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Happy New Year

My training volume picked up this week and the lovely easy training days of December are already a distant memory. Due to the icy conditions I am sure I am not alone in having spent more hours than normal on the turbo and the treadmill this week. Unfortunately I’m not as tough as the mountain biking boys of Team Wiggle who have been out training in the snow as you can see from Lee’s recent blog.

January is always the month in the training programme where my volume increases and I get back into the habit of doing 2 training sessions a day, I’m really motivated at the moment and much to my surprise, really loving swimming which has to be a first! It is by far my weakest leg when it comes to triathlon and if I can find a reason to run or bike rather than swim I take it. I was a little bit scared I wouldn’t remember how to swim after 6 weeks out of the water. I had laser eye surgery last November which meant I couldn’t swim for a month. I then had a 2 week holiday in France over Christmas where I got to bike, run and ski but no swimming. It doesn’t seem to have hurt me, in fact I feel better in the water which will hopefully translate to some new PB’s later this season!

I leave a bike in France and despite the huge amount of rain we had in Nice, I managed to get out and do some wonderful rides and only got soaked once! In the December issue of Pro Cycling, Col Eze was featured as a ride which is also one of my personal favourites and one I do quite frequently as it is a great way to cut across to Menton to the start of Col de la Madone, a ride that was also featured in a Pro Cycling magazine Nov 2009 I think. Trek fans will recognise where the name of the bike came from J.

Riding in the Alps is always a humbling experience for me. My strength in racing is flat, windy courses so faced with a 10km climb with a 8-10% average, I am not really in my element. It is of course good for me and makes me stronger but it doesn’t make me happy until I crest the top of those mountains. I tend to drift off if left to my own devices and enjoy the views rather than pushing myself to the max, which is where The Dutchman comes in. Every climb we did over the break was used for interval training and he was right there next to me making sure I was putting in 110%. If it was a short climb of 5-7km it was 1km hard, 1 km easy. Anything longer than that was 2km hard and 1km easy. Trust me, there was no enjoying the views this time!

So back to work, back to training and fine tuning the race schedule for the year. I am mixing it up a bit more this year and sticking to my Olympic and Sprint distance triathlons, some early season duathlons and also a few more sportives including the Fausto Coppi in Italy which will no doubt hurt a lot given my current climbing fitness! I’m busy recruiting my merry band of domestiques to help me out there. www.faustocoppi.net

Be careful out there on the ice! Happy Training.
Cx

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 10:33 am and is filed under Carolyn Hewett, Team Wiggle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.