08 Tuesday May 2012
Posted in race schedule
Since I felt like my racing skills are a bit rusty I decided to add another race in my schedule. On Saturday I’ll start at Austrian 1/2 Iron triathlon in a small town called Mureck, not far away from Graz.
This will be 3rd year in a row that I race there. So far I have two second places. Third time lucky?
25 Wednesday Apr 2012
Posted in race schedule
My season starts in a few days with TriStar Cannes.
Race format with relatively short swim and challenging bike course should suit me well so I hope I’ll get a decent result.
TriStar Cannes bike profile
Everything seems possible during offseason and first race usually takes you back into reality and sets performance borders for the upcoming year. We’ll see where are those borders this season.
04 Wednesday Apr 2012
Posted in training
Tags
14 days
64 hours of training
41 km of swimming
1080 km of cycling
217 km of running
10 kg of chocolate (approximately)
Training camp is over and now it’s time to get back into my normal daily routine. Overall the camp went well except for a few setbacks caused by minor injuries and that crash I wrote about last time. The volume was not much different than my usual volume. The main difference was that I was a lot less busy in between sessions.
Alps are still full of snow, so unfortunately we avoided riding in that direction. We had one big ride through the mountains and the scenery was breathtaking.
I’m not sure in what kind of shape I’m in but race season is less than month away so I wont have to wait too long to find out.
26 Monday Mar 2012
Posted in training, Uncategorized
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First week of training camp is already behind me. Since the weather got better Team TBB Germany decided to have the training camp in their headquarters in Bad Tölz. The weather didn’t look so good on my first day here (it was snowing), but then it got a lot better.
I’m already getting famous here. After only 5 days I was featured in two blogs on team TBB website and in local newspapers. Unfortunately that was not because of my good looks or because I’m so smart. It’s always easier to get in the media through the bad news and that was the case this time.
On Thursday afternoon me, my coach Joseph and Yves had another 30′/30′/30′ (medium/moderate/mad) bike session. At the beginning everybody was making excuses about their heavy legs, but sometimes when that’s the case you end up riding faster. Probably so you can get into a bed sooner. That was certainly the case this time. We were having an excellent ride and just as we were about to enter the „mad“ interval a black car entered the road from the side street and stopped half way into the crossing. I managed to avoid it but then I heard the sound of carbon hitting the road behind me. Never a pleasant sound to hear.
First thought after I saw them on the ground was: „Get up guys, we have to finish this before it get’s dark“. But after a couple of seconds I wasn’t thinking about training any more. Booth of them didn’t look like they are in a hurry to get up. A lot of people gathered around, the police came and then also the ambulance that took them to the hospital. I called Diana and we packed the bikes and went to the hospital. Fortunately booth of them avoided serious injuries.
Later, when we were driving back from the hospital I realized how lucky I was. Certainly I was lucky to avoid the crash, but I also forgot to buy travel insurance that covers medical costs when I’m abroad. If something happened to me and they took me to the hospital I think I’d have to tell them to shoot me. Those medical bills can be huge if you don’t have insurance. I bought it online that night.
my leg fell off and we had to glue it together
Anyhow, second week of the camp is under way. Training is going well. I had a niggle in my leg that forced me to cut short a couple of runs, but seems like that’s gone now and I can run normally again.
16 Friday Mar 2012
Posted in training
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After some moderate but consistent training weeks during winter the real training began this week. Very interesting week. A day with 3 tempo bike rides, another day with 42km of running, one with more than 200km on the bike… All this will add up to more than 30h. It would be more than 35h if there was not a long trip scheduled for Sunday.
I’ll spend next two weeks in training camp with German part of team TBB. I guess this week was just an introduction to the real work. After a lot of time spent on the trainer and in the pool over the winter I’m glad that I’m finally able to do some serious training outside.
The winter went well. I had some knee troubles at the start of the year and after that went away there were no further injuries. Most of my injuries happen in the cold part of the year so I’m happy that I went trough this period in one piece. I think I’m already in a good shape and hope it will only get better from here.
24 Friday Feb 2012
Posted in race schedule, triathlon, Uncategorized
There are still plenty of question marks about my race season but I have rough schedule now.
I planned to go to training camp to Gran Canaria with German part of team TBB and then do Challenge Fuerteventura as a season opener. Seems like that’s not going to happen. We’ll have the training camp either in south France or in Istria, here in Croatia. It’s too expensive to go to Fuerteventura just for a race so I’ll have to pick another one. Italians have their national championship at half-Ironman distance on May 1st and that’s one of the options.
At the end of May I’ll probably do TriStar race in Split.
After that I planned two Challenge races in Germany that I did last year, Kraichgau and Roth. Few days ago I heard the news that ETU and Challenge reached an agreement and booth races will also be ETU European Championship races. That will probably make professional race even more competitive. It won’t change age group race as booth races have been sold out. This could mean that ITU is going to abandon their O2 and O3 formats and recognize Ironman and half-Ironman as official distances.
After Roth I’ll probably do one of the hardest Ironman distance races on the planet, Embrunman. The bike course is a little longer than usual 180km and has 5000m of ascent. This race deserves another post.
Embrunman bike course profile
The rest of the season depends on the outcome of the first part. I may go overseas to do a late season Ironman in US. We’ll see…
31 Tuesday Jan 2012
Posted in training
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With the begin of New Year training has gotten a bit more serious. For now I’m spending most of my training time in the pool. I have almost 160k of swimming this year with a lot of intensity. Unfortunately the only result so far increased fatigue. This year I’m swimming less with paddles and instead of that I have some longer butterfly sets once per week. Until one month ago I never swam more than 50m butterfly in one piece and last week I did 2x500m.
Almost all bike rides have been on the trainer. I could classify them by the number of towels I need for a session. There have been 2 sessions with three towels, one with two and one with one towel per week. Looking at the weather forecast I think I’ll stay on the trainer for a little longer. On a positive side there’s only one month of winter left.
Running has been limited because of knee injury. Once the pain withdrew the other knee started hurting at the same place. I tried to find the cause and checked seat height on all my bikes. Apparently, seat was a couple of centimeters to low on my MTB. I use it mostly for commuting so I never paid attention to it. But those commutes can add up to 130km per week, so it’s not insignificant. Fortunately, booth knees are fine now and I’m getting back into full training.
I don’t have race schedule yet. I have to decide if I’ll buy Ironman PRO licence or race other races.
08 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted in training
01 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted in training
Swim: 318h, 1136km
Bike: 602h, 17212km (58h on a trainer)
Run: 206h, 2853km
Total: 1127h (almost 47 days)
Last year was the most successful year so far for me. During the year I’ve spent 47 days training which probably helped. I hope the next one will be even better.
I’d like to thank everyone that helped me during the year and I’d also like to wish happy and successful 2012 to all my readers.
25 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in training
Tags
fog, forest, low clouds, mountain bike, mountains, nature, training
The sun is gone and we probably won’t see much of it until spring in this part of the world. While I was growing up in the sunny south I never realized why are people living in continental part of the country so happy when the forecast calls for a bit of sun. After my first winter here I got an answer. Fog sets in around November and there’s not much sun until March. Besides the fog, last week the weather got a lot colder as well. That’s why I decided to use mountain bike for my training rides during weekend. Hoping I’ll see some sun if I go high enough I went riding in the hills.
For a long time it looked like this
But then the sky changed its colour
It was -3C at the bottom and +7C at the top (1000m above see level)
After some riding above clouds it was time to head back into this
I don’t know who placed the concept of heaven somewhere above the clouds, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that person lived in a place like this.
