A bizarre training week. Travel, festival, illness and some logistical challenges. Tuesday was a holiday so I managed to do a hard 2-a-day run/bike block. But the second half of the week was difficult. First, the pool was closed for 3 straight days for Diwali – so no swim midweek! Then I traveled to Chennai for work on Thursday, returning late on Friday, so a little tired and sleep deprived. But that wasn’t the half of it.

We were scheduled to go to Hyderabad for the Hyderabad Tri (Olympic distance) and spend a weekend with friends there. A few hours after I returned from Chennai, and just a couple of hours before we were scheduled to fly to Hyderabad, I had a scary experience. I had the mightiest of headaches (and I rarely experience headaches except for the odd hot-day run or a hangover). The headache was so severe it woke me up! And then I started to feel nauseous. I was feeling so unwell, we ended up not leaving on our morning flight (bye, bye tickets). A little later in the day, I was still unwell, had a ‘hangover’ headache and general uneasiness. But I didn’t want to waste the planned weekend. So we took a later flight. All this meant that I wasn’t remotely well enough to train on Saturday, so I missed a second session (a hard run this time). As we went to Hyderabad, I still hadn’t made up my mind whether I would do the triathlon the next day.

Late on Saturday evening, I decided to give it a go. So, I went to the bike shop to rent a bike. Wasn’t a very good bike, but was functional and I wasn’t planning to ‘race’ as much as use the event as a good, hard training session with some transition practice.

Come race day (Sunday), my event was scheduled to start at 8.30am with a pool swim of 1500m. We ended up waiting in the sun to swim our turn – and by the time I started, it was 9.25 (and nearly 30 deg!). Scorcher.

The bike leg wasn’t enjoyable either since there were no road closures and we rode with traffic, the heat and the wind. And with a heavy bike, a size too small, that didn’t run very smoothly, it was a challenging ride. But since I was looking for a hard training session, it certainly served that purpose.

The run leg began at around 11.30 for me – a high noon 10km on a hot, hilly course wasn’t easy. But once again, if I were to look at it as a good training session for hot 70.3 races like Goa and Colombo, it certainly served the purpose. Had a reasonably strong run under the circumstances and finished in about 53 mins.

I scraped together a 500TSS week which wasn’t too bad given all the logistical challenges, the sudden illness and the travel.

On to the next (hopefully more routine) week.