfortable until he had moved the seat. We settled in and kept ploughing up and down but gradually our form started to disintegrate until eventually, I just lost it; I really threw my toys out the canoe. I can honestly say I have never felt as demoralised as I did then and the ten minute paddle back to the clubhouse was the worse 10 minutes, ever, I have had in a kayak, with it conducted in silence as we twitched and splash supported our way back. Even now, I cannot quite understand how I can have so much confidence one minute and so little the next and it is this that makes our lack of progress so infuriating.

So what now? Well, one thing's for certain, we will not be doing the DW in a mystere. We both agreed that we have been deluding ourselves that with practice we could overcome the problems we have faced, and when we thought about it we really have made little progress. We can stay upright, but that simply is not enough as we need to be putting in a lot of solid miles over the next few months with good technique and with confidence. At the moment we have neither of those things.



 and that's not going to happen in the time we have left. The club has a stratos we can train in for the time being which is more stable and we can see how we go with it.

Staying indoors

We were due to go out in the mystere last night when a blizzard came through (well, by Surrey standards anyway!) so we hit the kayak ergos for 45 minutes, a bit of core work and then a 25 minute run on the rec next to the club. it was my first run in three weeks.

Turbo this afternoon followed by a paddle tonight now that it's a bit warmer.

It's not you, it's me.

As you may have gathered from my last post paddling has been pretty difficult. We had hoped to make some big gains and be comfortably settled into the boat by now and putting some mileage in, but we have still been fighting with it to a degree. It's taken a while but I have now got something straight in my head which I am hoping will be a bit of  a turning point for us. The boat feels a lot different with Ad in it, much more so than when Jamie and I paddled together and in my mind I always thought that is what it should feel like again. Jamie and I were in a heavy, stable boat, we both weighed approximately the same andwere a fairly lighweight crew and therefore there was hardly any movement, even when we were giving it some beans. The bottom line is, it is never going to feel like that for Adam and I in the mystere and pretending otherwise is dillusional. It moves a lot more, it's less forgiving of mistakes and it is taking a lot of concentration for us at the moment to paddle it well.

I simply have to get used to the movement that we are generating and relax more. I am getting really tense when we cross the river, for absolutely no reason; I just get extremely twitchy> I am absolutely fine in the Laance which is as stable as the mystere, but get me in the mystere and I get the shakes. It's all in my head and I need to find a way to overcome it as it's holding us back. Tuesday's paddle was a case in point. We had a solid paddle up to Kingston with a stretch at halfway. As we paddled back under Kingston bridge we had a bad patch, followed by a good patch at Kingston Rowing club and then as we made the turn to come back to the club my stroke went to worms and all I could think about was 'Don't go in the water'. It was actually almost paralysing and as we made it back with 100 metres to go, still with my stroke all over the place I ended up shouting at the top of my voice a rather fruity expletive. I was seriously hacked off at my own performance and I need to overcome it. I'm just not quite sure how.

The following day was a turbo session; 2 x 20 minutes which hurt. A lot. But at least I can't fall off a turbo.

Not feeling the love

A 40 minute paddle in the mystere this evening, with both of us at various times feeling pretty rugged. We just can;t seem to get comfortable in the boat. We;re going to give it another few weeks before we start thinking that maybe we need something even more stable. Hopefully it will not come to that....

My left foot - part 2

One K1 paddle on monday night with Adam and a run on Tuesday has been followed by four days hobbling around after stretching / tweaking / twisting my left ankle and achilles. Not during a hard training session but while sleeping in bed.  I must be one of the few people that can injure themselves while unconscious; it beggars belief.

Normal service will be resumed......

Back in the habit

No paddling this week; I think mentally Ad and I needed a break as the last paddle we did on sunday week ended up with us getting changed in silence, contemplating our up and down progress. In the Laances everything is fine but as soon as we get into the mystere it all turns to worms. Our paddle last week was one hour and it was ok (ish) but whenever we had to cross the flow we really tensed up, so I ended up sticking to the bank which meant when we came to the end of a run we couldn't get the boat aound. It was as we were faffing about trying to stern rudder the boat the right way that we went over. I tried as hard as I could to brace and keep us upright but I simply couldn't overcome the inertia. A very cold 5 minutes back to the clubhouse. Grim!  We had put in a few practice portages to try to break things up but really we should have just stayed in the cockpits; it was too cold for that shennanigans! Ad is getting really frustrated at not being able to progress as well as he was hoping and I am really frustrated that I cannot help him more. I think the appropriate phrase here is 'The blind leading the blind'. I think more K1 work, more ergo work and short paddles in the mystere until the air temperature gets back above 0 degress is the plan.

I've had 4 turbo sessions on the bike this week. The weather's been rubbish for running and I only have a very old and knackered set of running flats, not suitable for ice and snow. My main focus towards the Forestman is the bike; that's where I can make the most gains but at the moment I need to get back into the habit of training regularly in all three disciplines so that's what the next month or so is going to be about. Little and often.

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