Training

The best part of this week was my swimming.  It’s odd to think that.  I wanted to swim 600m each day and I managed to do that, even doing 650m one of the 4 days.  A couple weeks ago when I was getting frustrated and not seeing any progress, I decided to create a spreadsheet to track how I was doing.  The statistic of interest was to see how much rest I was taking for every 100m I swam.  Here is what that looks like since I first started swimming 2 months ago:

I only logged swims that were done in a proper 25m pool so I can sure the distances are correct.  As can be seen, my rest time per 100m swam has some down drastically.  The goal is basically to get that down to zero.

For my swims, I can actually manage 100m without a rest at the start and then 1-2 75m swim sets and then I’m down to 50m at a time as I get tired.  I can sense though that I’m getting close to 100m sets and if I can make that, it would go a long way to swimming 400-500m without stopping.

On the running side, I am still unable to run 3 days of 5 miles each, but I will keep trying.

Cycling was OK, but I didn’t get my long ride done today.  I got a flat and had to spend 15 mins changing the tube and then by then I was just not mentally ready to ride for a couple more hours.

 

Goals for Next Week: I’m travelling this week so I wouldn’t be able to do proper measured swims, but I’ll aim for swimming time and work on doing 15 mins for each swim day.  I will again shoot for running 5 miles 3 days a week.  One of my cycling days will need to be on an indoor bike so I’m not hopeful, but I will aim to at least get in a 40-50 mile ride on the weekend

 

This was a mixed week.  I had an unexpected 1-night  business trip and that threw a wrench into my plans.  But, in the end I still managed 7 hours of training time.

Cycling was the best where I got in all the planned rides with a long ride of 50 miles today.

On the running front I only managed to run two days and one of those was only for 1.5 miles as it was on the treadmill at my hotel and I just couldn’t stand to run any longer.

I have been frustrated with my swimming recently and so I decided to try something new….neoprene shorts.  I know they are a crutch, but the way I look at it, I only plan to do 2 triathlons, an Ironman 70.3 in April 2019 and an Ironman in November 2019 and both will be wetsuit legal.  I bought a pair of Tyr Hurricane Neo Shorts Cat 1.

I swam with them on Saturday and I loved them.  Typically I can only swim 25m at a time and must take a brief breather.  With the neoprene shorts, I was able to swim 50m at a time.  My arms were actually getting tired.  That never happened before as I guess I wasn’t working them as much.  The neoprene shorts are allowing me to swim more and give my arms a better workout.  I plan to continue to use them for a while and perhaps even permanently.  I’ll see how it goes.

 

Goals for Next Week: I need to get my running back on schedule so I will be aiming for 5 miles a day for the 3 running days.  I don’t’ expect my cycling to change much from last week so 17-18 miles on the week day and at least 40 miles, if not 50 miles on the weekend.  With my swimming I’m going to bump the distance to 600m each of the 4 days.

 

This week was pretty similar to last week in terms of the amount of workout time of just under 8 hours.

The most frustrating part of my training is the swimming. I just don’t feel as though I’m getting any better. For a change, I’m going to try using the Total Immersion swimming methodology for this week.  I had bought the video course on Udemy a while back when it was on sale and I just picked up a couple books on the program.  I decided that for this week, I’m not going to focus on swimming laps, but instead, I’m just going to focus on the skills from the program to see if it can help with my sinking legs.  I’m 90% sure that is the source of all my current issues.

 

Goals for the Week: I don’t expect any changes to my running and cycling.  Swimming wil be to simply do the Total Immersion skills and then perhaps go to the pool one day towards the end of the week to see if I can see ay difference