hamstrung

I set myself up perfectly for a dismal weekend by going out too hard in the sprint sessions on Friday. See, it's good to have red hot blood, where you want to drive yourself and be competitive. It's not so good when you're pushing it and the engine is in need of a little maintenance, and then you break something. In my case, another little tear in the big hamstring muscle. It's the second time sleep deprivation rendered me dumb enough to push myself harder than I should have. And funnily enough, on the very sprint that I hurt myself, JP warned: "Now don't hurt yourselves."
I suppose I can count myself lucky it didn't happen earlier, for example on the track, where I felt like I was on the borderline of hurting myself.

So I passed up the triathlon, and since I had tri-bars on, couldn't do the cycle race either. Since it's the second tear in my hamstring (this time the right leg), I'm not going to push myself into the triathlon paradigm. In fact I'm not going to do another triathlon this year. I'm going to try to gradually strengthen my leg muscles through distance and gym, and build up speed (so will continue training with JP), but am going to focus on the cycling.

Got this advice from Alex:

Once you get up early to train, you will be tired enough at night to sleep. Its a matter of forcing yourself to get up early. And believe me its tough for at least two weeks, but once you are in the routine, its gets easier. Even if I sleep badly, I still force myself to get up. It pays off eventually.

Regarding a good training program: My view should be that you try and train Tuesday to Fri in the mornings. We usually rest Mondays. I would suggest for the first two weeks, you just want to do like 30-40km at an easy pace. Then try and do a longer one on Sat and Sun. I would keep intensity levels low for the first two weeks, just to build a bit of a base. After that we can go into some more specific training. We usually have a hard day on Tuesday (Threshold session) and Thursday (Hills) and then a steady Sat ride and easy Sun ride. Wed and Fri are easy and Fri especially very easy. Sun also long and slow. This way you should be doing 10-12 hours a week. Like I said, you should probably just do normal easy rides for the first two weeks and then I will give you specifics for the Tues and Thurs sessions.

So going to set myself up for a hard two weeks, probably be sleepy and irritable, but there, got to get through it.

Had a nice birthday at work. Got some melktert with a candle, plus a song and a balloon (that did a suspended animation thing for hours under an aircon).
Had dinner at 7onKelner, marred by the fact that we waited almost two hours for the food, and mine resembled prawns on slop rather than salmon with prawns as a sort of side dish. Yuck!
Had pleasant enough conversation with dad and Fransa. The rest of the evening was a non-event, and that set the tone for the rest of the weekend. Enjoyed Blood Diamond though.

Feel really inspired to get The Sunburnt Soul both published and filmed.
Tomorrow laps around Paul Kruger at 5am. No excuses.