Month: December 2018

The week started off great, but by Thursday, it ended up being rather tough.  For my swim on Thursday, I had to take a few short breaks which is unusual based on how I’ve been swimming recently.  I was just tired.  I hoped the rest day on Friday would have helped, but I was still tried on Saturday.

I managed to complete all my workouts based on the distances and times, but for my Saturday run, I did it as a normal aerobic run and didn’t do the 11×30 sec intervals.

In retrospect, I think there were a couple factors involved:

• This was my biggest week ending at 10.5 hours of training
• Since the pool I swim at was closed both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I had to rearrange my workouts.  I also moved cycling around to try and take advantage of the good weather.  I think this ended up pushing a lot of my harder workouts to the start of the week

 

Plan For Next Week:

I hope to minimize the workout reshuffling, but there will be a little as I try and get the linger bike ride done outside on the better day of the week.  In total though, this coming will be be a similar load to the week that just ended.  The biggest challenge will be swimming 2350m which will be longest swim by quite a bit.

 

Today marks the end of my fourth week of training and the end of my first training block.   The 20-week plan I’m following is dividing into five 4-week training block.  The first 2 blocks (8 weeks) are the “Base” phase.  Every 4th week is a recovery week so I had it a bit easier this week than the previous 3, but I still did over 8 hrs of training!

 

I read this book this week and it was rather interesting.  It looks at all the different ways that you can get faster on the swim, bike and run and how much faster.  It was rather depressing to read about all the various things triathletes can do and the very small benefit it would produce.  You can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on various components or equipment and only see speed increases of “minutes” over the course of an 112 mile Ironman bike segment.  For professionals, that is important, but for someone like me who’s goal is to “simply finish”, it may not matter.

Now, having read the book, I still ordered an aero helmet, but that is a small price compared to deep section wheels which I can now see while it would make my bikelook cooler, for the cost, they just aren’t worth it “for me”

 

Plan For Next Week:

This upcoming week is going to involve a lot of workout shuffling.  I’m not working this week so I don’t need to swim in the evenings and I can actually do longer workouts midweek instead of waiting for the weekend.  So, I’ll be monitoring the weather and trying to do my bike rides outdoors when the weather is nice.  Also, since Christmas is Tuesday, the pool I swim at is closed on Monday and Tuesday and so that removes two days that I can’t actually swim.

This was the first week of the plan where I had to be shuffling around my workouts.  I got them all done, but just on different days.  The week started with my having to move my Monday swim so I could have attended my son’s choir concert.  Then I shuffled around my weekend workouts so I can do my long bike ride on Sunday when the weather was nicer and allowed me to ride outside….a rare occurrence these days.

I’m really getting used to riding indoors, but for now, an hour seems to be as much as I could bear.  This is an improvement though as it wasn’t long ago, 30 mins was a struggle.

I ended the week with 10 hours of workout time.  My largest ever.  I did hit 9 hours a couple times previously

 

Plan For Next Week:

This is a recovery week on my plan so things will be easier.