The Weekly Update

It's been another solid week of zone 2 but I did miss Wednesday's bike session. Tuesday's treadmill session was hard work as I went for the extended version with more reps. Yesterday I repeated last week's feat of running the full Velthouse Lane segment again - I'm making it sound like it's bigger, steeper hill than it really is, but it's challenging enough for me.

Now I've broken it and got my marker, I pushed a little harder this week. I'm going to keep applying a bit more effort each time until I get close to my old time from 2013. I'm not sure how achievable that is but we'll see...

Around the focused training there's been three 'zone 2' hour+ sessions, one on the bike, the others on the treadmill. Looking forward to my rest day tomorrow.

Psychological Barrier Down

The last couple of weeks has been a continuation of Zone 2 running and biking combined with one treadmill interval session and one Zwift bike workout per week and a weekend medium run.

The treadmill work outs have been pretty solid. The bike sessions hard, as I've let them slip a bit. I feel I'm getting some momentum going though. My jury is still out on the zone 2 but the verdict is going to be a few months away - the jury needs much deliberation.

The weekend runs have been good. Last Saturday was a pretty solid 13k road run with an attack on the final climb, only seeing me miss my segment PB by under 20s - I'm getting closer, as that was a twenty second improvement on my previous attempt. Next time.....

This Saturday I was back for the Flaxley loop, with the focus on the climbs. I wasn't going PB, but I did put in solid efforts. The highlight was managing to run the entirety of the Velthouse Lane Climb segment. A feat I've not managed since 2016. It wasn't the fastest I've done but I was determined I needed to run the whole 1.5km. So now the barrier is broken the gloves are off.... 

So I know I said I wasn't going PB, but buoyed by my vanquishing of the previous climb, I finished the run with a cheeky attack on the East Side Climb segment - and managed to equal my own (shared first place) KoM time of 2:26. Grrrrhh. I will be the one true ruler of the East Side KoM. I will!

A Solid Week

It's been a week of focused training. A solid Zwift hill climb on Tuesday, under/overs on the treadmill Wednesday, a sixty minute Zwift Academy session Thursday that culminated in a new 5-minute power PB. Friday saw me keeping my heart rate averaged at 127 for a 75 minute zone 2 treadmill run. Up yesterday, a very humid jog round the local woods. Couldn't get going. The humidity did for me. Then today it was an 80-minute zone 2 run on the treadmill followed immediately by 30-minutes in zone 2 on Zwift.

I hope this zone 2 training malarkey is legit. Do you know how much zen it requires to run for 80 minutes on the treadmill - slowly? I can tell you, it's a lot!

Enter the Zone 2

I've managed some pretty productive training these last few weeks. Some decent mid range weekend runs, a few tempo runs and some good speed work on the treadmill. Plus I've started to get into 'zone 2' training. Something I've never done before but I've been reading up on it and thought I'd give it a try. All my runs now, same as a decade ago, end up being hard efforts. Even my easy runs ends up as a hard effort. I just can't help it. So I'm trying this zone 2 stuff out on the treadmill where I can control the conditions and nudge the speed up or down to keep mt heart rate middle of the zone - now, whether the zone is calculated correctly is another matter.... but hopefully I'm in the ball park.

There's even been a few focused training Zwift sessions on the bike, rather than my more normal 'ride around a bit making it up as I go'. The highlight of the Zwifting, for me, are the hill climbs, and I've ridden a couple. There is nothing better than 5-10k at 7%.

All in all, it feels like it's been a productive few weeks.