My time in Wellington has come to an end, a move within my career means a move from location, but how great has Wellington been to train in…
Cycling – Wellington is windy no doubt about it, this means it is great for training on a bike. A ‘head-wind’ will give you strength training, a back wind always seems to turn and become a head wind, side winds, well they might as well be head winds in Wellington. My choice of location to train with primarily being based in Upper Hutt is Whitemans Valley. If you went up Blue Mountains Hill at the Silverstream end it seemed to go forever and would give your thighs a good work out, and then give you a gradual downhill towards Upper Hutt. If you tackled Whitemans Valley from the Upper Hutt end, you obviously get the opposite effect with a gradual uphill, then you can go screaming downhill into Silverstream, which is good practice for sharp bends at speed, but hair raising when it rains. Of course things called cars are problematic, but I always found most drivers courteous and would allow you to train and give way to you (single file cycling, not knobs bunch cycling holding up cars).
Swimming – I generally used H2O Xtreme pool in Upper Hutt, which is an excellent 25 metre pool with 8 lanes. Opens at 5:30 AM (0530 hours), so you can get those long sessions in before work that Coach Ray smashes you with when upping the ante. The most I did in one go was when Coach Ray was training me for Ultraman Australia, he had me do 8.5 Km’s in it, which was 340 lengths (I think the lifeguards thought I had lost my marbles and gone nuts). I would also train in Scorching Bay for sea swim training or in town for the Splash and Dash events I did. It was always guaranteed to be rough, which I didn’t always like but knew it was great for the Ultraman Australia 10 Km Ocean Swim.
Running – I have 3 routes I run on, sometimes multiple laps of the fitness track at work, particularly if Coach Ray has me doing Time Trials. The other options I would run on is a loop around Silverstream which would normally be about 40 minutes, another is a loop around Upper Hutt being about 1 hour. Of course if Coach Ray has me doing long sessions, I would combine both. Unfortunately, when it comes to injuries, it’s normally running that is the cause, but Coach Ray is very good at managing that.
So from here I move to Manawatu and will see what I can find it that location to beast me… Take care team, regards John Humphries (Aka Humps, Aka UltraHumps).
UltraHumps will be writing weekly blogs as he continues his journey and raising funds for Charitable causes.
Read Humps article from last week here:
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