2022 an update of life…
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Probably pre-covid being the last scribble… a lot a has changed since then. Both in my sporting and personal endeavours. A couple of personal highlights being the completion of my undergrad and oddly covid. I went back to Jersey for the covid period, it was the first time in years that the whole family had been together and to go one further locked down together in the house. It was intense at times as I’m sure you all can relate. We all lost our marbles a little bit… I even died my hair ginger (pic below). That being said I counted my blessings and made the most of it. Not to mention the fantastic opportunity to knuckle down and get some good consistent training done with no distraction.
2021 saw the first elite triathlon competitions in 18 months. It was an odd year for me. I island ‘hopped’ some 4000 miles across the Atlantic to the white beaches of Barbados where I spent 3.5 months building the winter foundations. I was fortunately training alongside good friend, local boy & training partner Matthew Wright. We banked some great volume before heading back to the Diff to join the remainder of the NTPCW training group. The season kicked off fairly prompt after our return with the first race block being fast upon us. This consisted of Llanelli Super series, Poland European cup & Portugal European cup. My form entering these events was arguably the highest we’d seen to date. In sync with previous seasons we saw a strong performance throughout swim & bike and then a fall off on the run and to be honest this was the theme for the entire 2021 season. Rounding out the year with some better results I was ready to cut the season off and get my head down for the last big winter before 2022 Commonwealth Games.
Now that’s the last 2 years summarised into two small paragraphs lets crack on with the now….
Here I am sat on my easy jet flight home from a 3.5 week camp in the Algarve. An accumulation of over 90hrs of aerobic training (excluding gym). For the stat nerds that can be broken down into roughly 225k of running, 1250k of riding & 80k of swimming. The idea of the camp: to move our normal program to somewhere sunnier and warmer with the personal inclusion of 3 extra aerobic hours on my normal weekly volume. The point of this you ask? The long answer would be aiming for the goal of 10,000hrs over 10 years broken in to 1000hrs / year. Of current I sit at 1048hrs for the last 365 days. This of course excludes gym because there are no CV physiological gains to be made shifting tin 😉 Don’t get me wrong, gym is crucial in a program for certain individuals… including myself. The short answer would be the 2022 season and in particular the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham come July.
2022 see’s a change in training philosophy to my weekly program. I sat down with my coach Luke in October and spent a good hour ranting about how fed up I am of being a shit runner. It was becoming demoralising and I was seeing very little gains in my race results & physiological run data. I stressed something needed to change. Since then we got to work on figuring where it could be going wrong. We noticed my body was super aerobic. My lactic when running threshold was 1.4mmol. Majority of the literature suggests the threshold to sit between 3-4mmol. My LT1 (first lactic turn point) & LT2 (threshold) only had 1kph difference & the LT2 was not much slower than my VO2. After liaising with the physiologist, physio & S&C coach it was decided I would adopt a more VO2 / speed work approach. This in return would pull my ceiling up and shift the whole lactic curve to the right and return make me quicker. In addition to this, it was obvious we needed to improve the biomechanics of my run gate. In particular increase in cadence & ground contact reactivity. We are now 2.5 months into the new program and already starting to visually see clear improvements. The plan for the season is still not yet 100% decided due to uncertainty around what start lists I can get myself on to however I hope to be on a European start line very soon. In the meantime I continue to train and improve myself daily. I will look to do a more regular blogs with more detail around the physiology & data of my training leading into the Commies come July.
As always, thanks for reading. See you next time!
In the meanwhile, I’ll leave you with this little beauty of Weddie Febb
Ollie Turner - Triathlete 