Author: Derek

Week in Review: July 16 – July 22 2018

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

This week is typical of what I can expect once a month.  Every month, I fly to FL to work at my company’s office for a week.  The difficulty with that is that I don’t have my bike and my swimming options are limited.

For the trip this past week, I chose to stay in a different hotel to the one I typically stay at.  My typical hotel has a gym, but it doesn’t have a stationary bike.  The hotel I stayed at had a stationary bike and a slightly larger pool.

So, my 2 weekday bike rides were done on an indoor bike.  For the first one on Tuesday, I decided to just listen to my music.  That was booooring.  I couldn’t wait to be done.  Also, for some reason, it is mentally hard to pedal like I would on the road.  So, I took the opportunity to do it as a high cadence workout doing the entire ride at 100RPM or higher.

For the Thursday morning ride, I decided to watch a movie.  That made the time go much faster.  Again, I did the whole ride at 100RPM or higher.

For my long ride, I was back home and did a 37-mile ride.  It felt pretty good.  Due to the excessively high temperatures in the DFW area this week, I wanted to ensure I was done while it was still cool, so I started at 5:30am doing the first 30-45 mins in the dark.  By the time I was done, the temperature was only 80F.

I continued to swim, doing my 4 swim days at the hotel pool.  The pool is only 15m so it involved a lot of laps.  I managed to swim at least 200m per day.  I can tell that I need less and less rest between laps, for for now, I think I can only swim about 50m before needing a rest.

Running went well and was typical of previous week.

My training time was right about the same as last week at 6 hrs 36 mins.

Goals for Next Week: I expect my week will be similar to this past one, but I would like to thrown in more swimming time.  Last week I would do about 6 mins of actual swimming time each session.  I’ll look to move that to about 10 mins

Week in Review: July 9 – July 15 2018

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

This week went pretty well.  My goal was to swim at least 200m each of the 4 days that I had my swimming lessons, and I managed to do that.  I didn’t make my stretch goal of swimming 400m on one of the days, but I can tell I’m slowly building up endurance in that I need rest less time between 25m lengths.

Friday was tough as my body felt really tired.  I was glad to have the rest day on Saturday.

I didn’t do a brick work today as I wanted to extend my long ride to 35 miles, which I did, and I decided that it was best to not try and run after that.  I did run 4 miles on two my 3 running days though so I ran the same total of 11 miles as I have done for the past few weeks.

My workout time went up to 6 hrs 41 mins this week.  A new high.  Here is what my week looked like:

 

Goals For Next Week: I’m travelling to FL this week so I wouldn’t have my bike, but I hope to do the equivalent amount of biking on an indoor bike.  I will continue to do 35 miles for my long bike ride, but I will throw in the 1.5 mile run immediately after.  Total running for the week will be 12.5 miles and I hope to do a total of 1000m of swimming

Beginner Swimming Lessons – Done

Posted by Derek on in SwimTraining, Training

This week marked the end of my 2-week beginner swimming class. It was successful in that by the second day, I was swimming freestyle with side-breathing.  Mind you, I wasn’t swimming fast nor was I swimming far, but I was swimming nonetheless.  I would swim 25m and then need many minutes of rest before I can swim another length.

That was when the lessons became somewhat useless.  I was in a class with folks that were afraid of the water, but by the second day, I was mostly on my own as the instructors focused on the beginner adults.  I would swim lengths of the pool taking breaks while the class did other things.

For the second week, I aimed to swim at least 200m each day in total and I managed to do that.  While I can’t swim more than 25m at a time without a rest, I have noticed the amount of rest I need is getting less and less.

I have signed up for the advanced class which starts in two weeks time, so for the next two weeks until then, I’ll simply go swim 4 days a week and work on reducing the rest time even more and aim to try and swim 50m at a time instead of 25.

This reminds me of when I first started running where I could barely run a couple blocks without huffing and puffing and having to walk, but over time the amount of walking got less and less until I didn’t need to walk, and the huffing-and-puffing went away.

I just need to keep working at it.

My first swim goal is to swim 400m without stopping.  That would be quite a milestone as that is the distance I had to swim for my Divemaster certification and it took me 17min 39secs.

Week in Review: July 2 – July 8 2018

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

The highlight for this week was the first week of the beginner swim class that I’m taking.  By the second day, I was able to swim freestyle with side breathing.  Now, I can only swim 25m at a time then have to take a brief rest then swim another 25m, but after that 50m I need about 5 mins rest.  The goal though was to learn to swim with side breathing and I accomplished that.  Now I need to work on my endurance.

In running and biking, I did the same distances as the previous week.  11 miles running and 60 miles biking.  I did my second ever brick session today, running 1.5 miles right after my 30-mile bike ride.  Legs felt like jelly, but that was to be expected.  By about the 0.75-mile mark, my legs felt fine in that they didn’t feel like jelly, but they were still tire though, but more like the tired feeling at the end of a long run.

Here is my week from TrainingPeaks:

 

Goals For Next Week: I will keep the amount of running the same.  For the biking, I will add 5 miles to the long bike ride.  For swimming, I hope to log at least 200m for each of the 4 days of my swimming class with a stretch goal of reaching 400m on one of those days.