Triathlon Diary: 2/18 to 2/24 (Week 2)

The Stratford YMCA Sweetheart Race was this week, and that made coming up  with a training schedule kind of a challenge.  I train on a four-week schedule, three working weeks followed by a rest week, and this was a scheduled Week 2, and given that the Sweetheart Race was more Sally's thing than mine, I didn't want to throw my whole schedule off just for that one four-miler.

But I still tried to arrange things to put as much of the week's work as far up front as possible because, let's face it, when you enter a race, you still want to give yourself a chance to do well.  Luckily, I had the first three days of the week off.



Swim
I only got in the water once this week, on Tuesday morning.  And it started out ugly.  But I worked through it, and eventually my body kind of came around.  Given that I rarely swim first thing in the morning, I suppose that's about the best that can be expected.

The workout went like this:

• 200 SKIPS (long warm up)
• 5 x 100 @ 1:25 (tempo)
• 5 x 100 pull @ 1:30
• 5 x 6 @ :55 (hard; alternating butterfly & freestyle)
• 100 warm down

It was nice to get the stroke work in.  And all three of the butterfly 50s were under :35, so that's good, I guess.

Swim Total: 1 swim (2400 yard); 24 pts.

Bike

I rode into work Thursday and Friday, and it sucked hard both days.  It was 24-degrees Thursday morning with what my phone called 16 mph of wind.  Headwind.  Friday was a little better, but the morning temp was still not quite 30-degrees, and the wind--all 8 mph of it--was still straight into my teeth.  The ride back to the train station Friday afternoon was a little Hell, but it was still windy as all Hell.

Then yesterday I had a bit of a conundrum.  I'd planned to take my kids to the YMCA to swim, but neither of them wanted to go.  Meanwhile, the temperature outside got all the way up to 50-degrees, and although it was overcast, it wasn't quite raining.  So I ran to my room, grabbed my bike stuff, and headed out.

Now, I would never call time spent on my actual rode bike bad, especially when this was the first time I'd actually had a chance to get on it since the New Year.  However, it did start, well, sleeting almost the instant that I got on my bike, and it was windy, and I ran over a piece of glass right at the ten-mile mark.  Granted, I could have changed the tire and kept riding, but I felt like God was trying to tell me that I shouldn't push it the day after a race.  So since I was only about a quarter-mile from the house, I just took off my shoes and walked it back home.

I'm ashamed to say that I didn't even change the tire before putting the bike away.  I guess I'll just have to get to it Saturday morning, God willing.

Riding Total: 2 x commute rides, 1 x half-ass road ride (33 miles); 33 pts.

Run

The good news in all of this is that I ran three times this week.  Sally and I went out for a five-miler together on Monday, and while I'd planned to make it a long, slow seven-miler, the fact is that Sally wanted to race.  So we pushed the pace and turned it into a tempo run, and then, instead of heading home on my own while Sally drove back in the car, I just knocked off when she did.  

I put in a short, easy run on Wednesday, and then Saturday was the race.  The course is only four miles, but it's sharply rolling with a hard climb right at the three mile mark.  I'll write a full race report later in the week, but for now, I'll just say that I was very pleased with how I ran, and Sally, of course, won her Age Group again.

Run Total: 3 runs (4.8, 3.25, & 5 miles: 13 miles total); 52 pts.

Total Points for the Week: 109.3

Final Thoughts

I had hoped to go for between 120 and 130 points, but 109.3 isn't bad.  It's only February, and with it being a race week and all, a little training wackiness is to be expected.  Moreover, what I lacked in volume this week, I more than made up for in intensity, and that's not a bad thing.

My next race of the season is Brian's Beachside Boogie, a 2-mile/10-mile/2-mile offroad duathlon, and I feel like I'll be ready for it.  The race is in mid-April.  After that, there's the Y-Tri and the Shamrock Duathlon in May, and an as-yet-to-be-determined Olympic Triathlon in either mid-June or mid-July.  With that in mind, I know that I need to start putting some longer workouts together, but right now I still feel like I'm building my base.  Hopefully by mid-March, the weather will better support some long bike rides.  Until then, I just want to keep running as much as I can, doing as many running intervals and tempo runs as I feel like my body can handle to prepare for the challenges of the season ahead.