Training Update: Week of April 13

Apr
2015
23

posted by on Triathlon

Monday:
AM: 1 hour of yoga.  This is not a bad way to start the new week when the last workout was a long run.  Good energy for a Monday!

PM: 2400-yard swim
I was all over the place. I started feeling like the workout would be fine, but it ended up being a day where I felt I was battling with myself. My form was way off, I felt out of balance and like my feet were dragging the bottom of the pool. The more I tried to correct it, the more I felt like I was flailing all over the place. Geez…was this a repeat from last week?

Tuesday:
PM: I packed my bike in case the weather cooperated to ride with the TriLife group. The forecast did not look promising, but my thought was that if I didn’t take my bike, the weather would cooperate and if I did…rain. Before I left work the radar showed an upcoming band of storms, so it was home I went with my (once again) unridden bike (happened twice last week). On my way home, I decided to flip flop my planned bike for my Wednesday morning scheduled run.

The run was a 60 minute (5 min warm-up/5-min cool down) main set tempo at my current pace (recall that I finally hit the 45 minute mark last week at this speed).  Well, I am happy to report that I knocked the 60 minutes out of the park!  I was happy to meet this milestone.  I have been working at this speed for six weeks, so it is awesome to have gotten stronger and check off the full hour maintaining goal pace without needing to slow to maintain heart rate zone.

Wednesday:
AM: 55-minute trainer ride with high intensity intervals. This one is always a treat…..

PM: 2500-yard swim
The swim was pretty good. After Monday’s session where I left feeling frustrated, I was able to re-focus and feel better about my performance. Before I swam, I watched a couple of videos to remind myself of some good, basic balance drills. I did a couple of these during warm-up and really took my time to reset mentally and physically. For my main set, I decided to just focus on the shorter sets to try to get my mojo back.  I left the pool feeling better than I had in some time.

Thursday:
PM:  Another day to “hopefully” ride outside…well, we can hope.  AGAIN, the weather looked like storms were approaching (you would think we were already in the middle of summer with all these afternoon storms in the area), so I drove home after work and did another reliable trainer ride.

65-minutes on the bike for a lactate threshold focused session that looked like this:
Warmup:
– 10min spinning easy  with 2-3 30-sec accelerations toward end of warmup.
Main Set:
– 4x10min at resistance that raises HR to (or just below lactate threshold). Intensity should be uncomfortable but if breathing is heavy (huffing/puffing) back off intensity to get breathing under control.
– Alternate cadence between 80 RPM and 90 RPM every 2min (in the 10min set)
– 5min recovery between sets.

Session was solid.  I skipped the normal 10 minute cool down to run a short 1.58 mile brick.  Trying to keep the legs honest…

Friday:

Rest

Saturday:
Tony and I headed out late morning (after some lingering showers cleared up) to ride one of our regular routes.  We have tackled this one frequently over the past several weeks as it has some decent rollers and flexibility for distance.  The day was beautiful, but unfortunately, Tony nor I were having the strongest of days.  I did not have the power I generally have, but just kept working.

Pretty close to the point where we would be hitting the halfway point in the planned mileage, we came to an intersection where they are constructing a bypass.  We had not gotten to that point in mileage on that route yet this season, so we were surprised to see this road work.  Well, what was awesome, is that the highway is almost done; it is not open yet, but for our purposes, we had miles of fresh pavement closed to traffic.  Easy choice…we took advantage!  In exchange, we were able to regain some of the speed we lost on the earlier hills, because this stretch of road was fast.  It was fun!!!!

We ended the ride with 52 miles in about 2 hours 52 minutes.  Despite the way we were feeling, we ended up having a good ride!

open road

Sunday:
Rain was in the forecast for the day, so I decided that I would be out to the greenway late morning in hopes of getting in my total miles before the rain moved in.  Once again I had company as Tony tackled the 12 miles with me at my pace.  The weather cooperated…we even had a few peaks of sunshine, which was unexpected.

I was happy with my hydration, nutrition and overall with my run.  I ran with four bottles on my hydration belt (two with Gatorade Endurance, which will be the Raleigh 70.3 course, and two with water) and took in some strawberry shot blocks during the run.  Tony and I shared a Honey Stinger Caramel Waffle in the car in the way to the park.  #HSHIVE

The last three miles were especially a challenge as my body was ready to be done.  At those points, I just bear down as I know that those miles in the bank are so important when it comes to race day.  I was happy that I was able to finish up with good consistency in my splits.

Run Splits

run

fortunate

Total training time:  10 hours 55 minutes
Swim:  4,900 yards
Bike:  77.4 miles
Run:  21.6 miles
Other:  1 hour

I also incorporate twice daily PT exercises that are meant to strengthen/stretch my glutes, hamstrings and re-align my hips. This probably averages about 25 minutes a day and I have not included that in the above totals. However, this is probably one of the smartest things I am doing daily!

I struggled a bit this week with my right glute and the achiness that I felt at times.  I have been very diligent with my therapy exercises, but parts of my body was not happy with me over the weekend.  I think the upcoming recovery week has timed out well (along with my scheduled PT appointment).

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