Hi everyone! It's been a while since my last blog post, and I've been knuckling down and training hard over the winter in preparation for my final season as a Junior. Having finished my A-Levels last year, I opted to stay at home and undertake training full time to pursue my goals. This has meant I have had much more time than I have been used to to train, recover, and fit in all the other things that go along with training like stretching. This has made a huge difference and has meant I have been able to go into training sessions fresher and better recovered, and as such I have made some real improvements over the winter.
Early February saw my first race of the 2020 season (excluding XC races which I see as more tough training sessions), Chichester 10k. I was only doing 5km (to take advantage of the smoother pace more experienced runners would set in the first half of their 10k, and I was relishing the opportunity to see where my winter running training had left me. I was hoping for a sub 15 minute 5km, but I wasn't sure if this was possible for me. I went out with the goal of running in a group and feeling the pace instead of trying to stick to my own exact pace, and this seemed to work very well, with the first couple of km going by without too much strain and I was feeling comfortable. I saw my time at the 3km mark was 8:49, and despite not feeling too tired at this stage of the race, I was 11 seconds up on what I had expected to be running at this stage of the race, and so felt a little apprehension as to whether I had got caught up in the group's pace and gone out too hard. Nevertheless, I pushed on and dug really deep over the closing 2km, and came out with a time of 14:52, which I was immensely pleased with, considering I wasn't sure if I could run 15 minutes.
Next up for me in February was a week in Portugal with my club, Team Bodyworks XTC and the South East Triathlon Academy. This was an opportunity to escape the onslaught of storms closing in on the UK, and the consistent sunshine in the Algarve where we were training was a welcome blessing. Unfortunately, I had to manage my training carefully as I was managing a small niggle, but I was determined to enjoy my time in the sun despite this, and still managed to get in some quality volume-based training, and even a 400m freestyle time trial! Rounding off the 10 days in Portugal rather poorly, I had an unfortunate crash on the second last day, but fortunately it was not too damaging and, after taking the next couple of days slightly easier, I was back to training without too much disruption.
The season now draws nearer, and with only 5 weeks until my first race, the British Triathlon Performance Assessments, I am extremely eager to get stuck into some races and see what I can do after a very strong block of winter training!
Thanks for reading,
Noah x