Workouts from the weekend and this week.

Hello Dear Readers!

It has been a busy holiday weekend but I did get my workouts in (well sort of). Here is the breakdown:

Saturday's Run Workout (5/23/09)

I ran 16 miles Saturday morning. I ran it in 2 hours 35 minutes. Kept my pace a little quicker than planned and of course ran the last mile faster than race pace. I was a little tired and my legs didn't feel super strong, but I was still happy with the workout. It was pretty hot that day so that is good heat training for me.

Sunday's Bike Workout 5/24/09

This was a planned 110 Mile Bike session with a 3 mile transition run afterwords. I had planned to get up early and meet Kevin (my coach) and some other triathletes for the first 70 miles or so. Believe me, these rides can be boring and sometimes it is nice to do it with other people.

As a lot of you know, I am NOT a morning person. But I still got up at 5:30 am. Grabbed some coffee and breakfast and got on the road by 6:45 AM to ride to our meeting point. Remember this is memorial day weekend and I must have still been sleepy. I was one block away from my house when my rear tire blew! Apparently some super responsible party person thought it was brilliant to break a bunch of beer bottles in the road in my neighborhood. Granted it was my fault for not looking more closely where I was going, but STILL!!!!

Anyway, rather than change my tire out just down my street, I duck walked it back to the house and changed my tire. Of course as luck would have it, I had a side puncture on my brand new tire! So whole tire off, replace with a new one (I always have a spare) and put a new tube in. Of course, by this time, the riding group had already left so I was left to ride alone.

The ride still went fairly well, until around mile 50 I continued to have the "chaffing" issues I wrote about previously. As the miles went by it got worse and worse. At mile sixty I decided that I had enough and went home. I finished the workout with my three mile transition run, which by the way I ran very quickly and very well.

I made a mental note to myself to call Kevin and schedule a bike fit session to see if my seat placement was correct (more on this later in the blog).

Monday's Swim Session 5/25/09

Despite my bad luck on Sunday, my swim session the next day was wonderful I had 3000 meters to do. Here's the breakdown:

Warm Up: 3 x 300 as 1 free/ 1 kick 1 choice on 20 sec. rest, 4 x 100 free or pull easy on 15 sec. rest.
Main Set: 14 x 100 as: 25 drill/50free/25drill on 10 sec. rest.
Cool Down: 6 x 50 as: 4 free/ 4 drill/ 4 kick easy on 10 sec. rest.

I finished it in a little over 1 hour. This was perfect because I lost about 10 minutes due to the kicking drills. My kick is terrible as it is and with the hard run and bike sessions over the weekend, my legs were trashed. But I was still very happy I did as well as I did.

Tuesday's Bike Trainer and Run Session 5/26/09

So now we are up to today. I had the following bike/run combination workout:

20 MIN WARM UP
12 min at Hr#4 low (I kept it around 147 BPM here)
Run 2 miles at Moderate pace (30-40 sec. under easy run pace, I ran it in 8:25 and 7:53 respectively)
8 min at Hr#4 middle (Kept my heart rate around 151 here)
Run 1 miles at Moderate pace (This was done in 8:07)
6 min at Hr#4 high (Maxed my heart rate out at about 160 here)
Run 1 miles at Moderate pace (This was done in 8:32)
15 min. cool down

Again my endurance and pain thresholds are getting better because these are very fast times for me.

As promised, I shall revisit my "chaffing" issue. As I said earlier in the blog, the pain after mile 60 was unbearable so I went to Kevin today to take a look at my seat position, riding angles, etc.) Boy was I right! Somehow over the last month or so, my seat had slid almost all the way back on the seat post. As a result, I was way too hunched over while riding in the aero position. Normally you want your elbows to rest at around a 85 degree angle from your shoulders. Mine was way over 100 degrees! So we readjusted the seat. After looking at the forward position we decided to raise the seat a little as well as bring the handlebars back a little to get my elbows as close to the optimum angle as possible.

Hopefully these changes will result in more comfort and riding economy during my training and racing. I rode about 20 miles during the bike/run session today and I seemed a lot better. But the real test will be during my long ride this weekend.

That's all for now!

Tri your best,

Bill