The Big Dance is upon us yet again with coverage for those inclined starting at 3:30 on Sunday morning.
The excitement that usually surrounds this event for us, hasn't been as prevalent this year for some reason. Maybe the experience of watching it will fire us up and get us out and into some regular consistent training.
Speaking of races, is only 5 weeks till the Hamilton Island triathlon. Is only a sprint distance race, which is well outside of our comfort zone. Right now, with a sore foot and unable to run, the thought of it makes my head ache, but with some luck this foot problem will over soon and 4 solid weeks of training and a race will be good for the soul. Add a dash of Hawaii inspiration into the mix and you never know what is possible.
One thing I have found, for myself anyway, is that once you are at reasonable level of fitness, to get that extra ounce of performance out of your body it simply comes down to consistently knocking out your key weekly 'hard' sessions. Not every now and then, but week after week leading into the race. The secret to achieving this (other than being healthy and not injured) is motivation and that internal desire to get out there and smash yourself in those key sessions.
An example happened this morning. Decided to take the chance and go for a ride with Cam and Gabby. Now I wasn't super confident that 2hrs on my sore foot was going to be achievable but once out there it wasn't to bad and really just a dull ache more than anything. After gradually building my riding km's over the last 4 weeks with a solid 120k last week, I thought knocking out 60km at a faster pace should be easy. So each hill I hit today, I worked that little harder, and most of the way out to the turnaround point I lead the pack. Unfortunately, about 30k from home, "kaboom", the body decided that it wasn't real keen for much more of this. Pride and ego in hand I had to draft most of the way home, as that little extra effort on the way out, which I haven't been doing recently, certainly had emptied my legs of all their speed. Good wake up call for a sprint race in 5 weeks and a reminder of the difference between aerobic training and tempo/ anaerobic.
Back to the Big Dance. The men will be very interesting with a race between 4 on the cards - Alexander, Lieto, Raelert, Henning. Macca is always a chance to win if he is 'on', but I don't think he has sorted his cramping issue. Any of the other 4 can win the race, but my pick has to be Alexander considering he is the defending champion and really we haven't seen him pushed on the run yet. As for the chicks, Chrissie first and daylight 2nd. Really not that interesting, other than to see how many Male Pros she can 'chick'. I will got with a guess of 28th this year.
