08/23/07: Swimming, Barefoot on the Beach, & Rollers

So far it's been a great week of workouts. God I LOVE recovery week. For the first time in months my legs aren't stiff and I'm not too tired.

Tuesday's swim had a great VO2 Max set built in. Totalled 2850 yds:

Warmup: 200 swim, 50 kick, 50 pull

3x300 negative split w/ 1 min ri. One of the best things about Benji is he's done triathlons and realizes that the triathletes could care less about doing butterfly sets. So while he was working with the "swimmers" on butterfly form, we got to swim.

3x50 kick

3x (4x100 HARD on 2:30) 50 easy in between each set. This was the fun one of the evening. The idea was to go really hard on the 100s, with plenty of time in between. Great set.

Cool down 150

On the way home from the pool I ran the bridges. One loop from the Y and back takes about 25 minutes...add a bit onto the end and it's a perfect 30 minute run.

Last night was once again time to go barefoot at the beach. The nice thing about recovery week is I get to do some workouts because I want to, instead of feeling like I have to. Getting to run barefoot at the beach for a 1/2 hour as the sun sets is DEFINITELY a workout I WANT to do.

After a 10 minute warmup, I did 6 20 second strides, aiming for 32 right foot strikes, which as it turns out is pretty fast. I walked back to the start before each interval, since this is a form workout and not a hard running workout. After the strides I headed back for about 10 minutes at a pretty good pace (~7:30 / mile), which was just hard enough to get my heart rate up into zone 2.

Finally this morning it was time to tackle the rollers. I got on them the last couple of nights just for a few minutes to work on balance. Today was my first actual workout on them, which didn't go too badly.

I'm staying in a doorway, at least for now. After practicing the last couple of nights I'm able to stay on them pretty well, only bouncing off the doorway occasionally, that is until I reached for my water bottle.....Andy go bye bye.....Even with falling off a couple of times, it was a good 30 minute spinning workout, with my heart rate staying mostly in zone 1 and low zone 2. The idea of rollers is to keep a good cadence (90-100) and work on form and balance more than anything else.

With enough practice on the rollers, I aspire to doing ILT drills on them, although for the moment I can't even ride them in the aero bars, much less without hands: