Final Long Workouts

Weekly Totals:
Swim 7200 yards. Bike 158 miles. Run 32 miles. Time 16h 26m.

Well, with only two weeks left, I'm just getting in my final long workouts before starting my taper to race day. Today I had my last long bike ride, 74 miles followed by a fast-paced 4 mile run. The bike ride was long, slow, windy and hilly - a tough ride all around, but I'm glad I stuck it out and resisted cutting the distance short. As for the run, I decided to run in my lighter racing shoes (just testing the equipment) instead of my heavier training shoes. While I felt slow as molasses slugging along, I actually ran my fastest training run this season; go figure.

Anyway, tomorrow (Monday) I'll do my final long run, and within the next couple days will do one longer duration swim. Then everything after that, leaving about 10 days until the race, will be shorter and lower intensity. And will try to focus on the "other" essential workouts: eating and sleeping/resting!

Run Focus

Weekly Totals:
Swim 5450 yards. Bike 100 miles. Run 40 miles. Time 13h 22m.

Swam better this week but still need to get some long swims in over the next week or so to build my endurance and gain confidence. Biking was tough to fit in given the crappy weather, so tried to do some rides on the indoor trainer, but that's just way too monotonous for me, so I fell a bit short on distance. Will try to fit some longer miles in soon this upcoming week. Main focus though was making sure I put in a good week of running. Increased my weekly mileage to 40 miles - definately not the most advisable increase in mileage from the prior couple weeks, but thankfully the legs continue to feel good with putting those miles on. Capped off the week with a 14 mile run today along the river in the sleet and snow, it was a good confidence building run and I ran it evenly paced throughout.

Just three weeks till race day. Have to start assembling my checklists and getting my gear / equipment together...

Latest Training Snapshots

Sorry for the slowdown on posting. I promise I've been training, in fact, here's my weekly training snapshot (including the time I'm spending on workouts, which doesn't include getting ready, warm-ups, warm-downs, stretching, showering, eating, maintaining equipment, etc.):

Swim 4300 yards, Bike 178 miles, Run 22 miles, Time 15h 33m

And for anyone keeping a tally, my total cumulative training snapshot (after 26 weeks of training, with just 4 weeks to go until the race):

Swim 29,000 yards, Bike 2,994 miles, Run 451 miles

Definately been light on the swimming (what's new), but trying my best to make it to the pool and put in the time and effort. Same for the run, injuries are keeping at bay, so now just have to increase the mileage slowly including a long run.

Today (Sunday), had a long training day: 74 mile bike ride followed by a 7 mile transition run. It was a bit cool and windy on both the bike and run, and that coupled with being so far into training, has left me both physically fatigued as well as a bit mentally fatigued. It's definately not easy keeping up with training at such a high consistency and intensity for such a long period of time, i.e. for the past 6 months! It's wearing on me for sure. Times like this I know I have to keep focused, stay mentally strong and continue putting in a hard training effort. Not always easy to do when there are so many more comfortable options on how to spend my time. Ah well... I'll just keep on keepin' on...

Four weeks to go!

No Need to Panic

Well, let's start off by giving you my weekly totals:

Swim 3700 yards, Bike 130 miles, Run 8 miles

And before you ask, no, that's not a typo... I ran only 8 miles this week due to some discomfort in my left foot. Thankfully the 4 miles that I ran today, went painfree, so hopefully I'll be back in the rhythm of the run this upcoming week. Otherwise, I will have a long road ahead of me. Ugh.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I definately felt a loss of fitness on the bike from the low volume from the prior week. But I think I can regain that back soon. And the swimming is, well, going about as swimmingly as I could hope at this point. I've started to increase the duration of my long stretches to build my endurance, but also throw in some quick sets for "speed". I put that in quotes, cause speed is quite relative, and to pure swimmers, I'm probably moving about as fast as a buoy bobbing up and down in the water ;^)

So just 5 weeks to the race. In this next couple weeks, I'll start to finalize some of my plans for going down to the race, and start getting all my equipment together (long checklist of stuff), and of course, continue getting in some key workouts to prep for the big day.

Rest-athalon is Over!

That's right, the rest-athalon is over, time to get back to training...

In the prior 7 days, I took 5 rest days, swam once and biked another day. Not good, but that's where I was relative to some injuries and a few other things going on. Now I'm feeling a bit under the weather, so naturally I'm trying to kick out any flu/cold symptoms by stressing/sweating them out of my body...

So yes, today I jumpstarted back into training: I swam, rode, and ran. Felt a little nauseous coming out of the pool early this morning, but that was probably due to a lack of good nutrition the day/night before. The bike ride was rather cold at only 46 F. Rode with shorts on, but opted for a long sleeve jersey and full finger gloves. I hadn't run in a week, so just wanted to take that easy. I don't mind the cold, but the risk of muscle pulls or strains goes up since it takes longer for the muscles to warm up. I make sure to warm up, warm down and stretch quite a bit.

I'm sure I lost a good amount of fitness in this past week or two, but today's workouts went well and last night in a relaxed state, I checked my heart rate: 54 beats per minute, another fair indicator that I'm still in good condition.

Given that I didn't work out much in those prior 7 days, I unfortuntely didn't eat so well either. While I did make some good food choices and cooked at home a bit, plentiful servings of popcorn, chocolate, beer, chips and salsa, greasy take-out, etc. were had. Ah well, only live once... So as part of my jumpstart, I not only ate well today, I counted my calories: 3,035 calories (as of the time of this posting, 11pm). My total workout time for today was: 2 hrs 10 mins. I'm really not sure what to think of that calorie count since I hadn't ever counted before, but no doubt I need all the calories I can get!