Project Triple 8 Training Review - Week 1
Distances: 108km run, 109km cycled & 1.9km swam.
Total Time: 16 hours & 40 minutes, Total Elevation Gain: 2,934 metres.
I’d put off restarting any activity/training until 30 May to
give my knee as much time as possible to heal after it stupidly picked a fight
with the Razor Rock at the XTERRA Danao race on Cebu. This meant (with the
exception of a ‘recreational’ hike up & an excruciating descent down from
the crater rim on Mt. Rinjani, Lombok just two weeks after the incident) I had
a full 5 weeks of recuperation which, for an active “ants in his pants” sort of
guy like me, was a significant lay off.
In the main I focused on being calm & relaxed during
this time so that my inner energy could be directed at fixing my knee. This got
harder and harder though as my natural impatience to a lack of ‘movement’ got
the better of me and, I confess, waves of regret at my stupidity started to
surface as I started to hear the tick tock, tick tock of the Project Triple8
clock getting louder and louder.
So it won’t come as a big surprise that on Tuesday last
week, with a full 12 weeks before Project Triple8 is due to start (allowing me
3 full days before the official start at 7:30am on Friday, 26 August for
sleeping) I dived in the deep end with an attempted marathon distance run down
the old trunk road to Kampar.
This relatively flat route resulted in miserable failure as
I only managed three quarters distance and was reduced to a walk with very sore
feet and a badly aching right Achilles’ tendon & two very sore knees. In a
macabre way, as my masochistic tendencies have a habit of doing, I interpreted
the knee pain as a big positive. My rationale being that as my injured left
knee ached as badly as the right one in my head I was sufficiently healed to
have started.
With that in mind on Wednesday I ran 20km as two 10km
sessions (morning & evening), rode my bike on Thursday morning with a short
5km brick run as I usually do, rested on Friday and rode & ran again on
Saturday morning. This would, I hoped, leave me fresh enough for another
attempt at a marathon distance run on Sunday which I planned to do on one of
the hardest sector’s of the Project Triple8 run route which has almost 1400
metres of elevation.
Fortunately, I was blessed with a cool morning and
encouragingly, I felt pretty good at the end of it and even better the next
day. Although, whilst tempted, I chose to swim & stretch the following day rather
than run as I still feel I need to recover and stay strong so that my
intentions of a slow polarised build up of run mileage can happen. After all
there’s no point starting the Triple8 project hard if you can’t keep enough in
the tank to finish the job and the same applies to my preparation plan.
As a consequence I’ve ended Week 1 feeling significantly
more positive about the challenge I’ve set myself than I started the week. The
challenge for me with Week 2 is that I’m going to lose a few days to
travel/work commitments overseas so it’ll be interesting to see if I can keep
up the plan to slowly build up the numbers so that running multiple double
marathons days is actually something I’m physically capable of :-)
Stay tuned and, most importantly, stay healthy.
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