Planning, Recovery, Catching Up and The Hard Routine

I am 100% finished with my ATP!!! It just gives me this sense of well-being, plus I don't feel like I have to work on it in the wee hours of the morning. It really looks good and feels right. I learned so much from last year, for example:

• Trying to run, even for 30 minutes, on Friday afternoon when I swam for 2.5-3 hours in the morning (after running long on Wednesday morning and then doing about 2.5 hours of swimming biking on Thursday), is probably not going to happen. I need to rest after those long swims, "rest" being a relative term, to be ready to do 3.5-5 hours of training on Saturday and 5-6 on Sunday.
• I didn't need to do any brick workouts. Whenever possible, I ran before I biked. It made the quality of my runs much better, but didn't really impact my biking. But I will be doing some brick workouts, since I am doing an Ironman next year, and I believe in doing transition runs just to remember about running right after biking.
• On Mondays, when I rode 90+ miles on Sunday, I might not feel like running (but will probably be able to get in a swim).
• I will just feel better about myself if I put in frequent 100+ mile rides, and so I have set things up to enable me to do that on 14 Sundays (except for the one time I'll go up to ride the IMWI course for a race rehearsal on a Saturday). If I can pull this off, my cycling will be in excellent shape come UMH!
  
• I NEED recovery weeks, and I have scheduled 9 of them. I used to be paranoid that if I dropped my hours way down that I wouldn't feel like bringing them back up, but I proved myself wrong. Not to mention that I just need the extra personal time to catch up on whatever I can!
• I need to keep up at least the core part of my strength routine right up through race day (see discussion below about the state of my back and core). I just can't afford to slack in that department, since it is critical to keeping me healthy.

So I built all these reality checks into the ATP and now all I have to do is EXECUTE it, which is my favorite part anyway.

I feel pretty out of sorts since I barely did any training last week. I just don't feel right not exercising, but I know I need the rest. But I need to get back to strength training, and I have a million zillion other things I am trying to get accomplished. Here are a few of them:

• Roof work
• Major tree pruning
• Concrete work
• Keep pestering the city about the foreclosed dump of a house so it gets torn down
• Test out the treadmill that I want to buy. I wanted to do that this last weekend, but other crap came up.
• Figure out where I'm going to put said treadmill.
• Get my car washed and detailed. I haven't had this done in 2 years!
• Buy a new mattress set for my bed. I finally figured out why I haven't been sleeping well--the fucking mattress is not supporting my back properly! I came to this amazing conclusion around 2AM today, and now I just have to go try out a few and make my final decision
  

I am going to see a chiropractor on Thursday, after running into my former one at the Farmer's Market on Saturday. The objective is to figure out whether I have bursitis (ischial tuberosity), just some stuff out of whack in my back, a strained hamstring or what. My guess is that I may have slight bursitis that I can fix (can you say water running/elliptical?), need that new mattress, and need my spine looked at after the abuse I put myself through this last year. It has become difficult for me to tell what's going on here since there is always so much changing. I know that my bed is toast--I spent more time in it last year than every before--and I know that I should have replaced the mattress a few years ago, so now it's just become urgent. My body has become more picky, probably somewhat just from age, but also I feel like a highly tuned machine that needs certain things just right. I have been experiencing referred pain in my glutes and hamstrings, and it seems to move around, which is indicative of nerve irritation--at least that's what I hope is going on. It has been noticeable while biking on the road-ish bikes, but not in the more upright position of a spin bike, and I will test my MTB tomorrow. Again, this would seem to point at nerve irritation. So I'm off running until I get this figured out. But if I can water run and/or elliptical, no worries--I'm just fine with that.

Swimming is coming along. I can really sense my rotation integrating with my kick and my stroke, and I can tell how much I was doing wrong, and that I have a ways to go, but it appears my brain finally understands the motion of swimming from a neuro pathway perspective, if that's the right term. I mean, I can feel what I need to do and what the effect is of doing it differently without thinking about it--I just feel it. I began rereading my Maglischo book, Swimming Fastest, and it makes sense to me now, and I can actually try something in there and feel what it's doing. All this has come about because I swam more than ever last year, but I also worked really hard on my body roll, or more specifically, connecting my head to my hips--I don't lift my head to breathe at all--it goes with the rest of the rotation. I also worked a lot on the high elbow during the catch (I already had it above water). So now finally, I've locked my head to the rest of my body and can make myself rotate more and my head doesn't have to think about it! And I can rotate and keep my elbows high and I don't have to think about that! So now I am trying to think about my hand position on entry and during the catch, and I am feeling how it should be done! Today, I "thought" about how I was swimming during my warmup, and then I just swam intervals, and while they weren't super fast, I felt pretty smooth and didn't swim too slowly considering I haven't even tried to swim fast in weeks! So I am encouraged that I am going to see some huge improvements to my swim this year.

I have restarted my strength training. I was such a slacker and did almost NONE for about 10 weeks up to and post UMC. Which is why I think my back is jacked up. So today I lifted for just 45 minutes, and I am such a pussy fucking wussy girl! Weight that used to be easy for me felt hard, but I know it will just be a few weeks before I'm headed back in the right direction. At my age, I have to keep this up to hold my muscle mass and sustain the S/B/R training load I am throwing at myself. I want to head into fall and winter strong for raking leaves, shoveling snow, and maybe I will pull out the cross country skis this winter!

In a few days, I am going to start in on my own Hard Routine. Ok, so it's not like what I am doing isn't already hard--it's fucking hard (go ahead and try and do my training and report back to me)--but I can always do better. So I need to go all public and say what stuff I am going to do better between 10/1 and 12/2/2010. First, let's start off with what I am doing well:

• Executing boatloads of training
• Generating some pretty respectable racing results
• Staying relatively healthy and injury free
• Staying employed
• Eating pretty healthily
• Stretching nearly daily
• Helping others out in the sport to achieve their goals
• Attending to my personal wealth plan
• Keeping in reasonable touch with friends
• Watch very little TV
  

So where can I improve? Plenty of places, but here are the ones I am going to shoot for:

• Jump rope for at least 5 minutes at least once a week.
• Do at least 20 pushups per day.
• Drink only 1 beer per day (yeah yeah this will be tough)
• Stretch my back over the stability ball or by hanging off the bed daily
• Take my calcium supplements daily (I hate taking pills)
• Do extra pullups at least twice weekly before I swim
• Put my legs up against wall for relaxation for at least 5 minutes on Saturdays and Sundays after I am done working out

How much "extra" time does this take? Really not much. Mostly it takes cutting myself off from spending time on the computer away from work hours. Maybe my hard routine doesn't look that hard, but hey, I'm a total slacker and I had to pick something! And I never know where these small things will lead.

So there. Go and make up your own Hard Routine. Just do it. Oh--you're already perfect? I think not.