Away from a routine, lots of extra food, traveling – training during the Christmas period is not as easy as it seems!
Christmas this year presented a few training problems, firstly my birthday is just before Christmas and my parents came to stay with me which meant more disruption to the usual routine. And then for Christmas we traveled interstate to spend it with my whole family in hot, tropical Queensland.
This worked out okay, and I managed to get a few quality run sessions in. The challenge was my brother lives essentially on the side of a mountain so any runs I did were automatically hill sessions! Some hills were so steep that I actually couldn’t run them, especially downhill and it did wonders to smash my quads and hammies.
The picture I’ve attached is of a sign about 2.5km into my first run and it wasn’t a lie! These hills kept going and going! Combined with the fact that it was 34C/93F and humidity was above 70%, this was one of the hardest runs I’d done in recent times.
As the elevation chart above shows, it was one serious climb with more than 360m climbing in a very short distance. When I got back home I was drenched in sweat and jumped straight in the pool to cool the legs down and kick out the lactic acid.
I stayed there for six days and managed to get in two runs, one ocean swim and a few pool swim sessions but am glad to be back home now and hit up some quality training – did a good bike session yesterday and planning on a run today. I hope you all had a great Christmas period and have managed to get all of your training in!
Discreet Triathlete 