Week 45: Review

Aside from the rain on Monday, it was a pretty good week weather-wise. Naturally, that rain prevented me from doing my 80km ride on Monday, however I partially made up for it by doing an extra 50km ride on Tuesday morning instead of the planned walk. Unfortunately, I also had to cut Sunday afternoon's ride a bit short as I forgot to take into account the time change when figuring out when the sun was going down. Aside from those issues, however, everything else went as planned.

The 18K LSD run on Sunday was certainly a lot easier with the cooler weather that we are experiencing right now. I managed to maintain an average pace of 4:52 for the duration, hitting the 18km mark a few seconds before 1:28. Further, I also managed to keep my average heart rate down to a very comfortable 154bpm (~64%HRR). I'll likely do another 18K tomorrow, and if all goes well I can play with the idea of pushing it a little further the following week.

On the cycling front, with some great weather on Tuesday I elected to go off of my normal route and give some bigger roads a try. After doing about three laps of my normal route to warm up, I took a quick break and then headed out along a north-south route that I've heard good things about. From an exercise point of view, it is definitely a much better route as it allowed me to ride non-stop at a steady 34km/h pace for almost an hour. Further, there were some very good rolling hills at points in this route, which added significantly to the challenge. The downside, of course, was that the speed limit was about 80km/h for most of the route, so the vehicular traffic was going a lot faster than it does on the residential roads that I'm used to. In addition, it primarily passes through farmer's fields, so on a windy day there would be little to protect me (and at these speeds headwinds can be very significant). This type of riding will certainly take some getting used to, however there is only one way to do that ;)

Weekly Totals:
Running: 56km
Walking: 38km
Cycling: 194km
Total: 288km

The other significant thing this week was that my year-to-date running and walking mileage crossed the 5000km mark. Unfortunately, I didn't start separating the two sports in my training logs until the middle of July, so I'm not exactly sure how much each of them contributed to that total. My ballpark estimate would be somewhere in the region of 2000K run and 3000K walked, but without the time to go back and modify all of those entries I can't be sure. Either way, that is a lot of ground covered over these few months and hopefully just the precursor to many more!


As for the upcoming week, the plan is to pretty much stay the course. I've now gotten back to the peak mileage of my last training cycle, so it's just a matter of getting my body used to this level of work before stepping it up again. If all goes well, I might push things ahead a little in the following week, but we'll have to wait and see on that front.

Upcoming Week:
Sun (AM/PM) 18K LSD
Mon 80K Cycle
Tue 8K Tempo
Wed (AM/PM) 10K Steady/50K Cycle
Thurs 10K Steady
Fri 80K Cycle
Sat 10K Steady