TRAINING WEEK 3 & 4: BACK IN NL AND CORONA

65 kms / 2 h 41 m / 25.8 avg km/h / wind force 5

Week 3 and 4 of my training plan came and went with a lot of unplanned interruptions again and I am falling even further behind what I expected myself to be doing in terms of number of hours training in the spinning and on endurance long rides. One good thing I managed to do before leaving Brazil to Holland on the 19th, was to squeeze one spinning interval session in the gym my brother arranged. The typical 5 times interval sessions of 3 and 5 minutes. That should have relaxed my body for the trip.

In Holland is when things got a little difficult. On the Sunday, I started the training week with a nice fitness session and thought it would be good start to get back in consistent training mode. Unfortunately I forgot that in the same day I had planned by Covid booster shoot and later in the day my daughter came down with a cold and self tested positive for Corona. So, since Sunday we are in quarantaine.

Monday I woke up feeling my whole body aching and feeling nauseated and I didn't know if it was the booster, the hard training after a long 26 hours trip from Brazil or I was going down with Covid. So, not to risk I had to cancel all sessions planned for the week and we went for an official PCR test. Which confirmed positive for my daughter and show negative to me. 

Things stay like that until Thursday when I started feeling better and planned a Tacx session at home with the goal of now try to stick to the training plan again and hope I don't get infected even if I'm living in a small 2 bedroom apartment with someone positive. We created a couple of rules to reduce the risk of contamination and so far things are going well. I didn't get sick and my daughter is no feeling too bad.

If I manage not to get sick during this time, this is a great proof of the obvious: distancing, cleaning your hands constantly, wearing a mask and vaccination really works. 

On Saturday I decided to do a longer ride and went out for a traditional 65 kms loop around my place. I do this ride quite a lot first because it is a constant ride to compare fitness and performance and because it is just nice almost with any city crossing (only in Hilversum there is a traffic light to stop).  The training was hard because a lot of wind was blowing from the south east, which meant my whole way back was with a very strong cross / head wind. I was not ready to push that much and the last kilometers was a drag to get back home. Felt completely exhausted but I'm happy for not being sick and to be back in training. 

SHOULDERS - Since November last year I started having very strong shoulder pains in both sides. My brother took a look and he believes I might have a calcification of the shoulder bones, which are pinching the nerves. The only solution is to strengthen the muscles around this area of go for surgery. As I don't want to go to the knife too quick, he gave for me a good upper body training scheme using elastic bands and my own weight. This takes only 30 minutes and I will be trying to do every day for the next 3 months before I call my doctor. Today was the first session and I can really feel my heavy shoulders now while I type. The plan is to get rid of this situation before the race in August. 

Training disrupted but not stopped

Tuesday and Thursday spinning interval training. First day 5 x 3 minutes interval. Second day 3 x 3 minutes + 2 times 4 minutes. Really hard training with big chunk of time on zone 4 and 5.

Once again my training plan got a little disrupted. I had to travel unexpectedly to Brazil last week and will be here for 2 weeks. This means just in actual travel I will loose 4 days in total and will be without an bike for those 2 weeks. Luckily I have two things that helped to stay active and keep some type of training during those days: a lot of time in my hands as I stop working after 16:00 due to the different timezone with Netherlands and access to a spinning bike.

The first weekend after I arrived I decided to dedicate it to fitness strenght and stretch. That meant I did 3 days of core and mobility exercizes of 45 minutes with the following sequence: squad + plank + side plank, ribbon upper body 15 pulls for shoulder and upper back, mountain climbers and abs). The upper body work with the ribbons were especially tought because of an injury that I have in both shoulders. My brother (who is a personal trainer) gave me a set of drills and that should be helping in the mid/long term. Just doing those sessions already helped me to go into the midset of stay active and not write off completely the week.

And because of that I decided to look if I could arrange a place to do my interval spinning sessions. Luckily my brother managed to arrange for me to have access to a gym close by that I could use their spinning bike. Simple and nice gym place and OKish bike. But perfect to drive the interval sessions. The first day was on Tuesday when I did 5 x 3 minutes intervals. The heart was jumping very quick to zone 4 (above 156 beats per minute) and also to zone 5 (above 176 bpm). But I manage to complete all intervals without slacking on the bike resistance. On Thursday, the heartrate was going up a little slower and more "in control". And I even managed to increase the size of the last two intervals to 4 minutes and finish the last 10 minutes with a tempo push. I felt much better for doing those sessions and today (saturday), I will go again for my 3rd and last session  before going back to Holland. 

In total, I won't loose completely the two weeks but won't be able to do any long endurance weekend ride that I was planning to start last week. Something around 2 hours. But as the weather in Holand is staying cold, just above 0 degrees Celsius and very misty, I'm not sure I would have done that either... Anyway, good to see the family and the 30 + degrees weather that I actually never missed...

WEEK 3 / FIRST DAY OF THE YEAR

 

13 degrees and sunny on January 1st! Global warming anybody?

Today I finishes the 3rd week of training. Coming back to routine of interval training twice per week and an longer endurance ride on the weekend. The first part of the week after coming back from Spain on Tuesday was to log a interval training in the spinning bike on Wednesday and on Friday. Both were 5 repetitions of 3 minutes interval, with some 20 seconds all out sprints in the beginning. Sadly without the heart rate monitor. This is to build up strength and muscular endurance. 

The second part of the training is to build up endurance with longer and longer rides.  Today it was a fantasy weather for a chilled ride to burn calories. 13 degrees of sunny and very mild wind conditions. Did an easy ride from Diemen to Almere Haven in the Markermeer. Totally on feeling as I didn’t have my bike computer with me. I only pushed twice when I was climbing a long bridge. I could feel the heavy legs from the interval training and my back was hurting from the many days sitting and eating. But it was a good start of 2022.

The second week didn’t  count as it was a Christmas break week and I did very little other than rest and eat a ton of good food and calories. One core fitness session and a couple of easy skateboard rides was all I could manage. 

Christmas break in Alicante was great to rest and catch up with my adventure companion.