Door Frame.

I skipped the time trial because I was late at work, although I did manage to get some filling done around the door frames in the living room. We're having carpet fitted first thing on Saturday morning so tonight is probably a write off too. More filling, re-touching and staining to do before the carpet is down. Hopefully, I'll get my time trial done over the weekend.

1st Testing Week Pt 1

Last night I did my first run test, I was supposed to swim but I left work late and didn't get to the pool in time. The test consisted of running three miles as fast as possible but with a heart rate cap of 150bpm. Even with the heart rate cap it felt quite tough, firstly because I had to move my Sunday 11 miler to Monday and was therefore quite tired and secondly because I didn't warm up properly. I completed the run in 25:25 which averages out to 8:30 minutes per mile, not too bad under the circumstances.
This evening I went straight to the pool after work and performed a swimming test. This involved a warm-up followed by a 1000 metre timed set, which I finished in 21:30. The same pace over the ironman distance would result in a 1h12 swim leg which is around the same time as last years effort and would be quite acceptable this year.
Tomorrow night I am intending to perform a 10 mile cycling time trial...

Testing week

I'm just starting my fourth week of proper Ironman training.... So far I've done plently of running, a bit of cycling and not enough swimming. My running consists of a daily run of between 1.5 and 6 miles, with a longer run on Saturday or Sunday.
Cycling so far has been limited to a weekly ride on my training bike which amounts to about 25 miles. The week before last I cycled to work as well giving me a 52 mile round trip. This is supposed to be a recovery and testing week but next week I'll cycle to work at least once, the aim eventually to get about a 100 miles of riding out of my commutte on top of what I do at the weekend.
I've been swimming in the local 20 metre pool and I can knock out about 2000 metres of mostly bilateral swimming fairly easily. This needs to increase to 4000 metres, however, as the weather gets warmer I should be jumping in a lake twice a week and that will get me 2 miles every time.

This is a testing week and so tonight I'll do a swimming time trial, Wednesday night will be a 3 miles run with a heart rate cap of about 150bpm and Thursday will be a 10 mile cycling time trial with a cap of 160bpm. These will give me some numbers to track progress. Next week I'll crank up the volume a notch.....

Bricks.

One of the things I want to do in the garden this summer is build a brick barbeque and a pizza oven. Here's a link to a good pizza oven building site. http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/gl_plants_other/article/0,,HGTV_3609_1384328,00.html