27 days later...

So it has been almost 4 weeks since I've arrived in Brisbane. I'm loving it so far! I'm getting used to the sunlight coming through my window blinds at about 4.30am. Most of the days, I'm in bed by 9pm so I'm still getting plenty of sleep. It's nice and sunny on most days with a humidity of around 75%. Not quite as humid as Malaysia but enough to have you sweating buckets after a 30 minute workout. Not a bad place to be to be preparing for races in the tropics.

I've had 3 weeks of work + training routine now. Actually, now I really welcome the early morning sessions. Gives me ample time to get to work on time. My office is located about 20kms south from where I currently stay. The journey is pretty smooth as I go against main traffic during peak hours. At work, I'm still getting my head around things and I'm learning something new each day. Slowly but surely.

One thing that isn't going slow are the club training sessions. The distance covered in the swim sessions are shorter than what I normally swim but with plenty of speedwork. Also, swimming with others does give extra motivation, forcing me to work harder. Something I've not done for the past couple of years and I think I've gotten complacent with my swimming, resulting in slower swim times lately.

Where I'm at every Tuesday 5.30am. And there's an earlier session at 4.30am! But I'd like the extra sleep!

The Tuesday track sessions are great and so are the Thursday tempo run sessions. Both involved running in laps, something which I found mentally challenging at first but now I welcome it as a good check of my progress each lap. We did a 5km time trial at the track this week. My Garmin measured each 400m lap to be slightly longer, by about 20m or so. So I knew I had to work a bit harder to meet my target for the official results.

Just met my minimum target of sub 20 minutes. Not great but good enough for now.

We did a cycling time trial too for 20km around the Murrarie bike tracks. No, not the velodrome type - much to my relief! But on concrete road, made specially for bikes, how cool is that! It was about 1.4km long, so we had to go through it 14 times. I'm not that great at corners, so that slowed me down a bit. Speaking of corners, I got told off a few times today when riding with the faster group (I've been joining the slower group the last 2 Saturdays). I get really edgy each time we come to a roundabout at high speed and tend to cross over my pace line. Something I need to learn and there is no short cut, just keep on practising.

It's been raining these few days, and today too in the late morning. I was at the back of the ride group when I had a flat. I yelled out but the group didn't hear. No matter, I took my time to fix it but I pinched the spare tube and used up all my CO2 canisters. The culprit was a sharp twig which I later pulled out. Luckily, a cyclist passing by gave me his spare tube and canister. I can't be any more grateful, otherwise it would have been an expensive ride home in the taxi! The rain came in the remaining 20kms home and I took a few shelter stops when it got too heavy and managed to get home safely with the help of Google maps!

Li-Ann arrives tomorrow and I can't wait to see her! It's been about 5 weeks since we've been apart. I better do a bit of tidying up before she arrives...