8 Weeks To Go

Well it's now only 7 weeks but this blog entry is about the week that's gone so ....



Monday was very interesting for me. I was given the chance of a VO2 max test at the Poly. They have a work experience student and he needed to fill in that skill in his workbook so along I went with my bottle of water. Fat lot of use that was with the face mask seemingly stopping anything entering my mouth including oxygen. It obviously wasn't but just felt like it.

I had stretched beforehand but there was no warmup and it was straight into the test. I thought they might have let me settle in with some sub130 stuff but no apparently you don't get to do the first 40 mins at that plod. I was way out of my depth at the speeds of the treadmill. I hung on for 12 mins and then called it quits. I felt later (after I had recovered) that I had quit too early and could/should have gone on for at least another min.

The result that came back was 51 and looking on line at 'norms' this is quite high. Too high I think. I don't trust the result to be honest. I'm going back on Wednesday morning to do the same test on my bike so we'll see what he comes up with. If the result is similar it will prove what I've always suspected that my years of bike commuting (in UK) has given me a decent cardiovascular system but a muscular skeletal system that isn't up to the job

The test was done at lunchtime and for the rest of the day I felt, well ... f*ked. I felt like I had run a half marathon or something. I canceled the night's run. I needed the rest.

Tuesday was a swim at lunchtime (2k in 38:50 - pool length is back to normal) and then a short run in the evening with my new compression socks. More about them later. They felt good on the run but I couldn't really say if they made any difference over such a short run.

Wednesday was a short swim at lunchtime with all the freaky scuba divers but not much else. The planned bike/run brick got canceled cos of 'family commitments' and then I fell asleep and left it too late to even go out for a run.

I decided I really had to make the most of the rest of the week and really try out the compression socks. I managed to get three runs in over the next three days and end the week with no calf injury! That is a major achievement for me. I had made the decision early in the training plan NOT to run on consecutive days because the chance of injury just escalated when I did this. It also made my calfs extremely tight and sore to run too frequently even if they didn't pull. It would take a few minutes in the morning for my calfs to 'relax' after a run the previous night and I would feel like I was forever on the brink of 'pulling' the calf during any run.

I have to say (and I know it is still early days and I'm probably tempting fate and a 'pull' but ...) the compression socks have changed my life ... well my running life anyway.

They feel like they are looking after my calfs as I run. My theory about my calfs is that during exercise the muscles fill with blood and expand more than the outer sheath can handle and that's the pain I get.

Maybe, just maybe the compression socks are doing what they say they do by increasing the blood flow through the muscle and not letting it fill and expand as much as it normally does and therefore keeping it within the expandable limits of the sheaf ... or maybe it's just because they look and feel so good (I had originally put the word sexy in there but maybe that's stretching it a bit) that I'm convincing myself they work.

Whatever the answer I have survived three consecutive runs for a total of more than three hours with no calf pain. So really I don't care how stoopid I look (and I do look stoopid) or how it might look like I just got them to have the latest 'tri fad' or even that they cost me $80 (ouch!). I just care that they have (so far) let me run more than I've run before. I love them!

I also bought a new top this week to wear for the race. With that and the compression socks I think I look like a subbuteo man. If you're not of a nervous disposition or don't easily throw up you might like to scroll down for photographic evidence.

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Subbuteo man