I’ve seen a plethora of articles lately highlighting the need for and importance of quality sleep for endurance athletes. This is definitely the biggest challenge I’m facing in my training, despite the fact that the benefits and likewise the impact of a lack of quality sleep are well known. One example is this recent article, showing that lack of sleep leads to:
- increased levels of cortisol (a stress hormone),
- decreased activity of human growth hormone
- decreased glycogen synthesis (glycogen is stored energy in muscles).
- Glucose metabolism (main source of energy) slows by as much as 30 to 40 percent
Finding the balance is really tough. Meeting my sleep needs, training needs and father duties will be tough. I think what it will take is a really close monitoring of my obs to ensure that I’m not overtraining, or more importantly pushing my body too hard. It will be a case of recording my pulse (HR) and most likely toning down the intensity of most of my scheduled sessions.
It’s not ideal and will impact performance but I think to be realistic I need to view this season as a base builder and to gain experience and prepare me for future seasons while still pushing myself to see what I can do. With this lens it makes it more realistic and gives me achievable goals.
Today’s session
It was swim day today and I was stoked with my session. My standard 500m warm up set (150m/100m/50m followed by 4x50m drills) is really pleasant and nice now. From there it was straight into the main body – 1000m straight. This was the longest I’m swum straight up in some time but felt really good and finished in just under 21 minutes, all in all not bad.
After that, with one minute rest it was in to 6x50m freestyle sprints. I was worried how I’d go after the endurance swim but I smashed it. I had to start every 1:05 and this gave me between 5 and 15 seconds rest. I finished the first five all around 50 seconds and the last one was 55 seconds. Not lightning speed but I felt strong. It was a good session. 1800m all up.
Tomorrow morning will be run day, just a short 7-8km easy pace, as much as I would love to do a speed session sensible is the key!
Discreet Triathlete 