Full week with two blo... ...cks and a kcolb

Seven days since the last entry? Already?

Well, that actually describes quite well the week I've had. Too many "yes" answers after the year-end at the office finally got a hold of me, and the work-calendar was topped up already on monday. Thus the amount of unopened e-mails grew steady even if I did my best to handle them swiftly. Mother- and father-in-law paid a week-long visit to us, which did not add the available free-time at home, and some endurance training was also scheduled. I can tell that altogether this was a pretty challenging and exhausting week :)

The positive point in having my wife's parents visit us meant that we didn't have to flip coin with my wife for which one of us got the odd hours and which the nice hours for training sessions. As long as we kept the fridge and kitchen cabinets uploaded, we could pretty much do what we wanted, as the grandparents were apparently much more enjoyable company to our little-one than mommy or daddy.

To get all the designated hours to happen, I had some experimental combinations with training sessions. The need for this was originally caused by a monday evening with too much of snow-plowing to have time for the evening run, so I had to squeeze it to the following days, and thus also change the original structure of the trainig week. So, on Tuesday I had my first ever blo... ...ck. Meaning an one-hour spinning session in the morning, a full day at work, and a 8 km run as soon as I got home from work. Ok, most of you probably think that's not a real block-exercise, and I admit that I'm stretching the term a bit, but that's why it's called blo... ...ck. And it was a first weekday ever that I've spinned and ran on the same day. Had no problems falling asleep that evening :D

Wednesday was normal with a morning swim and an evening 12 km run, but then I noticed that if I wanted to have an easier friday to give my body some time for recovery before the Saturdays longer session, I had to do anothe blo... ...ck on Thursday. And this would have to have a 12 km run as otherwise the hours would not be filled. Said and done, and probably as a consequence from this, Thursday evening saw me going to bed already on 9:20 pm. At this point my father-in-law decided to ask if I was punishing myself for something really serious or just simply insane. I remember being very tired and murmuring something about the next summer and the nationals... To which he said that I was too old anyway so why bother, after which I decided not to share my thoughts with him and left for upstairs to get some sleep in.

Friday had a normal morning-swim with no other training scheduled for the evening, so we could actually spend some time with the in-laws also. I think they thought that I had had second thoughts about the training and all after the last evening conversations, and changed my plans. How wrong they were ;)

On saturday, in-laws on their home-journey, I decided to do a real block-exercise. But as the temperature was about -3 celsius outside, I thought it would be insane to first spin for an hour, and then, all sweatty, go outdoors for a run. So I interchanged their places, and had the run first (12 km/ 56 minutes) and a transition at home, and a spin for an hour. So actually, I did a kcolb-exercise :D

As a summary of the training-week, the experiments with the block variations were interesting, and the results quite positive. I noticed I'm able to do two excercises per day (also other than swim & something), and that I can recover from them to be able to still train normally the rest of the week. Promising beginning, especially as the future weekly training-hours will require some artistic approach to get the fit the already tight schedule.

Train smart everyone, and also if the odds seem to be against you, be bold and creative, You'll make it happen somehow :)