Week 26: Review

My mileage has been steadily climbing for more than a month now, so as noted in my previous review I elected to make this week a recovery week. With Canada Day on Thursday, a fishing trip on Friday and a few other commitments in the week I knew that it would be a busy one so that worked out well, as it afforded me a little more flexibility in moving things around. In the end I dropped a couple of runs (6mi & 4mi) as well as one of my swims (~3K) and one ride (~50k), and I also cut back the mileage for today's long run.

The only downside to this approach was that the weather was absolutely perfect this week, so I hated wasting good days. With that said, these recovery weeks are critical to avoid injury so it was something that had to be done. If this TRIMP algorithm is accurate, it appears to have paid off as my CTL (fitness level) and ATL (fatigue level) are lined up again which indicates that the recovery went well (have to research these synthetic metrics a bit more, as they appear to be quite useful).

I had hoped to get some open water swimming in on Friday while I was out on the lake, but we never got a chance to get to a beach so that didn't work out. With that said, I'm not sure that it would have been possible to do much as most of the beaches on lake Erie are swarming with boats so getting out deep enough to swim would likely be pretty risky. Either way, it was a great day out with family and helped to work out a bit of stress from the system ;)

Unfortunately, we're now back to the brutal heat and humidity so the next week is going to be a fight as I ramp things up again. This morning's run was extremely difficult, as the humidex was up to 44C (111F) when I headed out and it really hit me hard. I had planned to do 13 miles, but ended up cuting it short at 11 miles as my heart rate was climbing higher than I was comfortable with. Compounding the issue was that my legs were feeling great, so my body kept accelerating on me and it was difficult to keep things slow. Either way, I'm glad that this was a recovery week as if I'd tried to do a 16 or 17 miler, it would have been quite the fight.

Week 26 Totals:
Running: 38.7km (24.0mi)
Walking: 1.7km (1.1mi)
Cycling: 174.9km (108.7mi)
Swimming: 4.0km (2.5mi)
Total: 219.3km (136.3mi)

Year to Date:
Running: 1104.9km (686.6mi)
Walking: 59.2km (36.8mi)
Cycling: 2370.7km (1473.1mi)
Swimming: 164.1km (102.0mi)
Total: 3698.9km (2298.4mi)

The plan for the upcoming week will be to begin ramping things up again, although the forecast is calling for more of today's brutal heat so that's going to be difficult. We got spoiled by the great temperatures last week, so going back to the sticky weather isn't going to be fun :oP

Tentative Schedule:
Mon 50K Ride
Tue 3.25K Swim, 6mi Recovery
Wed 30K Ride, 6mi Recovery
Thurs 3.25K Swim, 6mi GA
Fri 50K Ride
Sat 4mi Recovery, 90k Ride
Sun 17mi (27.4K) LSD