Training Week In Review: Week 10

I'm 3 weeks away from the Rock N' Rollman Half IM on May 31st and feeling good. The workouts have almost reached their peak, and the time and effort is starting to pay off. The workouts this week were more focused on one activity at a time rather than a bunch of mixed brick sessions. This allowed me to really focus on each leg and where I need to fine-tune things in each area as opposed to the brick sessions where I find my focus on the adjustment from one sport to the next.

Sport by Sport


Swim: I swam my first full IM distance in the pool this week in over a year (in one session). I felt good and wasn't really pushing the pace much. I was content to just sit back and keep going stroke after stroke and see where I landed at the end. The result: It was my fastest 3800m. Ever. I think that my original goal of completing the swim portion in an hour or less on race day is totally doable now.

Bike: My long bike workout got switched from its planned day due to weather complications. (which is ironic as you'll see in my "Run" section below) I rode out with a group of 3 on our usual route and the plan was to bike the same loop twice to reach our time goals for the day. I felt good throughout the entire first loop and our average was higher than usual, but my heart rate stayed the same if not a little lower than it has been over the past few weeks. What does that mean? It means this plan is working. As we approached the parking lot to pick up another rider and start the second loop I glanced at the time and saw that our loop went longer than I thought. (We changed the distance of the loop we were going to do once for the shorter distance twice which meant that overall distance was more, but so was the time needed to complete it) It was Mother's Day, and I knewI would arrive for lunch with family late, but I couldn't make it as late as it would have been had I gone out for the second loop. I've tried my best to make sure that training doesn't impact family time too much, so I opted to stick to only the first loop.

Run: Since the weather was questionable Saturday morning for the bike, I moved the long run to Saturday after and changed it up with a trail run on the Iron Hill Trail at Red Top Mountain. This was my first experience trail running in over 3 years, but I was excited for a change of scenery and I knew that I would be using/working muscles that the road doesn't utilize. It was lightly sprinkling as we headed out and by the time we approached our first mile it was pouring. Irony right? We swapped activities to avoid the rain and ended up sloshing through the remainder of the run in a downpour. I managed to cover 9.25 miles in 1hr 35min and I knew my legs would feel this run on the bike the following day. I also figured out that it's time to get new run training shoes as the slight knee pain that I've felt a few times over the past couple of weeks returned.

All in all a good week, but I know that I've still got 2 solid weeks of work to go before taper week. Weekly totals: Swim - 5300m • Bike - 50mi • Run - 12.75mi