Have I reached my potential already.

I've never really pushed myself very hard at this whole Triathlon lark. I always assumed deep down I was talented and just never applied myself correctly. Now I'm getting a bit worried. I've been doing this cycling program with Trainer road for 10 weeks. Granted I have missed a good deal of the sessions but I think after a very short cycling career I may have already hit my peak.

The first four weeks were great I could feel myself getting stronger and fitter the  whole time then I was doing the same sessions that at the start were hard but going on the same wattage I was finding them very easy. Then after 5 weeks I retested and i'd jumped up, huge improvement. So the systems automatically adjusts my FTP figure and i'm training to a higher number basically. My problem is I haven't completed very many of the new sessions so I know when I retest next week I may even go down in terms of FTP because for the last 5 weeks i've been getting off the bike after 1 interval when I was supposed to be doing 3. Here is a graph another cool thing trainer road do to show you how much you've trained each week. Basically TSS (training stress score) means if you went as hard as you possibly could for 1 hour you would get 100 points. So most of my sessions are intense but are usually about 90 minutes so in theory you should be getting 100 points per session. If I am down as 30 or 50 or something it usually indicates I opted out of the session half way though. I'm going to retest next week have a funny feeling I may have to move the FTP down a touch.

Swimming is going ok. I mean I'm getting in the pool twice a week but I suppose my problem is it's only for 30-40 minutes and then there's a fair bit of backstroke and kick only involved so in terms of actual distance i'm prob only doing 3-4k a week. I tested myself recently over 200 and 400 meters and i've actually gotten slower. I may have to look at doing something drastic with my swimming.

Running is prob going the best of the three. I got myself a treat in the new Garmin 620 run watch. It does all sorts of new functions and is really fun to play with. It measures your cadence your oscillation (bounce) ground contact time. Of course all of these would mean nothing other than the fact that they show you were you are in terms of other runners. My only really concern regarding the watch is it seems to say i'm in the top 10 and top 5 percentiles (cadence) for a lot of things. Now if I was I might be winning the odd race, i'll have to give Gary Crossan a loan of it and see what it says about him. If I'm in the top 5 where the hell is he.

It also does a VO2 max test. You don't have to push yourself to the limit for the watch to work this out. Most experts i've spoken to have said that it can't be very acurate although to be fair all the reviews I've read of it appear to be accurate for the V02 test. So it gave me a score of 54 which is what I got last year when I was tested in UCD so it can't be too far off. What it also does which I found interesting was it has a race predicator so based on your heart rate and your pace it gives you an indicator of what how fast you should be able to do certain races. So it has my 5k time down as 19:45. Whilst i've done 20:15 recently i've never broken 20 so i might give that a try early in the new year. Hope to still get a bit done during the christmas break.