The Bitch is Baaaaaaaack

BITCH=Babe In Total Control of Herself. A woman on the tri-drs list found that acronym, and guess who she thought of first? ME.

I'm feelin' it again. Not the desire to train 18 hours a week (yet!), but enjoying it being hard. Sure I had my little misstep this weekend where I didn't race as well as I should have because I toasted myself, but hey, I think I've recovered. Besides the workouts leading up to and then including the race were awesome. I really enjoy gutting it out day after day. I know, I am sick. But that's what teaches you to keep going in long races--if you've put the hurt to yourself in training, it is like a trained response to do it in a race--the so-called "digging deep." Only you are not really digging that deep if you do it regularly.

Yesterday was my usual Monday of 3 workouts--an easy swim (drills mostly), about 1 hour of strength (I have lost no strength since Brazil), and then an easy :50 run including :10 strides.

The swim went really well--I am going to keep up the drill workouts for awhile--I had my stroke count way down. I think I am just one of those people who needs regular, focused drill work. The strength session was no problem, although I made an executive decision that rather than do 1 set of 20 reps that I would give myself a break and drop the weight just a bit and do 1 set of 25 reps. That worked out well. My muscles still felt pretty abused from the previous 4 days. When I got to the run and started it, I was like fuuuuuuck.....my legs are MIA. For the first time in a long time I was running close to 9 min./mile. But I am so used to things being hard and effort and all, and hey, I'M NOT SICK, so I can do this. I got the job done.

I slept 10.5 hours last night. YA THINK???? Man did I need that! I also tried harder to gag down more carbs yesterday. When I woke up today I felt like I could have slept another 2 hours, so initially I wasn't too optimistic about doing a hard bike ride. But I did my good nutrition, a good early morning stretching session, and figured I would play it by ear.

When I first got on the bike I was like WTF gear is this thing in? It was like I had no power. And I couldn't tell if it was windy or not. Those are sure-fire signs of tired legs, even though the good old SRM was telling me that I DID have power. I extended my warmup a bit, and headed to my interval stomping grounds. There is something psychologically motivating about going to a place where you know you are going to put the hurt to yourself. It is almost like a Pavlovian response: "I am HERE therefore I must CRUSH MYSELF." That is always the objective. And today there was hardly any traffic to stop me in my tracks.

I did the spinups (3' worth) with a smile on my face, then I geared up for some Z3 work. The last few times I've done my interval workouts I think I have gone too hard for the Z3 stuff, but I am just so accustomed to crushing it whenever I can that basic instincts take over. But I did hold back a little more today, because I wanted to see what I could do on the FT intervals.

When I began the first interval (I did 3x8' with 4' rest again), all I could think was this feels harder than normal. I was putting out the watts, and smiling the entire time (another PICTURE PERFECT June day here in Chicagoland), yet I had some concern that I wasn't recovered from the weekend and that maybe I would be hurting myself by kicking it today. But you don't know until you try, right? I didn't even take notice of my average watts for the first interval.

When I began the second interval, I could tell I felt a lot better. There definitely was some wind, and once again I was LOVING it. Wind just makes me work harder, and I don't care (hey, Brazil was windy and I didn't care even though I was freaking sick as a dog). I even had an opportunity to race a car going up a hill, which I totally dug on, and then I screamed down the backside laughing hysterically while trying to catch my breath. I did notice my average watts for this interval and they seemed really good (a little TOO good, actually).

So I wondered what the third one would bring. The effort felt fine, and I pushed and pushed, and it was good and I rode HARD. I was smiling from ear to ear--this is hard, and when I would see people in their cars I kept thinking DON'T YOU WANNA KNOW HOW HARD THIS IS AND WHY I AM SMILING WHILE I AM DOING IT AND OH YEAH I LOOK REALLY GOOD, TOO, BY THE WAY, I CAN SEE YOU STARING AT ME AND YES IT HURTS BUT IT HURTS SO GOOD THERE'S NOTHING ELSE I WOULD RATHER BE DOING RIGHT NOW.

My normalized watts for the 3 intervals were 176, 186 and 184. About what I was hitting the week before Ironman Brazil. She's back!

Then I got to finish up by doing 4x90" best effort with 3' rest. Those are real fun, too. While they are a little squirrelly because of the undulating route, I still push as best I can. I hit 209, 221, 199, 206 watts normalized. I think I can go higher next time.

I may up the interval times to 10' this Friday if my legs feel up to it. It's time to up the ante a bit. Maybe I can even gain a few points on my FT watts? At any rate, it's feeling good to go hard again. My evil coach has trained me to want this stuff, or maybe he just picked up on me having the mentality to do it and LIKE it. Whatever. As long as I am healthy enough to do it, do it I will.

Ciao!