3 Weeks till Gold Coast....am I ready?

This past week was a mixed bag of sorts.. After doing well at the Bridge to Brisbane 10km, I was to run into work on Tuesday morning, keeping my heart rate below 150. This has typically been easy, but it seems I must have been still feeling the effects of Sunday's run as I struggled with heart rate. What felt easy, was not according to my heart rate monitor. I made it into work after my tough run where I did my best but my heart rate still averaged 156. Now part of that increased heart rate could have been due to the fact, I was dive bombed by two magpies. The first one scared the hell out of me, but the second magpie is now short a few feathers.

Why do I keep taking about heart rate? Well it is a true measure of how hard one is working and I plan to use it for my longer races. In my training, it has really helped with the recovery aspect and I can do more training with less recovery time between. In three weeks I will find out how well I can race a 70.3 on heart rate....

I guess one of the better things this week would have to be the 20km bike TT. Our last one I was somewhat sick, but still managed to shave a bunch of time off my last one. Saturday morning though, I wanted to do better and I gave it a full on effort.. Well it seems to be paying off as my time improved from 31:18 four weeks ago to 30:47. What that means for me is I still have room to improve despite completing the past TT at just over a 39km/hour.

One of the other big things was finding out how well I actually did in the 10km race...Out of the 26300+ who did the 10km I finished 171st overall. That means I beat 99.4% of the people who entered WOO HOO!! and as a bonus, I get to enter next year into the elite category. Who knew, I ``qualify`` as an elite athlete... too funny.

With one more solid week of training before my taper going into Gold Coast, I`m tired but can actually say, I have done what I think it takes to give this 70.3 my best effort. I will over the next week, sit down with Mark and determine some KPI`s for the race. Some people in the squad believe I can go sub 5:30 hours for the race and some think I could even flirt with 5 hours, time will tell. The good thing about this is in discussion with Mark, he did say that if I didn`t go below 5:30 hours I could fire him as coach....hmmm. pain and suffering gone if I go 5:31....just kidding.

That`s it for me this week, so catch you next time.

Cheers
Richard