So in among the hours of training, I fitted a “bike test”, which involved 30 minutes of warm up with 30 minutes of hard effort, whilst sweating buckets onto the kitchen floor, a run test of 2 hours at a steady pace and a swim test involving faster timed sets of 200m and 400m (thank goodness the Garmin records all the nitty gritty details!). These not only set my heart rate zones, but also resulted in a new “hypothetical” marathon time of 3 hour and 21 minutes…..maybe one day I can see if that’s genuinely now achievable!!! Off the back of these tests, Andy has been using coach Chouteau’s training plan as a guide and detailing some more in depth sessions with heart rate, cadence and pace targets, all documented in “Training Peaks” – an online professional coaching software tool.