Malaga training camp December 2009

Hi, when I was asked to write a blog for the web I thought I would keep a daily diary of my training week but soon realised that this would become very repetitive of swim-bike-run with eating and sleeping mixed in! So I thought it would be best would be to summarise a few highlights of my first BTF training camp in Malaga 2009!

So here goes, having been on the TriGold programme for ten weeks in Loughborough I was really looking forward to the camp, change of location, meeting other athletes and some good training in warm weather…… all lived up to expectations except the weather part which by the end of the week started to feel like I hadn’t left home!

Hotel was fab; pool, gym, running tracks, restaurant all within 30secs walk from my room. I t was great being able to just literally roll out of bed and focus on training with no other distractions.

Training out here has been challenging but also really enjoyable; clocking up a total of 20k in the pool, 365k on the bike and 65miles running in 8 days (yes Im still working in miles for running must be a runners thing!) We had some quality sessions including my first team time trial which admittedly didn’t start to smooth, but once got the hang of it we worked well as a team and I really got into it with a definite improvement the 2nd time round.

One of the toughest sessions Iv ever done in my life involved cycling up a mountain, not once but twice in the same session. Think we rode about 70k in 3hours in hellish conditions of wind and rain, not to mention experiencing my first crash as I skidded round a corner! Definately won’t be forgetting this ride in a hurry! Negatives aside, I took a great deal of confidence from this, think my mountain running had prepared me well (except the crash part!)

We also had some good run sessions up in the hills which made me feel a little bit more in my comfort zone!

The swims were pretty tough, added by the extreme heat and salty tasting pool, nevertheless the work got done and was awesome being able to swim with the full squad-just trying to hang onto their feet for as long as I could most of the time! Towards the end of the week I was starting to notice how few of us were actually left in sessions as a stomach bug had wiped out a third of camp, but luckily I survived the mini epidemic and made it to all the sessions!

The week ended with some fun and games of relays in the pool, my team consisted of Alistair Brownlee and Adam Bowden. We finished 3rd overall but note it is a good job Alistair can navigate in open water as he ended up in the wrong lane on one of the relays! On the last night we had some comedy awards and a brilliant video that Will Clarke had made of the week.

Last morning and myself and Holly Avil decided to get up for an early run – needless to say we will either be taking a phone/map/or someone else with us next time as we ended up totally lost at the opposite side of Anteguerra, using an abandoned hospital to phone for a taxi to take us to the hotel that we couldn’t remember the name of!! (bearing in mind we had only 40mins before we were leaving to the airport!!)

The end to a great week though and overall I have learnt so much from simple things like being able to pack a bike in a bag, to enduring torturous bike rides in the mountains. I have met some new friends and training partners and feel my confidence is growing in this new sport- a sport that I’m really enjoying with thanks to all the help of all the coaches and staff involved on the camp and back at home on my TriGold programme. So I’ll leave you with a quote that stuck with me at the start of this camp and that is; ‘making every day count, not counting the days’ and that’s what I intend to keep on doing.

So till next time,

Adios,

Katie.