Triathlon Diary: 1/21 to 1/27

It was a pretty good week of triathlon training this week, and especially coming off of having the flu, I'm satisfied with where I am.  It'll be tricky to balance the need to get with the need to stay reasonably rested as the next few weeks come along, but this was a good week of base building, so I guess we'll see how it goes.


Swim
I swam three times this week: Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, and while I didn't go particularly long in any of those workouts, by the end of Sunday, I was feeling a little more like myself in the water.  I still don't have the muscular endurance that I'd like, but I'm swimming okay, and that's an improvement.

I ran Wednesday, so the swim Wednesday night was my second workout of the day, and it was a struggle.  Not the kind of thing that would smoke me mid-season, but for an early season work day, it was a lot.

Sunday was probably the best workout of the week.  I wanted to do mid-distance intervals, so I set it up like this:

 - 5 x 100 @ 1:30 warm up.
 - 4 x 200 @ 3:00 aerobic pace.
 - 6 x 50 kick @ 1:00.  Fly / Breast / Free.
 - 2 x 200 pull @ 3:00.
 - 100 warm down.

The best thing about this workout was that the warm-up felt like a warm up.  I went in wanted to stretch out and take it easy, and the swimming actually felt easy.  That's real progress.

For the main set, I'd planned to do 5 x 200 @ 3:00, but I just didn't have it in my arms.  I knew it when I hit rep number two and decided to shorten the set during rep number three.  And sure enough, my stroke fell apart in the middle of rep number four.

Swimming Total: 3 x swim workouts (1700, 1800, 2100); 5600 total (56 pts).


Bike
I didn't ride any this week because of the weather, but Sally and I did watch the movie Premium Rush on Saturday night.  I liked it a lot, but I kept wondering who the Hell would ride from 116th Street to Chinatown down Broadway?!

Premium Rush promo poster.

Speaking as a guy who rides through Harlem on an almost daily basis, I gotta say that nobody in their right mind would ride down Broadway.  Why?  There are at least three better, faster ways to go.  I personally would take the Hudson Greenway all the way around the tip of Manhattan and then come back up to Chinatown from the south via the FDR, especially if I was riding that much every day.  My man had ninety minutes to make his delivery, and going that way would take at most forty-five minutes.  But if you didn't want to go that way or you were afraid of hitting pedestrians, you could also either cut through the Park--as they do later in the movie--or take West End Avenue, which runs parallel to Broadway but has one Hell of a lot less traffic.

In any event, the critical event would be avoiding Midtown traffic at mid-day, which they never even address.  But Hello?!  Broadway runs right through Times Square!

In summary: Premium Rush is not a bad movie, but all that weird route planning kept pulling me out of the plot.  Watch it at your peril.


Run
I ran twice this week.  Wednesday I went six-and-a-half in freezing cold weather, and about the best I can say for it is that I survived and didn't get sick.  And actually, that's probably worth mentioning.  The run itself was a straight Long, Slow Distance (LSD) run; nothing special there.

On Saturday, the Tri Club did intervals on the Y's treadmills.  Different folks did slightly different variations, but the base workout was:

 - 10 minutes warm-up.
 - 5 x (4:00 @ 10K Pace /  2:00 easy)
 - 5 minutes cool down.

I felt good.  Like we got a lot done.

Run Total: 2 x running workouts (6.5, 4.5); 11-miles total (44 pts total).

Total Points for the Week: 100.


Final Thoughts
A hundred or so points is probably right where I need to be for this part of the season.  Early season like this is all about "training to train" or basically getting ready for the hard work that comes once the weather warms up.

I don't like to increase my point totals by more than ten to fifteen percent, so this week was kind of a key week.  With a hundred points under my belt, I'm now ready to get into some serious training going forward.