Alrighty, today was great! It started with some homework, holy crap my class may kill me! That thing is going an an unbelievable pace. I had a test on Tuesday and man oh man am I glad I studied a lot. I feel like I did well, but it was a bit sketchy as I only finally grasped one of the major concepts the same day. I felt good about 99% of the test, so unless I made some stupid mistakes, I should get a good mark. I am going for 91%+ in this course, which will bring my overall average back up to 90%. Right now it's 89.6, which technically rounds-up to 90..but I want the real deal! So as well as being good with my training, I need to make sure that school is a priority. We will have either a test or quiz every other class. This week is a bit nuts. We had a test on Tuesday, then quiz Thursday, and another unit test on Tuesday, talk about fast.
So onto training stuff. I did not spin on Tuesday, partially because I do not know what the heck I should be doing for my base bike training and partially because I want to get 100% well before throwing more training load on the fire. Also, it's a pain in the butt to set-up my bike on the trainer! I think I will start my serious base building on the bike at the beginning of November. However, I still do need to get some bike sessions in to keep my legs used to it. Thursday should work well for that.
As for what type of training...what am I supposed to do for base training on a bike? With my swimming 3 Monday, Wednesday and Friday and Running Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday(Sunday running starts this week) I am really hesitant to add too much cycling. I think Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday like I planned int he first place will work very well for me, but do I just do long slow miles? Do I do drills? Do I do threshold work? Do I work on improving my cardiovascular system? If so, do I do that through higher intensity training?
I recently read an article talking about how the body will adapt when it has to. So if you are not doing stuff that causes your body to adapt much, it won't. Doing harder efforts forces your body to adapt and gets your base built far faster and more effectively while minimizing those endless miles and hours spent on the bike. The article also talked about how those really long miles can lead to fatigue setting in. After being pretty active my whole life, and taking various physiology and biology courses through the years, this makes a great deal of sense to me. One program I was looking at has you doing 20 minute sets at 95% of threshold with as little recovery as possible. Start with 10 minutes and work your way to only having 5 minutes recovery between sets a bit down the road. This excites me a lot for 2 reasons. Reason #1 I have a very limited amount of time, and getting more bang for my buck is always a better thing. Reason #2. Those efforts seem a hell of a lot like doing a TT, and I am training specifically to do time trials! I have read a ton of specificity of training(thanks Joe Friel, I can see 2 of your books from where I sit.) I usually wouldn't bother with specificity of training until later, but hell, if it will do the job now, that seems like a win-win!
In addition to doing these threshold rides, I feel like I need to throw in some technique building stuff. I have also read a lot about how proper technique(well, better) can drastically improve your efficiency on the bike, so hey, I'm all for that. I do have a major tendency to just mash my pedals pretty hard, though I spent a lot of time trying to keep my cadence up. I feel like drills would be a really good thing to incorporate, so maybe I can find a way to add them into a warm-up before I get into my main sets.
So I ran today, I did the 7k that I assigned myself, and I ran to a new playlist! As a result, I ran way harder than I probably should have. I checked my HR and I was way up there right from the get go. It seemed way higher than it should have been. I tried slowing down, but my HR wouldn't come down. At one point, I said "screw-it, I am feeling good, lets go play!" I came in with a PR in each segment I hit on Strava as well as a 4th overall on a segment that I didn't even know existed. The shoes I am currently running in are Saucony Ride 5's. Before my fractured fibula, I ran a ton in the 4's and they were super amazingly comfy. When they had tons of mileage, I retired them and bought a pair of 5's. From the get go, they seemed just as good, but on longer runs I was getting hot spots just on the outside of the "knuckle" of my big toe, right at the bottom. Not exactly on the balls of my feet, but on the sides of the balls. I assumed this would pass but it never really did. I got minor blisters a few times, but just attributed it to them being a different shoe ans suffered though it. I had after all put elastic laces in them to make triathlon transition faster, and I fell in love with elastic laces. Yanks to be exact. They made everything super comfy once you got the tension correct and made my brick sessions and triathlon transitions a snap. I remember having the hot spot problem with laces in the shoes and for a while I thought the elastic laces fixed it. Nope. Luckily I wasn't putting in much mileage, so it wasn't becoming a problem.
Since I started my base running plan, I have noticed the issue getting a little bit worse each week. After my run today, which was just over 7k, and the fastest pace at that distance since my 44:30 10k race back in April, I arrived home with some pretty sore feet. After taking my shoes off, I found blisters on both feet at the hot spots. I always run in running socks,and have tried double layer socks with not much success, so I decided it was time for new shoes! The current ones have 223k on Strava and I ran in them for the entirety of last season as well, so I think buying new ones is totally justified, as the soles are showing some heavy signs of wear. After lots of talking with the salesperson(who runs 31 minute 10k's...holy crap!) in my local running room, and testing out 6 different pairs of shoes, I immediately ruled-out the Saucony ride 7's. I wasn't sure if trying on a new pair of shoes while I had blisters was a good idea, but hey, the hot spots will be hyper sensitive, so if anything rubs, I will know...and as I was informed, if there are hos spots now, they will not be better 20k in! Very sound advice. I settled on some Nike Zoom Pegasus 31's. To be honest, I looked at them and thought to myself "are you kidding me? This guy is giving me Nike shoes to try? Does he have any idea that I am a serious runner? Is this a joke? This was of course before I found-out how fast this guy is! After picking them out of all six pairs he showed me, he smiled and told me that he runs in the same ones. But man, they just felt really good. He advised me to try them out on a treadmill because as long as they are still squeaky clean, I am allowed to bring them back within 30 days for a refund/exchange. That is honestly amazing, I was a big hesitant to buy them because of the current condition of my feet, but that takes a load off. Oh yeah, and all shoes were 15% off! Score! There was also a 20% discount if I spent over $200. Well, he shouldn't have told me that....not I had to hit it! I picked-up a half zip long sleeve shirt which fit awesome and will be perfect for running in once the temp drops a little bit more. The price? $55. But then I got $40 off my purchase, so yay for an awesome $15 shirt!
After that I went shopping, got some ingredients to make some home made power bars with...as well as the usual groceries. I gotta get this nutrition thing down and cliff bars are not exactly cheap. On my longer rides with Dark Horse Flyers in the summer, I would take a granola bar, a cliff bar and a banana. That plus whatever I spent on electrolytes($1ish x4 bottles) as well as a $6 snack at the end of the ride, each ride costs me $12, 3 times per week. That's $144 per month. That doesn't even include other random stuff like shot blocks and gels...oh man, I don't even want to think about that stuff. I don't usually use much of that stuff luckily, because I don't have the budget for that.
I had a quick dinner then went off to swimming. After the pool being closed 2 weeks ago, me being out sick last week, and Monday being Thanksgiving, it has been a LONG time since I've put in some serious time in the pool. Tonight's session went well, we talked about the format of the next bunch of sessions. Kim is going to have our lanes rotate closer to her on a class by class basis so that she can work one on one with a few swimmers at a time to improve our stroke. This really excites me as that's the reason I took this course. I can go to a pool and do lengths all I want, but unless I have someone to correct me, I am not going anywhere fast. I think I'll be working with Kim on Monday, and in the meantime, while she was working with the other lane over, we did out workout for the evening. our warm-up was 400m freestyle. The bulk was 800m with fins, alternating 100 kick and 100 swim. my ankle was starting to complain about all that heavy kicking near the end. Set 2 was another 800m, this time just regular freestyle with an emphasis on breathing every 3rd stroke. Well, since I was taught to breathe bilaterally every 3rd stroke, this was just swimming for me. The hardest part for me was keeping track of my laps! I was pretty good about keeping my lap splits on my watch which really helps, so all I had to do was keep track of how many 200m sets I had done. If I wasn't sure if I was at 6 or 8, I would just check my time. If I was way under, keep going. The first set came in around 4:30 every 8 laps. The second set came in around 5:00 for 8 laps. The 3rd set was with a pull buoy and hand paddles. I haven't used hand paddles in weeks and it shows. I need to work on those things a lot more. That set also came in around 5:00 per 200m I only got through 500m of that 800m set before we ran outta time, but I still felt pretty good about it. we did a 100m cooldown to finish out the night. Total distance was 400+800+800+500+100=2600m.
I'm feeling optimistic like I prefer to feel, not it's time for sleep and an early wake-up so that I can get more valuable study time in for my quiz...after I work of course!
Tata for now!
The Inconsistent Triathlete
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