Wanted - Miracle Worker

I'm well and truly miserable tonight with nagging lower backache. No matter how I sit or move I can't get any relief. I've spent the whole day rollering, stretching, heat packing, ice-packing all to no avail. I'm just about to give up and take painkillers, closely followed by a glass of wine - damn it!
It's not new, it's just getting gradually worse and what's more frustrating is that I can't seem to find anyone who can hit the nail on the head, identify the problem and sort it. I feel a bit like an old car with an intermittent fault, sometimes its fine and sometimes its not. It's all a complicated network of IT band, SI joint, imbalances etc etc. Over the years I've probably spent a fortune on sports massage and physio. I don't believe in suffering, I believe in sorting. Trouble is, I need a miracle worker on my doorstep as I don't have time to keep travelling further afield. If you are that miracle worker or know of one - please help!
This is where us weekend warriors differ from the pro's. (Well, just one of the many ways!) If I did this for a living I'd have an army of experts at my disposal to get me back on track. Instead, I'm trying to earn a living in order to pay for this very expensive hobby.
However, I have been able to train like a pro this week - the beauty of school holidays. All training completed in daylight; not a single silly o'clock alarm call; plus, I haven't set foot near the turbo - every bike ride has involved grit on my wheels - perfect. I've also been able to pick and choose which day to do what, based on the weather. So that has involved getting wet - every day!
This week's long bike ride was scheduled to be 3-hours, so having perused the Met Office menu, I gave IronPhil the options: "We can either go now, when it's gusting at 22mph; tomorrow at 30mph, or the weekend which is gale force gusts." Needless to say we saddled up and set off in squally showers and a stiff breeze (in Scottish terms that equates to 'blowing a hoolie and p***ng down!') Yet it wasn't too bad until we hit the turnaround point and discovered the stiff breeze was actually a tailwind and we needed to head home in a character-building headwind.

 Demoralising data from the gizmo's revealed that we may as well have stood still for half an hour as we'd covered less ground than last week's much shorter ride! To add to my misery, IronPhil announced that he'd been thinking about my cycling and decided that I must lose concentration when I'm riding because one minute I'm pedalling next to him, the next I just fall behind for "no obvious reason" and he has to slow down for me to catch up. Grrrr - watch this space - I will close that gap!

How SAD am I?

Years ago when IronPhil started his own triathlon adventures, I remember stifling yawns as he tried to talk to me about training methodology, bike components and other apparently important stuff. I was an uncomplicated runner at the time. The most technical thing I did was lace up my shoes, pin a number on my vest and just run as fast as my body would let me!
Now look at me - I could bore for Britain by talking triathlon even in my sleep. The bookshelf is groaning with endurance sport biographies, 220 mag and training manuals. I could guide you to a lifetime's worth of YouTube motivational viewing for turbo sessions. Every move I make is logged and timed ... but worst of all, I'm all tooled up! If it can be monitored or motivated - I've got the tools to do it.
An i-pod, to keep me running for hours; a waterproof MP3 player, to take the boredom out of 100+ lengths in the pool; finger computer, to count my lengths and other things that I can't figure out yet; bike computer - to let me know how far and how fast; Garmin - same info for when I'm running; I've even succumbed to the temptation of  a heart rate monitor,  which should arrive from eBay tomorrow. But most worrying of all, I've been ridiculously excited all week about a new app which I've downloaded on my phone to track my runs and rides. The thrill of downloading the data and analysing it when I get back is firmly placing me in the geek category! I'm worryingly SAD - Shockingly Addicted to Data. I can see how fast, how slow, how far I go; comparing myself to hundreds of other people I don't know and have never met - God if that's not sad then I don't know what is! The thing is, long distance triathlon training can be a lonely affair. I do like to train with others, but my schedule is not a very sociable beast, it's either too early, too late, too far, too fast or too slow, to fit in with others, so I'm often on my own for most of my 8 sessions a week - so I need toys to play with!
Unfortunately, technology is notoriously unreliable in the winter weather we're experiencing. I stupidly took my i-pod for an hour's run in hellish sleet and snow this week, I don't blame it for packing up on me - it's been sitting in rice ever since and I'm slowly giving up hope of a resurrection. My bike computer has also given up the ghost in foul cycling conditions.
But after a couple of tough weeks of  'training in treacle', so much so, that I abandoned my Garmin because I didn't like the run splits it was showing, I'm happy to report that while the weather is still doing its damnedest to break me, I've shed a weary skin and emerged stronger.  This week I've been back on track with fresher legs and better splits .... I'll never mock the motivating power of a bit of electronic tracking again!

Sleet, sweat & snot

I've done nothing but count this week - count reps, count minutes, count miles. It's been one of those uneventful winter training weeks. Just damned hard slog. I've ticked off the sessions, I haven't cut corners and to be quite honest, I haven't really enjoyed it. But, I guess that out of 30-weeks of training some of them are going to be simply hard slog - just going through the motions.
 An i-pod is worth it's weight in gold during times like this - find some good tracks, turn up the volume and visualise the race - it works wonders when the spirit is fading.
I've also found some great motivational movies on You Tube to while away the hours on the turbo.  This week I watched James Cracknell complete the Marathon De Sables, so much pain and suffering, it helped to put my humble dawn endeavours into perspective.
 Now I know there's plenty of purists out there tut-tutting at such apparently mindless training. I can hear all the good advice about the need to stay focussed during training - keep an eye on your cadence, think about body positions, breathing, blah-de-blah. Well let me just say that I completed 10-hours this week and in order to push through the heavy legs, dark mornings and cold nights I needed other, additional distractions!  Job done, box ticked. I know every week won't be like this, I'm at the end of week 7, I've just had my hardest week yet, and I'm just suffering from winter training misery.
My skin is suffering too.  I looked in the mirror this week and was horrified to see the state of my face, it looked as if someone had taken a piece of sandpaper to it and roughed it up in the night. Sore and stingy with huge flaky, dry patches. Now, I'm not a girl who spends a fortune on cosmetics. I don't get the whole fake bake, gel nails, handbags and shoes things. (See how lucky you are IronPhil? My greatest excesses are spent on training kit.) But I draw the line at looking like a ruddy-cheeked farmer's wife!  The perils of daily abuse - chlorine, sweat, snot, rain and wind. You'd think with this amount of fresh air and training  I'd look the picture of health, with radiant glowing cheeks. Hmm, clearly not. Don Fink and 220 Triathlon mag don't have any tips for this little girly problem. A kind colleague suggested nappy cream, another suggested petroleum jelly. Have you ever tried to wipe away sweat and snot when your face is caked in either of those substances? Today's 2.5 hour bike ride even came with a free exfoliation thrown in - cycling into a combination of heavy rain and wind actually feels like you're having buckets of gravel hurled at your face. Some women of my age would pay a fortune for that kind of natural exfoliating treatment!
I think the best solution is a small lottery win, just enough to pay for a winter training camp in the sun, a quite long winter camp - say 4 months?! I'll be back in May. Mind you, just check out this view...that's the reward I get for running up a local hill in the rare hours of daylight. I think that's worth the sweat!

I've had a message from God

What a shite week.
I'm tempted to just leave it at that but feel like I should explain.
It all started last Sunday morning when I woke up with someone else's legs attached to my body. Overnight I'd been transformed from budding triathlete to arthritic granny. Walking downstairs was torture. Training was hell. It was no better by Monday as I hobbled helplessly down the school stairs followed by 29 young people, some keen, some not so, to take on their second taste of cross-country training - I wasn't a great advert!
Yep Ol, you were right ... I shouldn't have done the Devil's Burden hill race, it did wreck my legs and made this week's training one long and painful sufferfest. In fact, the only thing that kept me on the turbo at 6am on Tuesday morning was sheer bloody-mindedness. It would've been an outrageous waste of precious sleep time to have got up at the crack of dawn and quit. Still, no amount of bloody mindedness was persuading my adopted legs to accept a gear change. They were frustratingly content to spin in an easy gear, every time I tried to change up, they yelled "Nooooo!". By the time the hour was up they were screaming for mercy. I rolled off the turbo and onto the floor feeling miserable and defeated, mercy didn't come .... but a 1hour run did!
There was no time for mercy this week, I had a date with some day surgery and knew that after a general anaesthetic I was going to have to take a couple of rest days. I hadn't banked on three though. I knew hospitals were full of germs - I came out sporting a nasty little cold. Despite working with young people who breed germs incessantly at this time of year, due to having their little fingers up their noses or down their trousers on a regular basis, I'm not normally susceptible to colds. So much so, that when I get one I feel quite affronted and immediately want a full investigation in how it managed to slip through my impenetrable defences.
Anyway, it did, so Friday was also written off as I came home from work feeling decidedly ropey. It was the wrong time to scan Tri-Talk, a forum for triathletes, and discover that the IMUK rumour machine is in full force. It looks as if the bike course for this year's race is going to be tougher and hillier than previous years. I signed up knowing that it was billed as a tough bike course due to the amount of ascent, but as I looked at a picture of a muscle-bound triathlete tackling one of the new rumoured ascents, and pretty much suggesting that he'd rather stick pins in his toenails than tackle that extra hill twice, I felt a small rising panic.
The cycling does worry me a bit, especially when the weather gods keep conspiring to screw up my weekend training sessions.
Well, today dawned unexpectedly bright. I peeked out of the curtains expecting to see a blanket of snow and knew immediately that this was a golden opportunity. I crept downstairs, made IronPhil (who'd been working late shift the previous night) a cuppa, and whispered in his ear: "Wake up - I've had a message from God!" "The Lord hath spaken unto me, he hath seen my plight  and parted the weather clouds, arise, we must go quickly."

I can't really say that conversation flowed much over the next hour, or that IronPhil said anything which I can repeat. Normally, he has the patience of a saint when it comes to me and cycling, today was different. I can only assume it's because I got the whole message from God thing muddled up. It turns out that I was wrong. We'd no sooner left the house than he brought down his wrath upon us. We spent the next hour in hell - a blustery, sleety, very wet kind of hell. As we reached our first roundabout IronPhil didn't engage in conversation about whether to carry on or turn around, he just turned. By the time we arrived home we were beyond frozen. IronPhil got straight into a hot shower, I changed into dry cycling kit and finished my session on the turbo. Roll on summer.