Ben Fouhy World Champion K1 1000m Kayaking New Zealand

The past week has turned out to be a really productive training week, with some solid 2k efforts on Monday followed by a couple of good endurance sessions. A key session I do (this is a long session of intervals) to test out my fitness about this time each year was a slight improvement on this time last year, which I was pleased with after having such an average week before. I am finding now that I have been paddling for a while that the gains are so much smaller and they are noticed further apart and that can make it a little harder mentally at times.

On Saturday we had the NZ marathon championships at Lake Karapiro. I was pleased to win my 4th National marathon title. The competition was not super strong. The other sprint guys opted not to race with the sprint world cups only a few weeks away. I on the other hand was only too happy to get some more miles under my belt.
It was a good hit out with 5 laps and 5 portages. I averaged 4m33s per km on my own for 36k so it was a good way to finish a solid training week. Second place was Matt Thompson just 5 minutes back.

I now have a week in Auckland packing and tidying up loose ends before we leave for Europe to race the second and third World Cups.

Over the weekend my fiancée Helen and I had our engagement party. We went to plan b when it dawned on us how much work was going to be involved having it at home. So we decided to have it at Banque in town.

Above long time friend and sports scientist Dazza, Troy and Mike from the team.

I must say it was a great venue and the food was very good.

Below Helen and myself. Believe it or not I didn’t actually drink that much. I am still feeling a bit hammered from training.

Overall the last week of training has been fairly ordinary to be honest. As always some gym stuff has gone well. On the water I have been very flat and my coach had to modify the program significantly.

Back on track this week though. This morning we did some 2k efforts and my times were fairly respectable. I have a better feeling about this week.

This morning we did a 10k time trial, the time was a little slower than my last TT a couple of weeks ago with my average heart rate down due to fatigue from the the volume of training that we have been doing. Tomorrow it will be nice to sleep in and let the body recover.

The conditons were very nice so paddling was enjoyable after the crazy weather we have been getting.

The weather is definitely starting to cool off.

We are in our second block of training now with the volume increasing, we are still bringing in some quality work but not putting much emphasis on times at this stage. Last week we did erg testing and I was pleased to have increased my peak power which shows I can push harder for longer. On the water I was the most efficient that I have ever been at 4min k pace on my lactate test. The erg test is more of a indication on how tough you are and the on water is more of a test of how well you are paddling. All this shows I need to keep being patient and that things are progressing well. I need to be careful to keep developing slowly and not get to carried away too early on.

It has been great to train in an environment where there are so many other world champions, although they are rowers it is a still good to have their company, it is motivating to see them training hard on days when I am tired and it helps a lot.