Taper week is out the window

Last time I was here, one week before our expected launch into the channel the team thought it would be a good idea to taper off our training. This time, given what we see happening in the channel, i've said to heck with that, and thrown it out the window, with one eye on kicking off my snowboarding training in advance of the winter.

Saturday morning i went for a run. I didn't quite know how long i was going to go for, it had been a while since i went for a long run. I'd simply plugged into my tunes and planned for maybe 10km, 50 mins or so. I don't know if it was the early morning sunshine, the burning ball in the sky, that cheered me up no end (i think i'd have been a sun worshipper if i'd been born into more egyptian or pagan times) or the peace and tranquility of Marlow on a Saturday morning before the carnival started, but I felt really good. Surprisingly good. The shuffled tracks on my ipod worked out perfectly as the road unrolled before of me; sending me right where i would normally turn left, pushing me on when i would normally turn back.
At one point i found myself at the top of marlow hill, where it flattens out on it's way to the A404/M40 junction. It's a long slog up that hill, but this morning i had the motivation to go on, i felt strong, despite the heavy smell of manure that has been liberally spread around the fields this week that turned my stomach a couple of times.
16km later I returned home, 82 minutes, not bad going i thought for a first long-run, actually the longest run i think i've done since i came back from Sydney, although i was starting to get a pain in my hips which can't bode well if my brain continues to tell me that running a marathon is a sensible thing to do. I've been told that the only way to train for this is to just run more. Sounds like a painful, marathon-mad runner urban legend to me.

Sunday morning I returned to the Handy Cross pool for the first time since i don't know when. Freddy took us through a steady 4.2km session with ample amounts of other strokes than freestyle. I really noticed that at any pace other than 'old man plod' my body reacts badly to the lactic acid build up. I'll need to retrain myself for that after this long-distance stuff is over, a few sprint sessions where we spin the wheels until our arms don't work anymore, feel the burn! Yeh, excited about that! Swimming in a 25m pool though, with turns every 20 seconds, was pretty unsettling, i've not felt dizzy for a while! I needed some adjustment there for sure!

So this morning's session in the river felt pretty ropey, very sore, with both legs and arms aching after the running and butterfly exertion of the weekend. I'm going to keep training this week anyway and kick on with the running (work allowing of course). At some point i need to refocus onto my legs in readiness for some backcountry, guided action when we get to the mountains in December. I'm pretty excited about following a guide again; part man - part mountain goat, into the backcountry. Last time I did this at Les Arcs in France, Ian (my board-riding wing-man) and we got some bearded, grizzled old french dude who looked us up and down, agreed with a shrug of his shoulders, and promptly pulled on his backpack which contained an inflatable compressed gas system that in the event of an avalanche would float him above the rushing snow and ice. Totally cool from a kit perspective! Obviously the theory is that this would leave him free to skip about the debris field and rescue us after the slide had stopped. Comforting. In summary, I can't have my quads or calves giving up on me half way down a pow-field.

I digress, check out Chris' site for some glorious pictures of the sunrise this morning over the misty Thames. Apart from the cold, it was a lovely morning to be up! See how I feel on wednesday though!
http://chris-newell.blogspot.com/

Happy trails!