Yesterday I spent at DISC, I was there at 9am working with Liz Randall as she gets ready for her hour record (1st March), then I hung around and waited for John Beasley, to assist him with the Malaysian squad, but I got it wrong!  They weren't in on Wednesday!  Doh!  So I ducked home for a couple of hours, and went back in to get there at 4pm to work with Hilton.

Welcome to the madhouse.

I had been to watch a few Wednesday night sessions over the years as a casual observer, but this time I was in the thick of it.  It starts for the coaching team at about 4, Hilton and Daryl Perkins (from now on, Perko ...) were sorting out stuff in the NTID/VIS/CCCC cage, I helped a bit, carried some stuff, then we had a look at the program for the night.

Many of you reading this have been to our sessions, and will know that we publish the plans ahead of time and have done so for a couple of years now.  So we're no strangers to planned sessions, but this is a whole new scale and intensity ... The session starts at 6:30pm sharp, with warmups for the sprinters and then the enduros (30 mins sprinters, 40 mins enduros), then they had 3 groups - Sprint, NTID/Pursuit and Enduro.  

I did the enduro warmup on the motorbike, Hilton did the sprinters.  The original request was 20 laps at 35, 15 laps at 40, 10 laps at 45, 15 laps ramping up to 58km/h.  When I took it up to around 55km/h with about 7 laps to go, Perko waved me to slow, the bunch was HUGE - there was maybe 35 enduros chasing the motorbike and with the bunch that big it was too fast, so we dropped back to 50km/h for the last 5 laps.

Then the carnival began.  The groups were NTID sprint (mostly, a couple of non-NTID riders were in the squad) doing MACCs, pursuit (NTID) doing pursuit cadence drills, and general enduro training.  For 3 hours it was hectic, a contingent of CCCC guys and Perko helped, with getting the various groups ready to go and misc helping out.  I timed the MACC efforts for the first 2 (of 4) 300m MACCs, and Hilton got me to ride the motorbike for the third set of efforts - I hadn't done it with his guys before and was a bit conservative with the speed I took them to, but that'll be better next time.  Hilton did the last effort for them while I timed again.

I also did the pacing for half of the pursuit training stuff, the first time I walked the line for them I got it wrong and went the wrong way!  Sorry guys!  We fixed it from then on.  Mea Culpa!

Overall, it was a mind-bending experience.  A lot of stress, a lot of people with a jam-packed program of training.  It all mostly worked out and the program was mostly adhered to.  I got home at about 11pm, totally knackered!