Well, there is a lot of catch up to do!
Between training, preparation for Rally Australia and a whole lot of travel, my blog notes never made it up to the website – sorry!
As far as training goes, the rest of October consisted of some easy-ish weekday sessions (apart from track, that’s always hard) and then some long weekends. Brick sessions, long rides, runs off the bike and generally getting the endurance side in.
It was definitely getting to the point where you are generally fatigued a lot of the time and I was happy when rally week came around.
Below is a summary of the last few weeks of prep leading into the event. Generally, I was getting in between 10-12 hours and the main thing I am seeing looking back in hindsight is that I am lazy when it comes to swimming!
The ‘taper’ wasn’t ideal, having a week of the rally. Although there wasn’t much swimming, biking or running, the stress level on the body and mind is high and I feel wiped by the end on the rally. I tried to make up for the specific training a bit the week after, but maybe should have focused a bit more on recovery. Whilst I didn’t feel fatigued come race day, I felt ready, but not super fresh.
It’s funny how things seemed to be on track until the last few weeks, then it all went a bit haywire. Interestingly, so many people I spoke to also found themselves in the same position for one reason or another. What is that about!? Is that a general theme with prepping for events like this? I guess when you are prepping over a long period of time there are always so many variables and the key (I’ve been told) is to get the hours in consistently over a longer period of time. Once you are a few weeks out, you aren’t going to get much fitter anyway. So here’s hoping that it was enough.
