Week 32: Review

The weather reports this week were pretty bad, however the actual weather worked out quite well so when I did get a chance to get out things generally went pretty well. Unfortunately, my schedule this week has been a bit mixed up as the family is taking a couple of weeks off work for some summer vacation stuff, which makes fitting in all of my training sessions quite difficult.

The threat of rain on Monday scared me off of attempting the ride scheduled for that day, which in retrospect was foolish as the grey skies didn't really materialize into anything. Given the weather, however, I did elect to head out to the pool a day early to make sure that that wasn't missed. We were out all day Tuesday, which meant that I had to pull a double on Wednesday to fit in both a 10 miler and a 4mi recovery run. As such, I didn't really have any time to go out on the bike on that day either.

We again went out on Thursday, so I pushed my 11 mile run and 2.7K swim back to Friday again making it impossible to fit in a cycling session. As we were planning on heading out on Saturday, and I had missed the tempo bit of my 10 miler earlier in the week, I elected to do both 5 miles at tempo pace and four of the eight scheduled 100m intervals during Friday's session. After a 2.2K warmup, I did the 5 mile tempo segment finishing the last mile or so on a local track. I then did a slow lap to cool down, and proceeded to do the intervals at that point (running on the straights, recovering on the corners). I then did the remaining ~5K at a slow pace to catch my breath and get home. It was a pretty grueling session to say the least, but it got most of what I needed to do in.

On Saturday I naturally ended up missing my scheduled 7 miler with speedwork, but with an 18 miler the next morning there really was no way to make that up so I let it go. I did manage to get half of the intervals in on Friday, and combined with the tempo run it likely had enough of an effect. I did, however, manage to get a bit of open water swimming in while the family was cooling off at the beach. I wasn't able to get out as far as I would have liked (not wanting to get mowed down by boats and/or jetskiis), and I have no idea how much distance I covered, but other than having some trouble going in a straight line it was actually pretty good. I didn't have a wetsuit, however other than a few small pockets of cold the water temperatures were quite comfortable (~23C), so it wasn't too much of a problem.

Sunday's 18 miler went as scheduled, and other than having to refill my bottles a couple of times to fight off the humidity it went quite well. I tried to focus on slowing myself and had thought that I'd done so quite well during the run, however looking back at the telemetry I still averaged a 5:05/km pace over the duration which is much faster than I should be going (Pfitzinger suggests doing these runs 10-20% slower than targetted race pace, which would correspond to 5:13-5:42/km). I'll have to continue working on that, however slowing things down when your body wants to go faster is a lot harder than it would seem ;)

Weekly Totals:
Running: 70.2km (43.6mi)
Walking: 2.5km (1.6mi)
Cycling: 16.5km (10.3mi)
Swimming: 5.8km (3.6mi)
Total: 95.0km (59.0mi)

Year to Date:
Running: 1,720.8km (1,069.3mi)
Walking: 190.5km (118.4mi)
Cycling: 2,686.1km (1,669.1mi)
Swimming: 20.4km (12.7mi)
Total: 4,617.8km (2,869.4mi)

While the cycling mileage was pretty pitfull this week, that's a bit misleading as the cycling group scheduled our ride for this morning rather than last Saturday. As such, we did a little over 100K today which likely should be accounted for in last week's schedule (as we're still planning on meeting up next Saturday for another long ride). Either way, this upcoming week will likely be pretty heavy on the mileage side so it will likely make up for last week.

As we're still on vacation, next week is likely to see some disruptions as well, however I'll just have to work around them as I did last week. With my first 20 miler of this training cycle coming up on Sunday, however, I'll have to be a little more diligent to fit things in where I can. I will likely miss a few of the shorter rides to make room, however right now running (due to the marathon) and swimming (building a base) are a higher priority at this juncture. As such, the following is a rough plan for the week but it's likely to see some significant changes ;)

Upcoming Week:
Mon 100K Group Ride
Tue 7mi (11.3K) Recovery w/6x100m, 2.7K Swim
Wed 30K Ride, 12mi (19.3K) GA
Thurs 50K Ride, 2.7K Swim
Fri 10mi (16.1K) GA w/6mi (9.7K) LT
Sat 100K Group Ride, 5mi Recovery
Sun 20mi (32.2K) LSD