Week 52: Review

The last week of 2010 was pretty busy and, combined with picking up a mild throat infection, I ended up missing one of my swims and didn't manage to get on the bike. Fortunately, thanks to Frank talking me into a 13.1 mile group run on Wednesday, my running mileage ended up being higher than planned. Thankfully, I was feeling much better by Sunday and was able to get the full 16 miler in as planned.


I also managed to do a bit more mileage on Tuesday's pool session, doing a little over a kilometer more than usual. Unfortunately, we had a swim club invade the pool on us and they didn't have even a basic understanding of pool etiquette which made things difficult (obviously used to having a reserved pool). They started off by diving into the deep end of active lanes without warning and narrowly missing a few swimmers already in the pool. Once in, they swam in tight packs with one another (which made it impossible to pass them when necessary) and when they took breaks (which they had lots of) they piled up against the wall leaving nowhere for others to turn around.

When there is a lot of traffic, I generally skip taking breaks and just stick with a continuous program to keep things clean. Generally speaking, this makes it easier for lane mates as it makes me more predictable and, thus, allows them to better work around me. The result of that is that I tend to do a bit more mileage as without the breaks I simply have more time to work with. When people follow the rules (resting on the sides of the lanes, avoiding blocking, etc.), this typically works very well.

Unfortunately, with this particular group they just kept gumming up the works and made no effort to work with me. For the first twenty minutes or so, I tried to be polite and do what I could to work around them. It quickly became evident, however, that that wasn't working and they were either (a) trying to force me out of the lane (they were using 4 of the 6 lanes, and the remaining two were packed with much slower swimmers) or (b) completely oblivious to how much of a PITA they were being. As I had about twenty pounds on all of them, I got tired of tip toeing around them and just switched over to freight train mode. Fortunately, after a couple of minutes of that they did a pretty good job of staying out of my way and I was able to finish my workout without any further issues.


Either way, I won't go on too much more here as I'll be putting together a full yearly review later today - just wanted to quickly log the details of the week. Fortunately, I noticed that my total mileage this year was approaching that of last year so I bumped up the mileage on Friday's run from 5 miles to 10K to push me over the edge. My running mileage was lower this year, but as my focus was on the Triathlon side of things that was made up for by significant increases in cycling and swimming miles.

Week 52 Totals:
Running: 56.9km (35.4mi)
Walking: 1.4km (0.9mi)
Cycling: 0.0km (0.0mi)
Swimming: 5.1km (3.2mi)
Total: 63.4km (39.4mi)

January 1st 2010 to Date:
Running: 2272.7km (1412.2mi)
Walking: 98.2km (61.0mi)
Cycling: 4482.4km (2785.2mi)
Swimming: 345.5km (214.7mi)
Total: 7198.8km (4473.1mi)

Year to Date:
Running: 25.8km (16.0mi)
Walking: 1.0km (0.6mi)
Cycling: 0km (0mi)
Swimming: 0km (0mi)
Total: 26.8km (16.6mi)