Author: Derek

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

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.

The plan for today’s long workout was a 40-mile bike ride followed by a 2-mile run.  A brick session.  My alarm went off at 5am and I woke up all stiff and sore.  My body felt really tired.  I wondered if my scuba diving yesterday was a mistake!

Anyway, I am determine not to skip any workouts as I know if I miss one, it would be that much easier to miss a second and a third.  I decided that I will always get up and do a workout, even if I have to shorten the distance or duration.  So I got up and figured that worse case I would ride 15-20 miles and skip the run.

The ride went well and at each checkpoint, I evaluated how I felt and went a bit more, but even at the 35 mile point, I figured I would skip the run.  But, I ended up going the 40 miles and I also ended up doing my run.

I’m glad I did as the run actually felt great.  Mind you, the legs still felt weird but surprising I didn’t have that jelly-leg feeling and I was actually able to run right out of my transition.  I had a hard time controlling my pace and HR as my legs just wanted to keep going at a faster than normal pace, so I switched to running 1-min, walking 1-min.  For the second, I moved to running 2-mins, walking 1-min

In the end, I did my 40-mile bike and 2-mile run in just under 3 hours.

For this week, I met my goal of swimming 10 mins each day.

For the week, I managed to up my workout time by a hour over the last few weeks, doing 7 hrs 41 mins.

Goals for Next Week: This will be week one of a 2-week advanced swimming class so I’m not sure how much actually swimming I’ll do.  I have to believe it’ll be more than 10 mins, but for this week, I’ll do whatever I can get during the class.  This week I’ll make 4-miles my shortest run distance and I expect to do at least 14 miles  for the week.  If the legs are feeling good, I may take one of my runs to 5 miles.  On the bike, I will stick to 15 miles for my regular ride and I’ll do 40 miles for my long ride.