Month: August 2018

Some Swimming Progress?

Posted by Derek on in SwimTraining, Training

I think it’s fair to say that swimming will be the make or break event in my Ironman 70.3 and Ironman career.  I know I need to train for the bike and run, but I’m 100% certain they will not be an issue.  Swimming on the other hand is the event where all my doubts lie.

Most half Ironman training plans seem to be right around 20 weeks and they want you to be able to swim 400-500m continuously before starting the plan.  I can’t do that as yet.  But, given a 20-week plan, it would mean that I have just about 14 weeks (3 months) to get to being able to swim 500m continuously.

I’ve been swimming 500m during my workouts, with breaks, and while I could see small improvements, it just seemed that getting there in 3 months would be a close call.

Today was the first time where I did my 500m and I actually felt as though, yes, I can do this.  I still had to take breaks, but I didn’t have that sucking air feeling after each length.

 

Week in Review: August 6 – August 12 2018

Posted by Derek on in BikeTraining, RunTraining, SwimTraining, Training, Weekly Review

This week wasn’t bad.  My running went reasonably well with two 5-mile days.  Wednesday was a bit sucky and I only ran 3 miles that day.

This was the second week of my advanced swimming class.  I didn’t actually take part in any of the class and I simply swam laps on my own.  The great things is that I swam 500m each of the days.  The 4th class day was cancelled due to weather.  I can tell I am progressing in my swimming and although I can only swim 25m at a time, the amount of break I need between laps is less.  I can’t wait until that break is non-existent.

The bike went well, but for the second week in a row, I didn’t do a long ride on the weekend.  It was raining the entire weekend and I found a one hour gap where I can ride without the rain, but the road was wet so I went slower than normal.  I bought a bike trainer that will arrive this coming week so Iwill no longer have any weather excuse!

 

Goals for Next Week: I’m traveling this coming week so I wouldn’t have the 25m pool to swim in.  I’ll be swimming in in the hotel pool.  So, instead of worrying about distance, I’ll be aiming to do 15 mins of swim each of my swim days.  I’ll be on the indoor gym bike so I’ll go for 1 hour while traveling.  I’ll be back home for the weekend and shoot for a 40-45 mile bike ride.  I may do that on Zwift to try it out.  Running would be three 5-mile days

Week in Review: July 30 – August 5 2018

Posted by Derek on in BikeTraining, RunTraining, SwimTraining, Training, Weekly Review

This week went great up until the last day.  My running started off a bit disappointing.  I went for my run on Monday and my legs were just tired.  I noticed that from the previous Monday too.  I think running the day after my long ride is the issue.  I ended up only running 2 miles on Monday.  My other two running days went really well though.  I ran 5 miles on both Wednesday and Friday without any walking breaks.  I think 5 miles will be my standard run moving forward.  I don’t plan to bump that up for a while.  I’ll probably stick to that through August

This week was the first week of my advanced swimming class. It was a bit disappointing though in that I didn’t really learn anything.  The other folks were much weaker than me so the instructor focused on them.  She did give me a couple tips, but that was it.  On Thursday I ended up lap swimming on my own.  The good news is that for 2 of the 4 days this week, I did lap swimming and I did 400m in total on Wednesday and 450m on Thursday.  I was nice to swim in a proper pool and measure the distance vs swimming in the community pool.  I can tell I’m getting fitter, but I still can’t swim more than 50m without having to take a break.

My bike riding was decent.  I did about 17 miles each of the weekdays, but today (Saturday) was the disappointing ride.  I was planning to ride 40 miles, but I just felt so tired, I ended up only riding 15 miles.  I don’t think the late swimming in the evenings and early morning workouts helped.

For the week, I ended up with about 6 hrs of workout time:

Goals for Next Week: I hope to swim at least 400m each of the swimming days and to hit 500m on at least one of the days.  I’ll do three 5-mile runs and stick to my normal bike rides.  For next week, I will try again to do a long 40-mile ride.