33 Days and 33 Nights until IMAZ

Total Volume – 15.6 hours.  This includes one hour of strength training on Monday, which I did before work for a change of pace.  Of course, the previous week was a recovery week, so that makes Monday morning a little more appealing, you know?

Swim – 3.7 hours, 8600 meters. Swim workouts were back up to snuff again this week.  In fact, this represents the second most distance I have ever swum in a week.  One of the sets was a skills and drill session, nothing much to report there, except that I had to shorten it by a few hundred meters due to sleeping in an extra ten minutes.  (I had an immovable time constraint on the other side.)  The last swim was on Sunday morning before my long run.  I added a 1000 meter continuous swim here as sort of a baseline test.  I am (hopefully) going to receive my wetsuit this week, and I will then do another 1000 meter swim in the wetsuit to see how much faster it is, and also to gauge how it fits and performs.  In case you were wondering, my time for the 1000 meters was 18:47 - about 1:53 per 100m.  This is with a fatigued body, though...  The long swim set for the week was 3900 meters done as 13 X 300 meters.  This is the first time that I have swum a main set that is as long or longer than the IM swim, so that is a nice milestone.  I took about a 20 second recovery between reps, and my total time for the set was 1:16:24, which equates to a pace of about 1:51/100 meters when you take out the recovery time.  Here's another couple of neat factoids from the swim.  On previous long sets, I had been troubled by foot and calf cramps late in the set, and they were almost entirely absent here.  Second, I held 16 SPL for all but the last length of the first 10 reps.  In all, the swim is coming along nicely.  This week is a 4200 meter set and the week after that is a 4200 meter continuous swim.   

Bike – 6.5 hours, 123.1 miles.  Just two rides this week, and only one was an honest-to-gosh bike ride.  The first "ride" was my usual spin class on Thursday morning, and the usual instructor was there playing the usual music.  Life was good.  Except that I broke the first two bikes that I tried out.  The first one had a seat that was loose, and I leaned forward and the nose pitched down.  The second I tried to adjust the cage to hold my bottle and it snapped.  Whatever.  Now, you might remember that my last ride featured two flat tires and I was going to have that examined at the LBS.  The first thing the mechanic at the LBS said was that I needed a new chain and cassette.  Great.  $200 later (I got a couple more things...) and I have a nearly new drivetrain (same chainring...) with a 13-24 cassette in place of my previous 12-23.  So this was the first long ride on the new cassette, and I have to say that I think the new gearing will work out a little better for me.  There are a couple of the new gears that I find very useful, and I don't miss the old gears at all.  Now, onto the ride itself:  This was my first ever ride over 100 miles.  I started out going north, and there was no wind to speak of.  I held my average at about 20 MPH for the first hour, which also featured some westward legs.  The wind was barely there, but what little there was was out of the east.  The second hour was a lot of north and some west, and I was trucking along nicely.  Not too far into the second hour, I discovered that I was hydrating too aggressively.  I had to stop to pee.  Not only that, I had to stop two more times on the ride to pee, plus I peed immediately after the ride.  That's too much for a 5.5 hour ride.  But it's hard to gauge hydration vs. temperature, and it was cool that morning.  Now, there was about a 10 mile stretch to the west just after the second hour where I was cruising along at 20.5 - 21 MPH.  That was cool, but I knew I was going to pay for it later.  So later in the ride, I start heading east, and I notice that my speed is dropping.  I am wondering if it is because I am wavering, or if it's the wind.  It's hard to tell, because it was not a killer wind, and you going right against it.  So I was encouraged when I turned west for a couple of miles late in the ride, and I was holding 22.5 easy when I had previously struggled to keep 18.  That, and I saw a couple of surveying stakes and the tape was fluttering westward.  All right, nearly home, I happened to glance at the cyclometer when it went from 99.99 to 100.00.  That was cool.  Finished at 104.6, and 5:26 cycling time.  Then, I went out and ran about 2.7 miles, and it was tough.  Of course, my first mile was too fast again - 7:48.  I want to try to run 8:20 - 8:30 pace in Arizona, and I am still not able to hold back enough!  My legs were rather stiff, and maybe I felt like I was starting to hit my rhythm in the 3rd mile, but by then it was time to stop, so it's easy to fool yourself.  In all, taking the Friday AM swim, it's like I did an Ironman.  Except, that instead of the day before, the swim would be that morning.  And I'd have to ride for another 7.5 miles.  Oh yeah, and I'd be running about TEN TIMES as much as I did Saturday!

Run – 4.3 hours, 30.6 miles.  Three runs this week.  The first was an easy 30 minute spin, which of course ended with a session at the park for Grace and Ellie to climb and swing and slide.  The second was my first "intermediate" run.  This was on Thursday. (I had meant to run on Wednesday, but it was raining cats and dogs.)  It was a 50 minute run, then a 10 minute "recovery" at the park to let the girls stretch their legs and run and play, then another 25 minutes to run home.  This was surprisingly easy, and if you read my post on golf carts last week, this is when I though of it.  Now, the long run was 2 hours on Sunday morning, following my last swim session of the week.  I started out with the thought that this was going to be a long, tough run, because my legs were so fatigued from Saturday's ride.  The first two miles only confirmed that belief.  Then, continuing a theme the bike ride on Sat, I had to stop to pee (under a bridge ) only 2.5 miles into the run.  I was able to back off on hydration enough to make it the rest of the way without stopping.  Now, after the pit-stop, my 15-minute timer was early, based on my mileage.  It went off for the second time, and I was not nearly to the point where I usually am, and I thought "at least I am 1/4 of the way through this run, but it's gonna be a long time yet."  However, much to my surprise, I found myself holding an easy pace and falling into a nice rhythm.  I was turning 8:10 - 8:20 miles and it did not feel like an extraordinary effort.  My legs were a little dead, but so what?  This is what they are going to feel like in Arizona, right?  Finally, to end it all, I picked up the effort level and closed with a 7:20 mile.  Woo-hoo!  That's a great finish to the week, and a great confidence builder to know that I can run like that with legs that feel worn out.

Stay tuned.  I've got two more hard weeks and three weeks of taper until IMAZ.