Rut-Ro!

After yesterday's festivities, including a bit of whining, I managed to get 10 hours of peaceful, decaffeinated sleep (I did not partake in the Ultra Violence yesterday despite starting the day tired and completing 3 workouts). I felt pretty good this morning upon waking, and looked forward to a productive day of work and strong workouts.

The day began with a fire drill for a customer that belongs to a colleague of mine. My colleague is on vacation this week, and of course before departing, he told me, "Nothing major should come up." Yeah, OK, right, like I believe THAT (and see you thought I didn't even have a job!). So after spanking someone for failing to contact me directly and jumping over my head to my manager, I got down to business and got the issue moved along and under control, where it currently sits.

Another fire drill that began late last week resurfaced, as I had decided I would do nothing about it yesterday, and I finally got the right people on the phone and found out what was really going on, and of course I volunteered to communicate this to the customer, as I am quite confident in dispensing whatever message needs to be given. After getting the message out to all involved parties, I found time to finish up my strength work (biceps, delts and 4 core exercises) before eating lunch and trying to decide when to fit in my bike workout.

Which brings me to our friend, Astro, here. He's sitting on his doggie treadmill, but I had to get on my people bike treadmill and put out some wattage. When I fired up the machine, the watts weren't coming out as quickly as I hoped, but it was just my warmup, so it didn't matter. I had popped in the Ironman Hawaii 2005 video tape, and I have to tell you I didn't even watch it. But whenever I would glance at the TV, there was all this nice colorful stuff, like Natascha Badmann (my idol) and Faris Al-Sutan (hottie par extraordinaire).

As I neared the “moment of truth,” or when I would begin my FT intervals, I still felt like I didn’t have a whole lot of wattage in the cottage, if you know what I mean. Yet I was hell bent on having a good session. I think that Tuesdays are just hard for me until I drop some of the stress of my Monday strength sessions. Frankly, I’m amazed I have ANYTHING left on Tuesdays after what I put myself through on Mondays. But I digress and/or I must be a wimp.

I like to look at my average watts every 2-5’. I decided to start out the first interval with a bang, and just go really, really hard and see where that put me. Well, after 2’ I was at my current FT of 165. I thought, well, now there’s the gauntlet. I can’t let myself go any lower than that, and gee, even higher would be nice. So I’m pushing and pushing (just like Coach told me to do), and at about 10’ I’m seeing 167. Perfect! I wonder, though, if I’ll have anything left for the second interval. I decide what the hell, just go for it, it’s not like I’m dying or anything (and I am paying absolutely no attention to my heart rate, either), so I finish off the first interval at average watts of 167. Never did that before!

I pedal easy for 2’ and then fire up the second FT interval. My aim is to not dog it and go any lower than I did for the first interval, but if for some reason I can only manage 165 watts, that is just fine, too. But I typically like to go a little harder on my second interval “just because.” After 5’ I’m seeing 168 watts. Looks good. After 10’ I’m seeing 169 watts. I’m thinking, “Rut-Ro. Can I hit 170? That’s a number I didn’t even DREAM of seeing this year.” It’s getting real hard, but I push, push, push, and I end up at an average of 171. ONE-HUNDRED-FREAKING-SEVENTY-ONE. That’s 6 watts over my FT that I hit last week, which was essentially after a 5-week layoff.

Goes to show you what happens when someone puts a little bug in your ear to “Always be pushing” and you throw off the shackles of what you THINK you can do and you just go and DO IT.

So now I have just raised the stakes and I want to push my official FT up to 170 watts within 2 weeks. Can I do it? I think I can. Stay tuned.