One Week out from Dublin Marathon.

If I'm been honest training hasn't been consistent leading up to this marathon. I still suffer from the same problem I had in school. I seem incapable of concentrating on something for a long enough period of time. I'll sign up for a marathon with great intentions and go "yeah this is for me" I'll go out and run 100k on the first week of training. Then I'll get talking to someone in the shop they'll tell me something about some new training software they have for the bike or I'll meet someone whose doing loads of swimming and team up with them for a while. Next thing I know the marathon training has stopped or been forgotten about altogether.

So for the past two weeks I've had two main distractions. The first one is a thing called trainer road. It's basically training software for your Bike Turbo. However if you have a good turbo with a power unit connected to it this software becomes pretty cool. You do a power test on it so it works out how hard you can work. Then you get a power program and build your power up. It basically means you are measuring everything you are doing on the bike. I came across it intially after Ironman Lanzarote and didn't really have any interest in the bike until now. I've basically done no cycling until last week when I got up and did the test on the bike, then did 4 sessions on it so haven't done any running at all since the last post.

I have a feeling the new Garmin watches 220 and 620 will spark my interest in running again, unfortunatley after the marathon.

The other thing I've started doing lately is crossfit. There seems to be a lot of rivalry in the states between "Crossfitters" and "Triathletes". Think it's who thinks who is fitter or in better shape. So I went into crossfit bray a bit worried that they might be critical of what I do most of the time. Thankfully after the first couple of sessions they realised I wasn't the typical triathlete (especially when they were all beating me on the 200 meter run), think they also realised I wasn't much competition. It's pretty good though for someone who is not familar with it. Cross fit is a mixture of Olympic weight lifting and functional strength training with limited amounts of Cardio. So what that basically means is almost every session lasts an hour. There is usually two parts to it. The first part is strength so it would typically be lifting a bar of weight in some manner until you can only lift it once and even then it's a struggle. Then when that's over you get to the main part which is called a Met Con. So today our met con started off with a 200 meter run, then back into the crossfit box, 3 chin ups, then 5 Thrusters (this is lifting the bar with 40kg over you head and back down to the squat position). It's great craic and there's a bit of competition in every training session. I'm trying to get in twice a week, not sure it's going to help me in the marathon but i've defo built some strength and I enjoy it which at the end of the day is what it's all about. I'm not going to be competing in the olympics, that dream is over so I just do this stuff to enjoy it.

I couldn't find much photographic evidence of me doing Crossfit on the crossfit bray (i'm not model size.). This is me doing double under skips (i'm in the white t'shirt). Not too sure what the fat bloke on the left is supposed to be doing think he came to take our bins out and joined in, only messing Ronan O'Bric you look great!

Damo.

Dublin City Marathon.

So the next big thing for me is Dublin City Marathon. I had my 10k swim at the end of September so more or less dropped everything trying to get the mileage up for this. I still ran once a week in September but swam three or four times to try and get the mileage up. So as soon as the swim was over I concentrated on the running. I tried a couple of long runs and ended up getting the bus back on some of them. Eventually I got out and Did a 30k run with Rodolfo, which was great to get under the belt before the marathon. Then the same week I did another 30k run so very happy about that.

I'll taper off the running now in an attempt to get energy levels back up for the marathon. I might get back into the pool a bit and try and get the swimming back again whilst I'm tapering.

Heres a nice picture Andrew Cromein took of me doing the 10k swim.

1st Post setting the agenda.

The last blog I did was purely focused on completing Ironman Lanzarote. So with this new blog i'm not going to concentrate on one particular thing. It's going to be a blog mostly about Triathlons and possibly a bit of Crossfit which I've just started doing in Crossfit Bray with Stephen Kinsella.

As Ray Darcy would say "I played a bit of Rugby" in School and for most of my 20's since then i've struggled along doing Triathlons. Biggest problem has always been my build at 90kgs most of the time i'm heavy as Triathletes go, and having done 2 months of Crossfit i'm after just realising i'm not as strong as I thought I was!!

So my training is very very hap hazard I have two young kids and a lovely wife and try and fit it all around working in Amphibian King so generally training takes third place to the other things in my life. I only do training I like doing as I don't see the point in people doing all these events and not enjoying them, at the end of the day 99.9% of us are never going to make a living out of it so if your not enjoying it why do it?

I'm planning on doing the Dublin City Marathon at the end of this month. I only really started training last week as I was training for a big 10k open sea swim and that took up all my time. I'm thinking about possibly doing another Ironman at some stage but I suppose at the moment the big thing i'm toying with is swimming the English Channel in 2015 although I have yet to fully commit to this challenge i'm still researching it.


So training this week involved building up my run mileage to 23 kilometers, I know this seems very low for the seasoned marathon runners out there but like I said I started late. Hopefully I'll be updating this next week saying I've done 30k run!!

Till next time,

Damo.