still ticking

Well, as I predicted a couple of weeks ago, my training schedule has indeed been shredded with travel

My originally planned 13’ish hours a week has become 9-10.5 hours a week…still not horrible..like not ‘2-3’ hours a week…so that’s good 🙂

My main focus was to maintain the Intensity of run and bike workouts, even if they ended up a bit shorter…and even move up the Intensity in some of the bike workouts to compensate for shorter volume…and I find that travel, and higher-than-normal ‘outside’ stress takes its toll on my ability to recover, so build that in as a factor and cut down my overall training volume anyway.

The main casualty has been the swim training…the most difficult to maintain when travelling to different cities, and with a busy schedule with other ‘stuff’.  I didn’t have much luck with the pool thing…I had a good swim workout on Tuesday May 17, and that was the last one until today…today lasted 35 minutes…it was all I could take…so got out of the water early..my training log note said in part

“heavy as brick in the water today…ugly”

sooooo how did I end up going 11 days without a swim in the middle of a 12 week Half Iron training schedule?…good question.  I had originally thought that I would at least get some drills and form-focused swimming in the hotel pools at my various destinations…but it started in Toronto…I called the hotel in advance, and they said yes, their outdoor pool would be open for the weekend that I was going to be there…turns out that ‘yes’ the pool ‘area’ was open…the pool just didn’t have any water in it.

and coming back from Buffalo business meetings this past Wednesday, storms stepped on the lap schedule of the local YMCA where they close the pool for 30 minutes after each roll of thunder, and a tight work schedule just didn’t leave much room.

sooo, once again we press forward to get the training back on track…as life happens.

My next planned travel is June 23 as I head out west to Calgary and Vancouver in advance of our Half Iron race on July 3.

I just completed week 7 of the 12 week training schedule, and although my quads are still stiff today from my 2 hour run on Thursday and 3 hour bike ride yesterday…closer together than I would have liked, but wanted to get them in this week, so knew that the long run would pull some energy from the long ride…not horrible though…all other senior body parts…although complaining somewhat…are still operational…so good…although feeling a bit worn, so need to watch that I don’t get sick in here somewhere…and need to get those legs recovered before hitting them with more Intensity again…so swim focus this week, hit some Intensity on the run when the legs come back, and see if I can stand on a BIG day by Saturday, with the local YMCA open water swim again in the morning, followed by a hit-it-hard-on-the-bike for 3 hours and a brick run to finish off the day

The remaining 5 weeks of training is really 3 weeks to fine-tune…and pick up the swimming to the degree possible…and then 2 weeks leading into a taper for the race, with travel the weekend before the race…so we’re getting down to the short strokes as it were.

My bike conditioning is in good shape…my run decent…swimming…well…I need to _really_ get in some quality time the next 3 weeks to pull that up to where it should be.

…oh and most importantly, not break something at this point…not a lot of time to come back before the race, so I’ll be leaning a bit conservative if things feel out of kilter…at least that’s the ‘plan de jour’ 🙂