Paul May

I grew up on the Northside of Dublin and never really spent any time in the Phoenix Park, but now that I live a bit closed to the centre of town it’s a beautiful resource to have right on my doorstep. It’s especially nice in the morning when it’s basically runners, cyclists, people flying kites and planes - and the deer. The learner drivers come later in the day, thankfully when most of us are off the roads.

We met up today at 10am at the Papal Cross and did circuits inside of the park for about an hour and fifteen minutes. Thanks to Noelle from Piranha for leading the session. It felt really good and is the longest cycling session I’ve done so far. I got a windproof jacket yesterday which kept me warm, and the plan is to cycle to work twice a week from this week. My leg/back weren’t too tight afterwards, which is good - and i made a bit of an effort to work on my left side while we were cycling.

The coming week is “ass in gear week” - physio, cycling, swimming, and easing slowly back into running.

The team of people taking part in the Chicago Triathlon met up on Wednesday to talk about fundraising, training, equipment, and logistics. It was nice to meet everybody; there’s a great group of 10 people taking part, so hopefully together we’ll be able to raise some serious money and have fun.

I really enjoyed the swimming this morning, and I’m starting to get an inkling for some of the technique. The slower and more deliberate I swim the easier I find the technique, and my endurance is slowly (very slowly) getting better.

And in other news, I had physiotherapy today after work, which went really well. I was very impressed with the team at Sports Med Ireland, who looked after me very well, gave me a thorough assessment and after doing some strength exercises, gave me some work to do between now and my next session. I can’t say physio was “fun”, but I’m glad that the problems with my back and left side were looked at.

I’ve just had confirmation that my spine hasn’t been damaged, which is great news. I’ll be starting physio at some stage this week, i’ll keep you posted on the back injury. In the meantime, swimming and cycling proceed. [Good swimming session this morning with the usual 5 minutes of decent technique and 55 minutes of slogging away haplessly.]

Hello. My back injury is persisting, so I have a doctor’s visit tomorrow and physiotherapy on Thursday. My gut feeling (or back feeling as it were) is that I’ll need an orthotic for my left shoe (or both) and some more weeks of physio. It’s worrying me a lot because it’s painful to walk, let alone run at the moment. Thankfully my swimming and cycling appear to be unaffected, it’s the impact of walking and running that is really uncomfortable (and a low generalised pain pretty much all the time). Fingers crossed.

In other news I spent a lovely weekend in Galway. The hotel had a very nice pool which I used to do some drills and laps; nothing too strenuous. My body position in the water is still terrible, but I obviously haven’t been able to tell while swimming. This page has some good tips which I’ll follow in my next session.

Thanks to Gavin for his generous donation (the first I’ve gotten through the website). In answer to his questions; I’m training with Piranha Tri Club here in Dublin, so I’m following their core training and working to a 20 week training plan which I cobbled together from information at Triathlon Ireland, TriNewbies and Begginer Triathlete, as well as advice from other people who’ve done Triathlons before.

I train (bike, run) using a Polar F6 heart-rate monitor. This is a fairly basic model available widely on eBay and in Argos. The HRM is basically a chest-strap which picks up my heartbeat and then sends the data to a wrist watch. The watch records the data, and gives me min-max heart rate zones for an effective training session. This has been really good in helping me make sure I don’t hurt myself while training. The inclination is to go at it like a bull in a china shop, but the heart rate monitor keeps me from overdoing it.

The swimming training is all coached, and usually consists of a 200m warm-up, and then a series of drills taken in 25m/50m sections. A typical hour at the moment is probably 800-900m, and it feels *way* longer than that. For the first few months the coaching focuses on technique, and then moves onto more advanced endurance, time-improvement. My focus is obviously just getting to a level of fitness and technique where 1500m isn’t a problem (at the moment it definitely is).

Anyway, I hope they’re decent answers. My back is still very sore, but hopefully some physio therapy in the next few days will help me with that.

I had a great long weekend in Longford and here, and I managed to put in a few hours training as well. On Saturday I did 4.5K on the roads in Longford, and the same again on Sunday. The route was very hilly, so I found myself reaching my maximum heart rate very quickly, and then slowing down - sometimes stopping when my rate spiked over my maximum. After the two days of running I found that my left foot was incredibly sore; so I may need to work on the way I’m transferring weight onto my left side (I felt it in my back too). I’ve decided to lay off the running until the weekend, work on my swimming, and then see how my foot feels at the weekend.

Swimming today was good - I got there early to warm up and did drills and swam well for 90 minutes without cramping up too much. The technique is very hard to work on when I’m running out of breath and my arms are falling off, but hopefully it’ll come eventually.

I’ve been neglecting the bike - must do something about that this week.

My legs were a bit stiff after the bag-packing last night; but the swimming went well today. When the coach told me to do a 200m warm-up I wasn’t totally phased, but it was still a tough all-in-all. This week I was joined by Ed in the “technique” (beginner) lane, so it was good to have another person at a similar level.

So, that’s all the training for today. A run tomorrow, and then Sunday off. Back to it on Monday, and more swimming on Tuesday. Happy Easter to you all.

We packed shopping like demons! Like Champions! Thank you so much to Virginia for organising a night’s bag-packing in Cornelscourt shopping-centre yesterday, which hopefully raised a lot of money for Our Lady’s Hospital. Standing for 6 hours was tough.; swimming this morning….well that’s a story for another post ;)

I had my first swimming session with Piranha today, and it went well. I’m *by far* the weakest swimmer there, but they all have a couple of months training on me at least…so I didn’t feel too bad. The coach worked on getting my hips up in the water, on my stroke and breathing, and i had improved a little bit by the end of the session. The soreness in my legs seemed to have improved by the end too. All in all I found the session tough going, especially with this damn cold, but well worth dragging myself out of bed at 6am. 5K running tonight, more swimming on Friday (and possibly one other evening this week). Joy abounds.

My legs ache, my arms ache - and I think I’m coming down with a cold. Hopefully this will get easier as the weeks go by, because at the moment I’m sore. I’ll go along to circuits training tonight and see how the warm up goes. If I’m still sore then I’ll sit out the session and swim tomorrow morning with (hopefully) better legs and arms. Nobody said this was going to be easy, no pain no gain, etc. :)