Paul May

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Triathlon.