School Holidays!

One of the annoying things about being Australian and being almost addicted to watching television shows like Game of Thrones, is that every now and then there is a week where we don't get an episode and have no idea why. There is always a good reason, but given that I'm not in the United States, it isn't obvious. I guess you are all on the receiving end of one of these delays and it was all because of school holidays.

To all the people with real jobs, you might laugh at me and say that I should have even more spare time, it's not quite the case. My girlfriend is a teacher too and so all of a sudden I have a buddy who I must fool into thinking that I spend every moment thinking about her and not about triathlon!

Then there's that whole routine I'm going to keep harping on to you about. Consistency is the key to my success - in triathlon and diabetes especially.

While it's school term my life exists as such:

4AM - Alarm gets hit for another 10minutes of snooze

4:20 - Pre training yogurt. Yep, every morning six days a week I have about 200-300g of yogurt.

5 - Roll out for cycling or drive to swimming

6:45 - Breakfast

7-8 - Wait for phone call regarding which school I may be going to that day. Sometime I get booked in advance, in which case, I can just get ready and go.

8:30 - Either school starts or I return to bed for a 2 hour sleep.

12-1 - Lunch

3 - Afternoon tea before training. Guess what, yogurt again!

4 - Afternoon training

6-6:30 - Dinner (yeah, dinner is cooked for me, but I do have to clean up afterwards as part of the deal)

7-8:30 - Clean up from dinner and try to put to rest all the silly little curiosities my head creates. This is usually solved by surfing the net for ridiculous amounts of time ploughing through race results and news sites for any skerrick of new information. 

8:30 - try not to let myself get distracted and go to bed.

That is literally it. If I'm not teaching, I might spend the day blogging, cleaning one of the 9 bikes at our house at the moment or wasting my life in the latest computer app/game I've discovered.

Now when it's school holidays, this all goes out the window. Just like the kids went nuts in Lord of the Flies as soon as they lost their institutions of civilisation, my consistency went out of the door too.

I was spared the cold morning starts and was able to ride once the sun came up. This also saw me having breakfast two or three hours later. It often meant, that because I felt full, I would have a smaller lunch than normal. After almost a week of this I cracked and cracked hard.

It has taken almost four years, but I can finally start to put my body through enough training that I actually have to start eating to assist my recovery. It has taken so long to bend my body back into the shape that it can handle training hard again, I just wasn't ready for it with my nutrition.

After four days of eating basically twice as much as usual for each meal, I was feeling good enough to push in training sessions without going into a completely fatigued state. I had kept training in the mean time, but more testing how much I could push, rather than going all in with my efforts.

That first day back I was stoked to post season bests for each leg, swimming, cycling and running. I even got through that killer 80k ride, 10k build run, more comfortably than before...and then I got sick. 

I don't know if it's just me being soft, my having a funny sinus system like my mum or subconsciously following what my mum does when she gets sick or if colds actually hit me harder, or even something to do with diabetics poor response to colds, but for what went through my girlfriend in two days, blew me apart for 4 and had me sleeping for about 16-18  hours.

The cold basically shifted my program around and gave me a forced recovery week, one week early. Starting monday I will be back at week one of a crucial six week training block, which will really need to get me up to a level where I can race professionally in Asia in a few months without making a complete fool of myself.

And that is why this week we have that episode like the one in Survivor where they recap then entire season so far, with never before seen footage. Basically as normality returns to my life, so will my training and so will the interestingly unique perspectives.

Next on Tri Being Juvenile:

• I detail some of my training partners, why they are brilliant and why I do all of my training by myself;
• I do a pictorial "One week of training in the life of" brought to you by my sponsors...which is why this will never happen &
• I do a revealing investigation into what happens when the coach is away and you're left with the assistant coach: