Eight(ish) weeks to Toral de los Vados

[Riazor Blue]

Things have fallen off the wagon. Not much, just the odd garden tool here and there, a sack of potatoes and such like. The wheels are still intact.

It's been a bit of an enforced easy week this week due to two things. One, stupidly, my fault. The other the fault of Andalucia.

Firstly, my bloomer. Things were going really well, no problems with the training whatsoever. Then I changed over the display on the HRM to sho percentage of HRmax instead of PPM. No problem except that I found it easier reading off PPM so I changed things back.

Except I didn't. I actually changed things to a different setting, HRaverage. Of course, me expecting to see my actual heart rate displayed while running, decided that I was slacking and needed to raise the pace a bit. So in week 10 I ran a bit too fast. By Saturday, I had begun to notice things, like achy legs, especially the quads and an odd little ache in one calf. I was supposed to be doing a 20 miler on the Sunday and that's where Andalucia comes in.

There was Feria de Abril marquee set up in the gardens in front of the casino here. The Feria de Abril is a week long endurance event in Seville which involves eating, drinking, dancing, singing and dressing up in funny Andaluz costumes. I have to say that from what I've heared, it does need lots of training and huge amounts of stamina to go the course. We had a cut down mini weekend version with one marquee sponsered by 'La Gitana' manzanilla wine. There was the usual drinking, eating, women dressed up as Spanish dolls, line dancing to flamenco style music. Something quite strange to us 'up north' where the bagpipe is king. I got into the spirit of things with a glass of manzanilla and a few spicy olives. The deep fried squid cubes ere not bad at all, I have to say, but I think they were my downfall as Sunday morning was spent on the loo with the squirts. So there was my 20 miler out the window.

Monday saw little improvement in matters so there was nothing there either. I looked on the bright side, hat my legs were getting a bit of time to recover (although at that moment I still had'nt sussed the HRM problem). On Tuesday I went for an 8km trot - not the trots, you understand, they had cleared up. To my surprise the legs felt a tad sore afterwards. So rest on Wednesday then 10 km on Thursday and for the first time in a couple of weeks I activated the zone alarm on the HRM and found it chirping at me when the watch only showed 146 bpm. It was then I realised that the thing has an HRave display. So I changed that and dropped my pace dramatically.

Today, Friday saw 8 easy kilometers in preparation for a half marathon on Sunday.

I'll be back with Bob on Monday.