Start of the 16/17 season

So I had completed my marathon, now I'm able to get back to cycling and possibly swimming, although I'm still not really enjoying swimming so lets get back to cycling.

I had one week of recovery after the marathon, with a few walks but no real training for almost 10 days. My first session back was a 21km Time Trial with SBTC. Yes after a few months with no focus on my bike speed, I was a lot slower than usual and averaged only 33.4km/h, whereas my best 14km TT I held 39.6km/h. I knew I had a lot to work on before the new race season.

I had the Springfield Duathlon coming up in only a few weeks. Other than the one TT, all of my cycling was done on hills, whether it be Mount Cootha or Mount Gravatt as this was an "undulating" course. If you haven't done the duathlon before, the best way to describe the ride is approximately 50% downhill and the rest of the time is of course uphill.

After the three weeks of hill training and riding, I was ready. Race day came and I was really happy with my result, I didn't quite get my target time of 2:30:00 but I didn't mind as the bike course was approximately 4km longer than the year before.

Two weeks later and I did my first Triathlon training camp. Standing Start Triathlon ran its first TeamSST camp down in Lennox Heads. What a weekend of training, starting off with our first ride on Saturday morning. For me the ride ended up as 68km with just over 900m of elevation gain (this is the equivalent of riding almost halfway up Australias highest mountain, Mount Kosciusko), followed by a warm 8km run and then a shorter pool swim. The best part of this camp was to come on Saturday night where we really gelled together and got to know each other as a group having a quite a few drinks and great food at our camp. The Sunday session got cut short and we ended up doing a 80km ride through Byron Bay to Mullumbimby and back, during which we had one of our members getting multiple flat tyres.

In the weeks to follow, I continued training as normal but really starting to lose my enthusiasm for the sport and I was starting to gain a little weight back. I wasn't sure what was going wrong but I knew I just wasn't as happy as I had been.

Bridge to Brisbane came up and I hadn't planned on doing the run. However a friend gave me his free entry, as he'd decided to go for a long ride rather than doing the race. Unfortunately, as the race start line had moved this year. I was waiting for a train for a very long time, only to find out there were no services going into the city before the race. So I did end up late to the start meaning I started in a group a lot slower than I should have. I did end up finishing the slightly short of 10km course in 49:58 with the stroller. It was a very rocky ride and I cant believe Sapphire stayed asleep the whole time with me jumping onto every kerb possible to get around people, I also somehow spun the stroller coming around a corner. I do have one regret and that was I apparently tripped over a lady when I tried to get around her near the start.

I still wasn't feeling quite right, I was going through the motions of training but was finding it quite easy to cut a session short, or just skip it completely. This made my decision easier to step down from the Committee of South Bank Triathlon Club. It felt like a weight had lifted off my shoulders after making this change and I was back to doing this sport for me rather than the rest of the club.

I decided, since I was back into this for me, I would go most of my sessions alone and stepped away from the club sessions. This way I could focus only on what I needed to focus on. A big part of this was to improve my swimming. I did one session with my coach so he could give me a few pointers and he gave me just two things to work on. The first was to keep my head pointed down as I was always looking slightly forward which tilted my head and in turn tilted my body creating more drag in the water. The second was my arm kept crossing over, this causes a lot of issues including making me not swim straight especially in open water which I always noticed I would veer right in open water. The way he explained for me to correct this was to imagine that my shoulders were train tracks and every stroke my hands were to grab the sleepers on the outside of the tracks.

My swimming improved greatly. At the start of 2016 I was averaging close to 3:00/100m, by mid September I could finish a training session averaging 2:08/100m across the whole session and even getting under 2:00/100m for the first 100m sprint effort. It turns out, actually jumping into the pool and swimming helps improve it more than not doing anything.

End of the Bridge to Brisbane 2016