 My friends, week three has not gone to plan. I have been violently ill, which happens when you have kids from time to time, or a lot of times. And what I thought I'd do in this video is share with you what I do when sickness interrupts your training program. This is supposed to be week three, and originally I was supposed to be in the kitchen here sharing with you what my recovery meal looks like after a heavy training session, but instead the only thing that I can sort of digest at the moment is just Vegemite, sandwich, or toast. Let me just straighten up this bad boy. Now what I thought I would do is we'll go to the whiteboard shortly and I'll show you where I was in my training schedule and what this disruption has essentially meant, how I'm going to re-engineer my training program based off of my sickness, but before I do so, I thought I would just quickly explain to you how it all came about because some of you might find it an amusing story. It started on Thursday last week and this is what happened. I went and picked up this magnificent bike. So I've just parked the car at the front of a dealer here on the Sunshine Coast Trilogy Cycles and they have a bike in store that I'm going to be taking off their hands for two weeks, which I'm very excited about. I reckon that's it there. Keith, how are we? We're on a new car. What have you got here on this? Is that a westward bike stand you got there? That is a westward bike stand. It's the most such bike stands I've ever seen. Yeah? Nice. So you're a BMC dealer? Yes. Yeah. What are you? You haven't ridden one of these yet. Am I taking this off your hands? You were supposed to be riding this yourself. I was going to be taking this this weekend. Yes, this is your new test baby. What we have here is the Time Machine Road. Incredibly aero stiff bike. Yes. Your tubing is all the Camantel tubing. Yes. Look at this here. It's very interesting what's going on here with the downtube. It kind of like spirals out. I was just going to say there's a lot of aero bikes on the road at the moment, but one of the unique features on the bike is the integrated drink bottle cages. Of course. It makes it more aerodynamic. It gets the wind flow flowing out around the bottles. Yep. Right. Another unique feature on this bike, probably not unique. A lot of bikes are coming out to know is all the integrated brake cables. Yeah, OK. All the hidden cables. Makes the front end of the bike incredibly clean. Yes. This particular model is running the 11-speed E-Tap. Yes. Very nice. Great DT Swiss ARC wheels. Cool. I'm really keen to see your thoughts. Yeah, OK. What thoughts on what you think about the Time Machine. No, thanks for letting me take it off your hands. So there's going to be a review on that bike to come shortly, but I've hardly ridden it as a result of what's been going on. And essentially what I thought at the time was that was Thursday. The following day was Friday. And the Friday was actually my birthday. I turned 38. Now, I don't expect people to say happy birthday. I'm not looking for sympathy or anything like that. I just want to explain the story to you. Because what I had planned on doing is because the wife was away, I thought when I dropped the kids at school on Friday, I would take that BMC Time Machine out for a three or four hour ride, shout myself, some lunch. And that would be quite a magnificent little birthday. Pick my kids up. And then I had planned dinner with my parents. But instead, at 2.30 AM on Friday night, this is what happened. Daddy. Daddy, I flew up. So that's right. That was my eight year old. She went down hard. She all over the ground. And 2.30 AM, I was cleaning it up and I was singing. I hope that isn't the dreaded, what we call, gastro here in Australia. Or in the US, you call it the 24 hour flu. I thought, maybe she's eating something bad. I had my fingers crossed, cleaned it all up. She went back to bed, woke up the next morning, fingers crossed, and she was unwell. So I did the dad thing. She stayed at home with me. I looked after her for the day. And then I started to feel a little bit weird that Friday myself. Still was able to pick up my six year old Ruby from school. We canceled dinner with my parents. It was a really good birthday. And then the next day, Ruby, she went down harder than I've ever seen her go down before. It was, I'm not gonna go into the detail, but she went down hard. Meanwhile, I'm feeling a little bit weird, but what I've discovered over the years, I've built up a bit of immunity to this dreaded bug. And I normally feel a bit weird for maybe 24, 48 hours and then I get through it. And that's what I thought had happened. So I continued my week twos training. Once my wife got back Saturday night and did three hardcore sessions in a row up until Monday, then Tuesday. This week, I was feeling a little bit tired and lethargic and then Wednesday. I went down harder than I've ever gone down in my entire life. Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit. The whole world was spinning. I'm not gonna go into the detail, because I don't want people to click off this video. But today's Friday. I'm gonna try and get this video out today as well. And to be honest, I can't really think properly right now. The only thing that I can stomach is plain food. I'm quite depleted. And essentially, I'm gonna have to re-engineer my training program. So what I thought I would do is show you, because I've been sick this week, all that Wednesday, all that yesterday, Thursday, and I doubt I'm gonna get on the bike and do anything today. So I'm probably gonna get back into it tomorrow. And I've only done one session this week. What am I gonna do to change things up? So we're here in front of the whiteboard. Let's talk about sickness first, okay? So you get sick. Now, sickness, for me, can normally mean two things that happen more regularly than others. And they are, I'll get gastro or the 24-hour flu. This can happen once, maybe twice a year. Or I get a chest infection or a head cold. Now, let's talk about the length of the sickness. Now, there's been a whole bunch of studies done online, everywhere that talks about, when you train hard, and I was at the end of week two, starting week three of my cycling training, which is when my training really starts to ramp up, your immune system gets compromised. Your body releases a whole bunch of hormones and proteins that essentially means you're more susceptible to catching things. Or if you've got something already in your system, that thing is gonna take over or take charge, as it did for me. Now, typically with a sickness, you've got a start, a mid, and a tail. Now, if you've got a chest infection or a cold, quite often that period can be maybe one to two weeks. And there's a start, there's a mid, and there's a tail. Now, for me, because your immune system does get compromised, if I feel a chest infection or a head cold or something like that coming on, I will not train if I feel it coming on. Because if I start training when I know it's coming on, I know it's gonna be a lot worse. It's gonna be, instead of one or two weeks, it might be two or three weeks. I'll never train in the middle, because once again, it's gonna put along. And I'll only start training when I'm right at the tail end, right at the very tail end. This is just for me, personally. I find that I can still get through it and everything's okay. Now, with gastro, or the 24-hour flu, it's a little bit different. It's more like one to two days. You feel really crook at the start for 24 hours and it just lingers. Now, what I've normally done in the past, as soon as I've come out of it, I'll just start training normally. I'll still feel maybe a little bit crook in the guts, but I'll just keep pushing through it. And normally, it might linger for a few days, but it's not like a head cold or anything like that. What's interesting for me to consider in this situation is when my kids went down, I felt a little bit off, but I thought that was it I was gonna get through it. And essentially, what I reckon has happened is because I've trained really hard, it was, say, sort of day two. I fought off on the Friday, Saturday was when my wife came home, so late Saturday when my wife came home, I jumped on the train and did a high-intensity workout. Then on the Sunday, I did a four-hour ride, or just under, I did about 110Ks. Then on the Monday, I did two, those circuits that I showed you last week, I did two of those, and I really struggled through that. And what I reckons happened is the gastro bug has still been inside me, and I haven't completely killed it off. And because I've been doing these high-intensity workouts, all of a sudden on Wednesday, bang, I've been smashed down. So what's my learning been? Make sure when you get crook, whether it's gastro or head cold or whatever it is, you're right at the very tail end. Maybe even just completely gone before you start doing any high-intensity stuff. I reckon the moderate stuff would probably be a lot better. And maybe if I just did some moderate stuff when my wife came back and I was still feeling a bit crook, maybe I wouldn't be standing here talking to you about this situation. So it's interesting for us to contemplate when we get sick how we manage the process. Now, what do I do with my cycling training? So I take a step-ladder approach to my training. Now, if you wanna learn more about the step-ladder approach, I've actually got a free guide called the five-step system to smarter, stronger, faster roads. So I can go talk about the step-ladder approach in a fair bit of detail. But essentially you've got intensity and you want the intensity to lift as the weeks go past. But you wanna do it in a gradual process. And as you're doing it, you also wanna take a step back every so often to absorb some of the high-intensity stuff you've done. So I had done, let's call this, this is week one. So week two got a little bit harder. And then week three got a little bit harder again. Now I had done week one, I'd done week two and I partially got it into a week three. I'll give that half a tick. And then I exploded. What am I doing now? How am I gonna continue to manage the process? Because typically what you do after week three, in week four, you take a step back because you've done high-intensity, more high-intensity. You're pretty fatigued here. Then you wanna absorb that fatigue and this is where your rest recover and you get a lot stronger. And then you repeat it all over but you're continuing to lift the intensity and making each and every week harder and harder but also having those rest weeks. So what I'm going to do because I'd sort of partially gotten through week three is this rest week here is gonna be this week right now. And essentially what I'm gonna do is I've kind of missed week three unfortunately but I'm gonna go straight next week to week five. I hope that makes sense. If you've got any questions or queries about this process I will go into this in more detail in upcoming videos but I wanted to explain to you what am I doing at this point in time because I'm documenting this 10 week process and I may feel weird, I may feel strange but hopefully this made a lot of sense. I'll catch you guys in the next video.