The most important part of any sport comes before race day: the early morning training sessions, the hours behind the scenes spent in the gym/on the road and the dedication that each athlete puts in days, weeks and months before the day of the big event. Today I want to tell you about my three favourite training sessions that I do each week with UoN triathlon club.
1. Wednesday morning early swim, 6.30-8.30am
This is definitely my favourite session of the week, it's often hard to get out of bed for and I set many snooze alarms, starting from 5.15am to make sure I get out of bed and into the pool. But when I get there, even after a hard session, it's the best start to the day I could have. In this two hour session, we do a range of different things - drills to improve our technique, timed sessions to help us pace and longer distance sessions to build up our stamina and mileage. We regularly swim over 4km in these sessions. I say 'we' as the swimmers are divided into lanes according to their speed and although it's an individual effort, we all help each other with counting lengths and remembering the set.
2. Wednesday afternoon Wattbikes, 3-4pm
Actually, I don't particularly like this session as it always tires me out and leaves me wanting to crawl straight into bed afterwards but I believe it's really beneficial to my training. For those of you who don't know (and don't worry, I didn't know either until a month after using them), a Wattbike is a brand of exercise bike that is very, very clever. The computer can tell you your power output, energy output, speed, pace and pedalling technique. After a test to gauge our individual zones last semester, we now work in different 'zones' each week, building strength, resistance and pace. We usually listen to upbeat music and sometimes have disco lights on inside the training room.
3. Monday evening swim, 7.30-8.30pm
Although this swim session is only an hour long, it's a good start to the week and allows me to eat two dinners on a Monday (one before training and one after). Like in the Wednesday morning swim, we work on our technique, pace and strength in the water before 50 triathletes fight over the six showers afterwards! Swimming is my strongest discipline of the three, but from the beginning I was determined not to get complacent so attend both swimming sessions each week for personalised sets and advice from the coaches.
If you look at the training timetable, you will see there are over 14 hours of different training sessions each week that the club provides and I am just one of over a hundred members. Each triathlete has their own strengths, weaknesses, likes and dislikes when it comes to the three disciplines but there you have my top three training sessions each week (triathletes like to do things in threes).
The weekly training timetable includes swimming, cycling, running and yoga sessions across all UoN campuses.
Comment below with your favourite training session!
Author: Leona Hinds (10/03/2015)