A "typical" day

It is a question I am asked regularly and still struggle to answer; when training for a multidiscipline event such as Modern Pentathlon no two training days are identical. To help me describe a typical day I have taken a snapshot from my training diary. Admittedly this is one of my tougher and more action packed days as I have to say I thought it would look more impressive.

I have chosen a fairly typical Monday in February when training at the National Performance centre in Bath. This day involved five separate training sessions and was actually free from the usual Physio or massage appointment. I was well recovered at the start of this week after a fairly light weekend in which I just ran on both days but had no competitions or much travelling to do.

I always start my day with a bowl of porridge usually topped with fruit and nuts to add nutrients, washed down with a cup of green tea. I used to be incredibly poor at digesting my breakfast before training but my love of sleep is too strong and now I get up as late as possible.

I drove the ten minutes to the University where the training centre is based and where I stayed for the majority of the day. Having met up with a few of my fellow athletes we set out on a steady 40-50 minute run which as usual we used as a great chance to catch up on the weekend gossip. It was straight into the pool at 10.30am for about a 90' session in which we covered close to 4 kilometres involving a lot of arms only work.

After an aerobic based morning I am usually pretty hungry and I am not alone. The whole squad will jump out of the pool and head up to the cafe on site for a healthy yet substantial lunch. For me this usually consists of a chicken breast and various salads including carbohydrates such as couscous or pasta. Lunch for the squad is usually pretty social and it is time to mix with a few of the athletes from other sports that also train at the university. If I do not have time to head home I regularly pop into the athletes lounge area and put my head down on the sofa for a power nap, the combination of swimming followed by lunch seems to be the perfect recipe for sleep.

This particular Monday involved a meeting unrelated to Pentathlon just a short distance from Bath, however it tied in well as I had to drive in that direction for my riding lesson. Riding is the one sport for which we have to travel, it is only a short 30' drive to the venue where our instructor is based with her horses. My lesson consisted of one to one instruction on a horse called Gucci which despite battling the snowy conditions it was an hour well spent.

I found myself with a spare thirty minutes which I used to drop into my friends house on my journey back from riding, an ideal opportunity to warm up over a cup of tea. I returned to the training centre in time to fit in an individual shooting session on the indoor range. Although our shooting is now combined with running it is still essential to focus on the pure shooting skill.

The final session of the day was a two hour group fence. This included a structured warm up including stretching which was followed by specific footwork exercise. It was then time to kit up and enter into a poole format in which we all fenced each other including the boys.

This day was not a particularly demanding in terms of the intensity of the sessions but it was long in duration as I returned to my flat over eleven hours after I left. Obviously this was just a snapshot and some days will include gym sessions, physiotherapy, massage, nutrition meetings, combined event training, individual fencing lessons and more intense physical sessions which explains the difficulty I have in describing a "typical day".