Bring it on!

What a weekend! With the first race just one week away it was time to get in some final heavy and long sessions.
It all started on Friday. Having an 18 km track session with the olympic relay team was so inspiring.
I had planned to do my session in Leuven. Apparently I was sharing the track with the olympic 4x100m silver medal winner Elodie Ouadrouogo.

I just about caught a cold as she came flying past doing her 400m full out intervals. My intervals were a tad longer (5km warmup - 10x600m full out, 200m recovery - 5km cool down), but way over a tad slower...

Saturday saw a heavy 4km swim session., followed by a short 50km TT-pace ride. Could it be that I am finally getting somewhere in the water? There's still plenty of room for improvement, but in each case it seems I have shaved off 1'20" of my last year's 500m PR over winter. yiha...

Finished off the weekend today with a loong and windy 140km bike ride, followed by a short 8km race pace run. I decided to start the ride off head to wind, and ended up in Terneuzen.

From there I came flying back into Antwerp with the wind in the back! lovely!
This main course was followed by what I was hoping would be a short blast around ggw - to see there were about 7 or 8 snipes playing merry-go-round- tiny beats followed by reaches that were way out of proportion.
Of course there was also Gio having fun and getting still better in the moth. Looked nice.
As usual the first 2-3km running off the bike felt like my legs were cement filled. But getting better from there on, and finally finding the rythm somewhere in km 5, and the endorphins going full blast from km6 onwards!!
Bring it on!

carnival

What a beautiful day it was. Spring has finally arrived.
And what a funny day it was. Virtually every village I passed through was celebrating it's own little carnival parade.

Camp

I promised Jan I'd help him build his camp on his favourite spot behind the garage.
Oh we had so much fun - father and son.
So much fun I missed out on the planned traning session, and so much fun the boat trailer is now really the framework of camp. There won't be any travelling to regatta's soon then... at least not for a while and not with this trailer...

farmland

I must have seen every square meter of cropland and fields within a radius of 50 kilometers around our house over the past few months.
This sure is where the breed of the 'Flandrien' was raised. Open fields that are always a bit chilly; give a windy feel, even in merely 5 knots of wind; and roads with sticky clay on the surface which calls for powerful legs even in tailwinds; and skies with dramatic views of the most spectacular clouds to finish it all off.
Aargh... gotta love it.


On the way home I met my old friend Gio... fiddling around his boat - making it faster, as usual....

Benicasim

hmm...I haven't updated for a while. So what have I been up to really.
Last week saw me doing the swim-bike-run combo for about 26hrs.
At times my legs were so sour they hurt to touch... ouch!!!
We shared both the hotel and he roads with quite some rock stars - Belgian ladies Elite Champion Ilse thought us the fine art of riding together in the breakaway., while the Belgian Junior Cycling team was chasing....
Crosscup runner Kurt paced us along both the beach- and hilly runs. And swimming specialist Johan kicked my ass as if I was going nowhere. Luckily the 25m pool was just 1.50m deep, or I might have sunk. The swims really felt like my arms would fall off. Towards the end of the week standing at the edge of that pool made my already sore arms hurt just by looking at it.
Anyhow, training camps are for one thing and one thing only... to work so hard that you are faced with a couple choices: die (not really but it feels like you are slowly facing death), give up and go home, or make it out alive & end up better off than where you started.
A promise I made to myself was that no matter how bad I was hurting I had to suck it up... and that's just what I did.
Luckily I didn't go there for sailing.During the whole training camp, merely one or two days proved breezy enough to qualify as sailing wheather...