70.3 Training Update Week 3 - Every day's a schoolday!

Three weeks in and I'm finally starting to feel power in my legs. This was preceded by a lot of creaking, tightness, and general pain. After a successful week 1, my knees started to hurt when I ran, both on the outside and directly under the patella. After some googling and conversations with my local gym instructor, I quickly realised that I had lots of weakness in my lower back, glutes, and quads, which led to bad tracking of the knee and two well-known conditions amongst runners - Runner's Knee and IT Band issues. I found a really good series of videos on Runner's World by Dr. Jordan Metzl, here's the one on runner's knee. So, nothing serious and certainly not something that would prevent me from continuing, but definitely a lot of strengthening work to be done before I could run again. 

So, I spent a lot of the last two weeks focusing on both strength and flexibility. These two videos have been key to those two weeks and I plan to continue to use them througout the next five months:

10-minute strength workout 
10-minute foam roller recovery  

Those two, combined with lots of jump squats (3x15) and 3 mins of planks have made up my home strength and flexibility work, and I have combined that with my regular friday Tabata class at the gym. 

So, having improved my strength and flexibility, I eventually got back on the bike and did a 20km ride over the weekend, as well as a 3km run this morning.

My plan has always been to use the first six weeks of my training to get to week 1 of the 16-week plan  which brings me up to the race. By then, I need to be doing a 10km run on the weekend as well as a 30km bike and a 1km swim. To get from where I am to the 10km run, I plan to run 3 times a week, doing 3km 4km and 3km in week one, and gradually increasing the distance each week by 10%. I am terrified of injury so hopeful that this will get me there!

Gratitude
It's not easy fitting training in when kids and life get in the way...this week my husband was away for the weekend at his friend's 40th. So, I'm grateful that my 5-year-old is actually interested in exercise and doesn't mind me hijacking our playtime together with a trip to the garage to work out together while the toddler napped. She patiently skips and does her yoga, while I do jump squats and sweat ;-). 
Also grateful that my husband doesn't mind me ditching him and the kids as soon as he walks in the door with a hangover, so that i can get a bike ride in before the sun goes down!