January Training

January was a funny month.

Over Christmas I was looking to neither lose nor gain weight - particularly difficult at that time of year.

I did quite well and came into January approx 3lbs heavier than when I went home for Christmas. This is still much heavier than I'd like to be "race weight" or more appropriately "Wedding Weight" but it was a decent starting point for 2013.

Swimming: I went swimming twice in the first week of January, once when it snowed and then three days out of the last four in January. The aim is to go twice a week and six times isn't so bad. I have also swapped from doing pre-work (always difficult to get out of bed!) to late night swimming which I find much more enjoyable. I've also bitten the bullet and joined the gym so I don't have to pay £3.30 every time to go - much more cost effective.

Each time I went my main aim was to get 400m done, and then some casual lengths afterwards, whilst working on my front crawl. I'm now at the stage where I can fairly comfortably swim half of the 16 lengths front crawl (alternate with breaststroke) and have my 400m time down to around 12 minutes.

Total Time: 3hours
Distance: 3000m (approx)

Cycling: Due to the snow it was mighty hard to get any read miles in this month. I did 60km at the beginning of the month (6th) which was our normal ride with added most of the Lincoln triathlon course thrown in and then after the snow had passed a short 28km ride in the windiest conditions I've ever ridden in. I managed one evening on the turbo (oops!) and one stint on the bike in the gym. A fairly poor month on the bike, but I'm not overly disheartened by this.

Total Time: 5 hours
Distance: 88km on roads plus approx 20km on turbo/exercise bike.

Running: I had probably my best month ever running! I went out running on a total of 5 days, as well as 1 day at the gym. That's almost twice a week. It's not much in the grand scheme of things but as I historically don't get on great with running, I'm really pleased - especially as there was a weeks break or so because of the snow.

I started off the month doing some 10k training using the Adidas MiCoach app. This took me out 4 times in the first week and a bit of the month doing various speed zones for timed intervals which was a good way of training and will probably go back to it in the future. I even got my fiancée out with me once! Once the weather hit that training stopped and I stayed indoors for a week or so. Then last Saturday I went out and did 5km on the snowy paths and nearly stacked it a few times, but came in with a respectable 25:15 which I was pleased with because of the weather and my general lack of running in the previous weeks. Then I got in the gym once this week and did 5km at a casual pace in just under half an hour.

Targets for next month will be getting out regularly or doing time in the gym and getting back to running 5km comfortably in under 25mins, before ramping up the distance for the 10k in April.

Total Time: 3 hours 15 minutes
Distance: 23.5km on roads plus 5km in the gym. 

All in all, not a bad start to the year. Much more organised than I've ever been and hopefully I've put down a good basis for the rest of the year.

Thanks for reading :o)