Need For Sleep

The most likely reason for me to miss a training session is the need for sleep. I can function quite well on reduced sleep for a little while. With a 5 month old and shift work that is often required. It becomes a problem if I try to maintain everything without catching up on that sleep. This has been a feature in my life since I began taking training seriously.

There is a difference now versus my early training years. At the start I would refuse to miss training. Sometimes this led to improvement. The consistency in training did pay off. The down side was big. A couple of times my body descended below simple sleep debt. It was now sleep bankrupt. Training was near impossible and the loss in fitness over the ended recovery time clearly was much more detrimental than any gains I had made in the lead up.

Now I am in a position where catching up sleep is harder to do. Plus have some extra experience. The result is I don't let myself get that run down. At the start of the week it was clear I was heading that way when the 5am sounded. The morning bike session was traded for some more sleep. This turned out to be needed more than I thought as the following work shifts involved an excessive amount of overtime. Finishing at nearly 1am when the end was meant to be back at 9pm seriously cuts in on the sleep hours.

So there's been less volume this week, but I hope it is still leading to improvement. At least what I have done feels good.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sandy Point Half Marathon

Image
Any race that uses a picture of myself as promotion makes me think I should compete in it. Wouldn't want to disappoint the masses. Last year my race slow and cold over the same course. A time of 1:30:20, was disappointing and a kick up the backside to get to what really works in training. Since then I have put in a lot of consistent kilometres and have seen some improvement. I was definitely going to race faster this year. Based on my race results over the last few months the hope was to see if I could get down to near 1:24:xx. The weather was very different this year. Far from cold, in fact I think it was our warmest night in a few months. However, there was a Damaging Winds warning issued, with predictions of 65km/hr gales to slow things downs a bit. The winds hit, according to the weather sites: NNE averaging around 50km/hr with gusts of 76km/hr. That made for some interesting race tactics. Luckily the rain held off until after the race. For some reason I felt ready with only 1...
Read more

Fitting Together

It's interesting how easy it suddenly becomes to prioritise aspects of life. I have missed plenty of training in the last week, but for the first time in my life, it really, and I mean really doesn't matter. That's not to say I am throwing training on the back burner. Far from it. Of course I am finding it hard working out how life now all fits together, but I am thoroughly enjoying the process. Training is now just part of the puzzle. What was a very easy load a couple of weeks ago, is now just manageable. This is what I anticipated. As things settle down and I work out of few things the training load should again become much easier. At the moment it looks like I will be able to get in all the key sessions, so in reality it is going fine.
Read more

The Gorge

For work I am currently stationed away from my normal branch. This is a recent roster change that I am not too happy about due to a number of reasons that I won't go into here. The good thing is that it gives me different roads to ride on when commuting. Nothing like a bit of variety to break things up. One particular bit of terrain that I now get to cover is known as the Gorge. It is exactly as the name suggests. The road that takes you into the Gorge is simple. One side is a very wide bend, that could almost be thought of as a straight road. The other side involves a couple of reasonable bends, which wouldn't normally be an issue, but can be when hitting speeds of 60km/hr on the descent. I want to make it clear that the Gorge is far from the toughest of climbs, while quite steep on both sides it is relatively short. So what is it about the Gorge. For me it has provided a good bench mark for my cycling fitness. Back when I first started on the bike it took all my ef...
Read more