Richard Allen’s Comeback Training Blog- July
As you may know I retired from professional triathlon at the end of 2006 due to injury and the fact that I had quite simply had enough. This was the end of a 15 year career that saw me win 9 British Elite Titles, the London Triathlon and Ironman 70.3 UK amongst other things. I was happy be retired and doing other activities. I completely stopped swim and cycle training but continued to run and stay fit. The coaching and consultancy company took over as my main focus and is now well established at www.richardallenfitness.com
Sometimes things happy in ones life that make you change direction completely. A few months ago a young girls called Ellis Clarke passed away from cancer. She had her whole life ahead of her. Two years ago my partner’s mother died of cancer and 15 years ago my Granny had cancer. The simple fact is that cancer touches us all.
When Ellis passed away aged just 16 it made me firstly think ‘God I am lucky to be alive’ and ‘God I am lucky to have a talent in sport’. It then made me think that being alive and having this talent in triathlon I could actually do some good by using my talent to raise money and awareness for cancer. So I will be making a full comeback to professional triathlon racing in 2009. I will not only be raising money for the Ellis Clarke Foundation but racing for the memory of everyone I know who has had cancer. The coaching will continue as normal but at least my athletes will know that I am going through the same pain that they are going through in training! I will be following the same programme system, just doing more of it.
I am currently doing 9 sessions per week (3 swim, 3 bike, 3 run) and have been doing so from the beginning of July when I started training again. I will build up to normal professional training (approx 12-15 sessions or 25 hours/week) over the winter and will then target a few major races in 2009 to really race at my best. My main goal is likely to be the World Ironman 70.3 Championships in Florida and I will have to qualify for this through another Ironman 70.3 event. I also hope to do some of the major Olympic distance events in the Uk with the simple aim of raising awareness and getting exposure.
The road back to the top will be difficult I know, however training has been going far better than I could have ever hoped for in the 1st month. Progress has been fast because I am so motivated and am physically so fresh. Because I am largely starting from scratch I have been able to improve on my all round technique which will lead to improved performance. I am finding this particularly in the swim where I have improved my technique to already be swimming quite fast on not much training. I have basically been doing 2 longer, easy sessions and one harder, race pace interval session per week in each disciplin. What I am finding is that I have not lost the endurance at all and can manage this fine, I have lost the strength, power and speed. So this is what I will work on over the next few months. I think it should come back fairly quickly though.
So the aim of this blog from now on is to chart my progress back from retirement and no serious training at all to hopefully being in shape to win again in 2009. I will let you know how I am feeling, what I have specifically been working on and I will show you some of my training sessions in detail.
To start with here is the bike turbo session I did this morning (05/08/2008) as my hard interval session for the week. Man it hurt!!!-
Warm up- 5mins@100 heart rate/ 5mins@120hr.
Main set- 10 x (2mins@160-170hr/ 2mins@120hr).
Cool down- 12mins@100hr.
Total- 60mins.
Richard Allen is back!
