SwimTraining

This week went great up until the last day.  My running started off a bit disappointing.  I went for my run on Monday and my legs were just tired.  I noticed that from the previous Monday too.  I think running the day after my long ride is the issue.  I ended up only running 2 miles on Monday.  My other two running days went really well though.  I ran 5 miles on both Wednesday and Friday without any walking breaks.  I think 5 miles will be my standard run moving forward.  I don’t plan to bump that up for a while.  I’ll probably stick to that through August

This week was the first week of my advanced swimming class. It was a bit disappointing though in that I didn’t really learn anything.  The other folks were much weaker than me so the instructor focused on them.  She did give me a couple tips, but that was it.  On Thursday I ended up lap swimming on my own.  The good news is that for 2 of the 4 days this week, I did lap swimming and I did 400m in total on Wednesday and 450m on Thursday.  I was nice to swim in a proper pool and measure the distance vs swimming in the community pool.  I can tell I’m getting fitter, but I still can’t swim more than 50m without having to take a break.

My bike riding was decent.  I did about 17 miles each of the weekdays, but today (Saturday) was the disappointing ride.  I was planning to ride 40 miles, but I just felt so tired, I ended up only riding 15 miles.  I don’t think the late swimming in the evenings and early morning workouts helped.

For the week, I ended up with about 6 hrs of workout time:

Goals for Next Week: I hope to swim at least 400m each of the swimming days and to hit 500m on at least one of the days.  I’ll do three 5-mile runs and stick to my normal bike rides.  For next week, I will try again to do a long 40-mile ride.

The plan for today’s long workout was a 40-mile bike ride followed by a 2-mile run.  A brick session.  My alarm went off at 5am and I woke up all stiff and sore.  My body felt really tired.  I wondered if my scuba diving yesterday was a mistake!

Anyway, I am determine not to skip any workouts as I know if I miss one, it would be that much easier to miss a second and a third.  I decided that I will always get up and do a workout, even if I have to shorten the distance or duration.  So I got up and figured that worse case I would ride 15-20 miles and skip the run.

The ride went well and at each checkpoint, I evaluated how I felt and went a bit more, but even at the 35 mile point, I figured I would skip the run.  But, I ended up going the 40 miles and I also ended up doing my run.

I’m glad I did as the run actually felt great.  Mind you, the legs still felt weird but surprising I didn’t have that jelly-leg feeling and I was actually able to run right out of my transition.  I had a hard time controlling my pace and HR as my legs just wanted to keep going at a faster than normal pace, so I switched to running 1-min, walking 1-min.  For the second, I moved to running 2-mins, walking 1-min

In the end, I did my 40-mile bike and 2-mile run in just under 3 hours.

For this week, I met my goal of swimming 10 mins each day.

For the week, I managed to up my workout time by a hour over the last few weeks, doing 7 hrs 41 mins.

Goals for Next Week: This will be week one of a 2-week advanced swimming class so I’m not sure how much actually swimming I’ll do.  I have to believe it’ll be more than 10 mins, but for this week, I’ll do whatever I can get during the class.  This week I’ll make 4-miles my shortest run distance and I expect to do at least 14 miles  for the week.  If the legs are feeling good, I may take one of my runs to 5 miles.  On the bike, I will stick to 15 miles for my regular ride and I’ll do 40 miles for my long ride.

This week is typical of what I can expect once a month.  Every month, I fly to FL to work at my company’s office for a week.  The difficulty with that is that I don’t have my bike and my swimming options are limited.

For the trip this past week, I chose to stay in a different hotel to the one I typically stay at.  My typical hotel has a gym, but it doesn’t have a stationary bike.  The hotel I stayed at had a stationary bike and a slightly larger pool.

So, my 2 weekday bike rides were done on an indoor bike.  For the first one on Tuesday, I decided to just listen to my music.  That was booooring.  I couldn’t wait to be done.  Also, for some reason, it is mentally hard to pedal like I would on the road.  So, I took the opportunity to do it as a high cadence workout doing the entire ride at 100RPM or higher.

For the Thursday morning ride, I decided to watch a movie.  That made the time go much faster.  Again, I did the whole ride at 100RPM or higher.

For my long ride, I was back home and did a 37-mile ride.  It felt pretty good.  Due to the excessively high temperatures in the DFW area this week, I wanted to ensure I was done while it was still cool, so I started at 5:30am doing the first 30-45 mins in the dark.  By the time I was done, the temperature was only 80F.

I continued to swim, doing my 4 swim days at the hotel pool.  The pool is only 15m so it involved a lot of laps.  I managed to swim at least 200m per day.  I can tell that I need less and less rest between laps, for for now, I think I can only swim about 50m before needing a rest.

Running went well and was typical of previous week.

My training time was right about the same as last week at 6 hrs 36 mins.

Goals for Next Week: I expect my week will be similar to this past one, but I would like to thrown in more swimming time.  Last week I would do about 6 mins of actual swimming time each session.  I’ll look to move that to about 10 mins

This week went pretty well.  My goal was to swim at least 200m each of the 4 days that I had my swimming lessons, and I managed to do that.  I didn’t make my stretch goal of swimming 400m on one of the days, but I can tell I’m slowly building up endurance in that I need rest less time between 25m lengths.

Friday was tough as my body felt really tired.  I was glad to have the rest day on Saturday.

I didn’t do a brick work today as I wanted to extend my long ride to 35 miles, which I did, and I decided that it was best to not try and run after that.  I did run 4 miles on two my 3 running days though so I ran the same total of 11 miles as I have done for the past few weeks.

My workout time went up to 6 hrs 41 mins this week.  A new high.  Here is what my week looked like:

 

Goals For Next Week: I’m travelling to FL this week so I wouldn’t have my bike, but I hope to do the equivalent amount of biking on an indoor bike.  I will continue to do 35 miles for my long bike ride, but I will throw in the 1.5 mile run immediately after.  Total running for the week will be 12.5 miles and I hope to do a total of 1000m of swimming