6 Foot or IM?

I'm still agonising over whether to try to attempt both 6 Foot track and Ironman Australia this year. All sanity says I should just pick one or the other and throw my lot in. But I don't like being told I can't do something - plenty of people have done it before so it's definitely possible. And I'm not trying to break records at either one of them. The jury's still out...

This has meant that I've been doing both some longer bush running as well as plenty of riding lately. My bike kms have definitely been down on last year though. When I look at my training logs I've been averaging between 200 - 250km a week over the last couple of months (Sept - Dec), compared to 300- 350km over the same months last year. The reason is simple - my week is pretty much the same except that in the last few months of 2008 I was injured which meant I couldn't do any running, but it was ok to ride. So the only difference really was that my long Sunday run became a Sunday ride of about 80 - 100km over that period. Now it's back to a long run. You just can't fit everything in!

I have been happy with the additional running though. I've managed to do a whole bunch of Sydney Striders STAR runs over the last few months which I've really enjoyed and I'm sure have done my running a lot of good. I feel like I've also found a good balance of 3 quality days running per week (2 faster sessions with the HuRTS squad on Tues /Thurs, then the Sunday long run) which I feel has had a lot of positive results - less weekly sessions, but all of them quality, has decreased my leg-tiredness and kept me injury free. I've recently added a 4th run, just half an hour easy after my long bike on Saturday.

Anyway where does this leave me now? I've just ramped up the riding after Chrissy and did about 500km last week and hoping for the same this week, before I go back to work. I managed to do the Four Gorges ride solo last Wednesday morning (even throwing in an extra lap of Berowra to make it 5 gorges and 150km). Then I went and did it again with the Boundary guys in Saturday, backing up the day after the Beyond the Black Stump run. This time we did Galston, Berowra, Brooklyn and Bobbin Head. Then Michael suggested going further to Church Point and back via the beaches (where we met Marty which was a great coincidence) so that was another 155km.

At the Berowra ferry on my solo 5 gorges ride


It's all felt fine, except when I did a hard running session on Tuesday it's taken 2 days and my legs still haven't come good yet! Backing off today to try to recover them before the weekend.