Weeks Behind

What do you mean it's May already?  Wha ha happenened ta April?



 

Swim: 26,400 m, 9 swims, 1 race

Bike: 322 miles, 15 rides, 1 race

Run: 66.3 miles, 10 rides, 2 races

Strength: once

Yoga: twice

So the run milage was a bit low, I had a half marathon and an oly triathlon and lots of out of town trips.  That meant the weekend long stuff didn't happen for the most part.  26k in the pool is pretty incredible, and 322 bike miles is great.  But I missed a lot of my long rides and long runs.  Here's how.



oy.  that week. The fun thing about that week is that Bigun and I were at the Indian Princess spring outing having a blast at Camp Seafarer.  The weekend before this one was Easter, when we went to SC to visit the folks.  So that tends to throw a monkey wrench in the training plan.  That still only left me with 4:34 in training time over the entire week.  One run and one swim?  No weekend long efforts at all?  That's ironman interruptus.  Also known as the sacrifice you willingly make for your family because that's what is really important.

This was also known as Masters week.  Wednesday night and all day thursday Tom and I were travelling to Augusta.  Then Friday I was exhausted, and it was a rest day anyway.  The one lone long effort was the Half Marathon I ran with Jenny and Jess; I still got to swim on Saturday but passed on the long bike ride to save myself for the race.

So that strange cut up week left me with a total of 5 hours and 42 minutes in the sweat box.  2 runs, 1 swim, 2 bike rides, 1 incredible day at a golf tournament and more sunburn than is really necessary.

Cast Iron Club updates:
as of sunday 4/14 I'm sitting on 11.88 Iron Swims (up from 10.73 before saturday morning), 7.86 Iron Bikes, and 7.47 Iron Runs on the year. I may have to run a few more miles monday just to let the run pull ahead of the bike distance for a bit.

The highlight of this week has to be the triathlon, because everything else was pretty normal.  3 runs, 3 swims, 4 bike rides, adds up to 9:03 in training time.  Almost back to those 10+ hour weeks.  The odd thing was that on sunday I did nothing, got caught up in family time and slept almost all day.  I ate, then napped, then ate, then napped.  I needed the rest, that was a tough race.

There was a couple of funny things that I left out of the race report. As soon as I stood up at the end of the swim I got very disoriented and stumbled like a drunk monkey into the guy next to me almost knocking us both over.  Then I took off running out of the water and up to the transition area, which was a steeper hill than I expected.  10 feet away from the water as soon as the cheering crowds start closing in on the path we had to run on, I let out a tremendous burp.  It was loud and like 5 seconds long.  Think I took in some water?  ahhahahahah.  oh well.  Kelley had to stay home with the kids so it's not like anyone I knew was in those cheering crowds.  The other thing I left out happened on the bike.  The bike course for the olympic distance was one loop, and the sprint race going on at the same time was a smaller loop with the same first few miles and last few miles.  By the time I was around mile 22 out there, the sprint course joined in but it timed out to be some of the slower bikers from the sprint race.  So good for me, I got to feel like I was flying past people at the end of the bike leg.  There were also cars on that part of the course, and they were pretty respectful of the bikers.  even the slow ones.  So finally there came a point where the car wouldn't pass the biker that I wanted to pass, so I jumped in and passed everybody!  Got to the right of the car, had over a bike length to still get left of the biker, and it was open road after that.  so I passed two cars and one bike in the same move.  And I think that's the first time I passed a car in a race.

This was finally a planned week. there was nothing extraneous about this, no work demanding overtime, no extra family demands or anything extra.  I played the schedule, worked my 40 hours, hit my 5 bike rides, 3 swims, and 3 runs.  I got in the long efforts on the weekend.  totals came to 23 miles of running, 121 miles on the bike, and about 6 miles of swimming totaling 12.5 hours of total training time.  Oh yea baby, that's the good stuff.  that's a solid 12:30.

Saturday's swim was a nuclear meltdown in the pool.  There was a 6 x 200 IM set with extra stuff thrown in there, like the first one was 100 fly, 50 back, 50 breast.  Why cut out the freestyle?  extra torture, that's why.  The saturday RAM team workouts are an hour and a half instead of the 1:15 that we get on the weeknights.  Then Kelley and I took the kids to the Raleighwood theater for lunch and a movie.  This place is a cool concept, it's a movie theater with a restaurant built in.  The movie tickets are cheap, and the food is overpriced, but the waiters will keep bringing you stuff all through the movie.  It was TONS of fun.  We don't go often, but I always enjoy it.

Then after that I got in 55 miles on the bike.  I had some concerns about this ride.  As evidenced by the graphics above, I have missed the long bike ride for the last 5 weeks.  Even the triathlon only had a 25.5 mile ride.  Today is May 1, and on June 2 Ironman Raleigh 70.3 will be here.  So I'm running out of time to get these long rides in.  I really wanted to test muscular endurance this time and see how I felt at the end, testing my nutrition plan as well.  I felt pretty good the whole way through, but I hope I will be feeling better by the time race day gets here.  This is going to be a tough course, and missing 5 straight weeks of long bike rides is not going to help it get any easier.  This 55 mile ride made me very relieved.  I need to get in some 60 milers in once or twice this month as well, but I'm feeling much better today than I was last week.

The long run felt great too.  I ended up on a treadmill next to another guy who also ran 10 miles.  It's very rare that anyone else is dumb enough to go that far on a treadmill, so that was pretty cool.  I felt relaxed the whole time. The only really embarrassing thing for the entire week was before I hit the treadmill. I planned to warm up with a 15 mile ride on the stationary bike. Turns out, I wore some short running shorts, and I didn't realize that until I was on the stationary bike and looked down to see my balls hanging out. The short shorts rode up enough to leave me a bit flashy.  Of course the shorts have the built in underwear in there so I wasn't actually exposed, but it was still enough for me to call the ride done after only 6 miles. That's a warmup after all.

and you won't believe what happens next.  Hint: it's nothing.  I slept off last week.