I’ve survived my first week of training following workouts set out by a coach – hurrah.

Training was harder than I expected and there was no day off as swimming counts as “active recovery”.

Monday: This was my “rest day” i.e. I was given a swim to do. I can totally understand the point however, your heart rate just doesn’t get up there during swimming and generally I dont get tired legs (normally). On this occasion I did feel a little tired after but thats probably because I’m not used to doing sprints. I guess I’m normally a lazy swimmer and spend half my time with a pull buoy between my legs doing a lazy crawl.

Absent minded training is no longer allowed. I will be doing either hard sessions or very very easy sessions. Everything is about quality.

So with my first swim I had to familiarise myself with a button on my Garmin watch that records rest periods. My workout was warm up, then a main set of doing 50metre sprints followed by 15 seconds rest. This was mostly done in front crawl, however, there were some lengths of breaststroke in there too. Sadly I didn’t have time for the cool down as they throw you out of the pool after 45 minutes. I batted my eyelashes at the guy behind my goggles but he wasn’t having any of it.

Tuesday: I went to the gym before work and was feeling quite smug because I’d designed my own workout to follow. Of course in reality when you get there you soon realise ahhhh I cant find the long bar or exactly the weight I need etc, however, I did my best to follow my plan. It was a total body workout and included some machines but also free weights and “floor work” which always sounds like something a gymnast would do. I must of overdone it as my legs felt like robocop for the next few days…

After work on Tuesday I had my first run session to do. I knew it was going to involve interval sprints so made the rare decision to drive to a spot I knew, where it is pan flat. I also picked it because it has some tree cover and it was a hot hot day 🥵. Again I used the lap button on my watch for each interval. It was a really hard session as I clearly just pootle normally. Going really fast one minute then very slow the next is completely foreign to my legs. By the end I had to walk some of the last easy bits as I was really flagging.

Wednesday: Today’s workout was 1hour of easy cycling. Woohoo. It’s great when you see the word ‘easy’. I was allowed to cycle indoors or outdoors but basically just needed to keep my heart rate at a certain rate (Z2 = easy/you can still chat).

I had hoped it would help my legs, which by Wednesday were more like robocop after horse riding. It didn’t.

Thursday: Ahhhh finally my legs were feeling a lot better 👏. Thursdays session was an easy run of 30 minutes. It should of been a hard bike session but I had to switch Thur/Fri round for work reasons. It felt both bizarre and difficult to run as slow as I’d been told initially. However, I finished my recovery run and will admit I did feel better after.

After work on Thursday my husband and I had our 30 minute strength session with Emma (our personal trainer). She put us through our paces with lots of arm and core work (I told her to lay off the legs 😆). As always it was a lot of fun and I really feel I’ve worked hard after.

Friday: I was dreading this session thinking it would be incredibly hard. I had to do a 50 minute bike ride (in or outdoor) using a big gear and pushing hard with a slow cadence. This was done in an interval fashion with easy spinning in between. Based on the watts I’d been set to achieve I actually found it very doable but arguably I should of pushed for higher watts and worked harder. Ah well, next time, I’m sure he will increase the watts!

Saturday: Saturday morning was a 45 minute swim switching between normal front crawl and swimming with the pull buoy concentrating on technique. This was followed by a 30 minute easy run with 5 minutes of faster intervals in the middle. I really wanted to run faster for longer. I dare say this is a good thing. In the past I was probably doing such hard or long runs I always wanted to go slower!

Sunday: Easy/steady state outdoor bike ride for 2-3 hours. I went out with my husband and rode 55k on our road bikes. I really enjoyed it but my loss of speed compared to last year is very noticeable to me. I was trying to take it easy, however, even taking that into account I’d say I’ve lost 1-2 miles an hour. Amazing really. Still I will get it back 🚴‍♀️.

For each session you do using the TrainingPeaks App you state after how you felt and how much effort you put in. You can also add general comments or questions. For the bike session I mentioned how tired I felt and the coach asked me what I had eaten. Following my response the feedback was I need to eat more, apparently around 45-55g of carbohydrate an hour based on my current efforts. That’s way more than I’ve ever eaten when out cycling. So I’ll try that next week and see if it helps. Certainly an excuse to eat more is always good 😃.