Chugging Along

The time off I had reminded me again that I have to consider all the things I'm doing in addition to training in terms of recovery. At the end of the second week, I did a 10,000 yard swim on Friday that went well, on Saturday I ran :30 and biked 2:45 and then on Sunday I felt sick. Looking back, I accumulated too much time working in my yard (6 hours on one day) that on top of the training, put me into a fatigue hole. So I skipped my Sunday long run. But I still got in 17 hours of training Mon.-Sat.

Last week I was back to work and as predicted, felt fine after taking a day off. I got through all of last week's training just fine, except for the day when I swam, then lifted, THEN ran and remembered that I should not lift before I run (works for some people, not for me). I have this week and next week pretty high volume (including one 8-hour training day), then I get to taper off for a few weeks, run a lot, and then I revert back to "normal" IM training (what I've been doing is Ultraman base building).

The last 4 weeks of biking have been tough--getting back to doing the really hard intervals takes some getting used to, but I can see the improvements week to week and that is a great feeling. The workouts don't suck as bad. They always do suck at some point, but that is part of the program. I don't quite yet feel like I'm back in my 2009 biking shape, but getting closer to that weekly.

In terms of running, I am just now formally reintroducing tempo runs, and my tempo pace is down right now, but that's fine because the push right now is to just run a lot and not worry so much about pace. That will change once I'm through my 60-mile run week, when I can run less but with a solid tempo run mid-week plus tempo work during my long runs.

Swimming has been really enjoyable lately, and I am getting back a modicum of speed--for me, anyway. Mondays and Wednesdays I am doing shorter (up to 3,000 yards), harder workouts and still banging out a really long swim on Fridays. The speed work M/W is beginning to show on the longer swims, which is great! I am not expecting to get much faster, but it does seem to help me to be a really "durable" swimmer. When 7,000 doesn't feel so bad (what I did last Friday), I pretty much feel durable. I am anxious to see what happens once I drop that really long swim and sub in another interval workout. It's been, what, like 3 years since I've done that during the winter, and I am really looking forward to it!

I know how many people scale back their winter training a lot what with holidays and such, but I am just the opposite. For me, winter is a great time to get in a lot of swimming and running (less biking), whereas once it's warm in the spring, it's time to really pile on the biking miles. Works for me!

I had an interesting discussion with some folks at the Y yesterday. They wondered why some people would do a race like Tough Mudder, where they might come out with scrapes and bruises and sometimes receive electric shocks. I tried to explain that there are different variants on the sorts of races/events people do--I gravitate towards the long distance, but also appreciate the short and sweet at times, but shy away from what I perceive as dangerous (for me). Some people like the thrill of obstacles and such, and I get that. The question I got was why do people CHOOSE to do these things? All I could say was because we CAN and we like to push our limits, and I said that I couldn't understand why some people choose to be overweight and/or inactive or unhappy. Someone tried to argue that people don't choose to be overweight, and I just didn't have the time to get into it, but what the ability to do anything well (maintain one's body, for example) boils down to is the desire to LEARN the right way and then to be MINDFUL of executing it and accept the ongoing WORK required to excel. Sometimes I might joke about how easy some of the things I do are for me, but in every case, it has required those 3 things. Take any one of them away and you have a person just getting by. I guess I still have that fire in me, which means I must be absorbing my training well!

I am reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. It is great so far. This is the 3rd book by him that I have read. One of the things I really like about his writing is that he makes some of the weird thoughts his characters have seem so "normal," even logical. Maybe that means I have weird thoughts myself, but I have always believed that. All I can say about this book is that this morning when I woke up and looked outside, I checked to see how many moons were in the sky, and thankfully, there was only one!