10/16/07: The week in review

The plan was to up the hours a bit, since my supposed peak week the week prior was a flop due to all of the flats on the bike. Out of a planned 16 hours, I ended up with 14.86

Swim: Plan 4 hours
Actual 2.75 hours, 3.04 miles

I got stuck in traffic on Tuesday, so arrived 15 minutes late. After Saturday's long run and Sunday's long brick, the weekend swim got left out. Having done two 2.4+ miles swims, I'm not going to sweat missing a swim workout at this point. I've come a LONG way swimming with the masters group and am totally confident about making the cutoff, at least based on the factors under my control....as always, I'll need some good karma from the open water swimming gods on race day...

Run: Plan 4.5 hours
Actual: 4.5 hours, 29.61 miles

Saturday's long run was a little bit of a mental challenge...Quite frankly I didn't WANT to run for 2 hours; however, there comes a time when you train the way you NEED to, instead of the way you WANT to. So it was with the long run....

I was probably thinking more towards how my legs were going to feel on Sunday's monster 6 hour brick, which brings us to....

Cycling: Plan 7.5 hours
Actual: 7.58 hours, 138.29 miles

Is it all about the bike? I think it's time for a revision...It's all about being able to run off of the bike....which was exactly the purpose for Sunday's brick from hell.

My legs were a bit tired when I started the ride from doing a 13 mile 2 hour run the day before. But that's what makes triathlon so much more demanding than marathons....you have to recover from workouts much more quickly.

Although it was a bit windy, the bike ride went well, and my nutrition really seems to be dialed in, alternating sipping water with Nuun every ten minutes with Perpetuem + some water, and a Powerbar gel every 45 minutes. No stomach problems at all :)

I intentionally took it VERY easy on the bike, wanting to have a good run afterwards. I got in a bit over 85 miles in 5 hours, which is about what I expected.

Starting the hour run, my legs felt like lead weights, also expected. After about a mile I fell into a rhythm, and just kept reminding myself that this was the last hard workout of my training.

One thing I've noticed lately is that I have to run pretty hard to get my heart rate up into zone 2, which bodes well for the race. In fact, I would LOVE to be able to keep a 9-10 min / mile pace on the run with my hr in zone 1.

I pushed the pace a bit in the last 30 minutes, getting my hr up without going overboard. I went 6.44 miles, for a 9:19 / pace....not bad

And that leads us to....drumroll please....Training to Date - 19 Weeks in Review