Training Thoughts 1/19

It's so difficult for me to ride much more than 1:30 on the trainer that I'm thinking of just making the best of that time. Untill it's warm enough outside to ride longer, I'll do some more quality work instead of quantity.

The last 2 weeks have been fairly consistant with about 11,000 yards of swimming, 5 hours of biking and 35 miles of running. I've been healthy and rested and feel mentally strong towards my training although I have had a personal problem that troubled me during the week. Good friends helped with that issue but I still feel like I let people down that trusted me.

On to training talk:
Swim
I feel very healthy and strong. Shoulders feel great unlike last year at this time. I feel it's because I've reduced my use of paddles to about 10% of my swimming compared to about 30% last year. I've gone back to 200's for a while and have been consistantly been doing repeats on 3:30 in a SCM pool. Last year at this time I think I was doing them on 4:00. I like doing the 50 easy/50 hard during the 200's, they are interesting and challenging. Next week I'm going to change it up a little and go back to 500's with 100 easy/100 hard one time and 100's and 200's with the other 2 week day swims.

Bike
As I said before I'm going to keep the bike rides down to no longer than 90 minutes and work on quality. I experimented with some FT workouts this week and felt good about them, they were hard but doable. I've been staying away from the spin classes only cuz the trainer has been more conveinent lately. I'll probably do the spin class tomorrow morning (sunday) as I'm going to be on the treadmill again. Still looking at targeting 5 to 6 hours for the next couple weeks.

Run
All my runs this week have been on the treadmill in contrast with last week where all of my runs were outside. Hopefully it will get warmer this week and I can move outside again. I really need 35 deg F to be comfortable. I bought 2 pairs of shoes this week, a pair of Mizuno Wave Rider 10's again and a pair of Wave Elixers. I've been wearing the Elixers since tuesday and am very happy with them. They fit well and seemed comfortable right out of the box. My older shoes were Wave Riders so I know the new ones will work when I start running long miles outside again.
I introduced a little bit of speed this week to break things up and make the run interesting but the bulk of my running has been easy. My hips, knees and feet all feel healthy so I expect to keep this amount of running load untill I move completely outside again.

Next 2 weeks will still have a lot of easy workouts, after that I get to run some more tempo and bike a little harder. My swim load will stay the same but possibly moving to longer intervals depending on how I respond to the 500's this week.

Peterborough is looking like it is comming off my schedule since I haven't found anyone else that is doing the race. Muncie is 4 weeks before Steelhead and is looking like a good tune up race since I have done it before. It would be a good place to work on my bike pacing as the bike course was fairly similar to Steelhead as I remember. I would intentionally go easier on the bike to see how I can run afterwards. Being a lower key race would take pressure off of me to perform on the bike.

Next week's schedule
Mon
Swim ~1:00 sets of 500
Run Easy 30 to 45 minutes

Tue
Bike 1:45 Moderate Aerobic
Run 45 min Easy

Wed
Swim ~ 2500 Base Intervals
Run 55 min Moderate Aerobic

Thu
Brick 1:00 Bike/30 min Run

Fri
Swim ~2400 Fartlek Intervals
Bike 1:15 Moderate Aerobic (might move to sunday)

Sat
Swim with FAST
Bike 3:00 (in my dreams :P)
Run 35 min with some strides (might move to friday)

Sun
Run 1:20 Moderate Aerobic