Week 17: Review

It's been a bit of a crazy week, so my mileage is a little short this time around. In addition to bringing the bike in to get the flat replaced on Monday, on Wednesday's ride I snapped the front shifter cable and had to bring it in again on Thursday to get that fixed. Given that the shop doesn't open until 10:00, that messed with my schedule enough that I ended up missing one of my scheduled runs.

The weather this week was also pretty hostile, with some incredibly powerful north winds (~45km/h with gusts up to 80km/h) to fight on my Monday and Wednesday rides. On the east-west legs of both trips, the crosswinds were so strong that I had to lean the bike on a 15 degree angle to keep it tracking in a straight line. Needless to say, this meant that the northbound leg was pretty much a continuous fight where I was actually looking forward to the steep uphill grades as they provided some shielding from the wind.

The upside, however, is that the return trip was incredibly fast thanks to those tailwinds - once I came out of the hills and onto the flats, I got down into the aerobars and easily managed to average speeds in the high 50s to low 60s. I likely could have gone faster too, but I ran out of gears (50x12) and the tired legs from the outbound trip didn't much feel like spinning out higher RPMs to squeeze a bit more speed in. Got a few confused looks from drivers when they realized that I was keeping up with them ;)

On the weekend, the reports called for rain so I wasn't able to squeeze in a Saturday ride once again. I did go out for my recovery run, and unfortunately ended up being out there for about 80% of the precipitation that we actually got :P My footpod batteries also ended up dying just before I headed out, so I managed pace by feel and figured out the distance based on the calorie computation of the wrist unit (ie I stopped when I hit 400kcal).

With the forecast calling for rain on Sunday as well, I elected to hold off my long run until this morning. While it pretty much looked like it was going to pour all day, it didn't end up amounting to much so in retrospect that wasn't really necessary - but hindsight is 20/20 and I didn't want to spend an hour and a half in the pouring rain ;)

Given the shortage of mileage in the other sessions this week I ended up adding an extra mile when I went out this morning and logged a 13.1 miler. The rain was gone today, but in its place there was lots of direct sunlight, heat and humidity. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't too bad (~27C/63%), but my body is still used to the cold weather and it's going to take some time to get it adapted to these kinds of conditions again. Either way, aside from the heat it was a great run and was nice to squeeze out a little extra distance once again.

Week 17 Totals:
Running: 44.7km (27.8mi)
Walking: 1.3km (0.8mi)
Cycling: 122.5km (76.1mi)
Swimming: 7.2km (4.5mi)
Total: 175.7km (109.2mi)

Year to Date:
Running: 655.1km (407.1mi)
Walking: 39.9km (24.8mi)
Cycling: 1005.0km (624.5mi)
Swimming: 103.3km (64.2mi)
Total: 1803.3km (1120.5mi)

The upcoming week is looking like it's going to be pretty soggy, so my cycling mileage is likely to suffer a bit again this week. Fortunately, if the current forecast holds it looks like the weekend is going to be decent for a change and hopefully I'll be able to squeeze in a good long ride on Saturday ;)