Achilles Monster

This past week of training was really focused more on swimming and biking since I’ve been experiencing some lingering pain in my left Achilles tendon. I ran one 6 miler this past week at a 7:22 pace and decided to just take 7 days off running to let the tendon rest. I had a few good swims to speak of though. I did a 2500 meter long course swim and a 2000 yard pull with a buoy which were both a decent paces (57mins and sub 40 mins respectively). James Banker (team Clementine’s official Panckae Coordinator – see older post) came out for the lake swim on Friday and did a phenomenal job considering he hadn’t really swam more than ten times in the past 12 months. James went out to the 1.2 mile round-trip buoy (see photo) and hung out while me and another guy headed out for the 1.5 mile buoy. We joined back up with James and swam back in. Total time was 58:33 I believe. Not too bad, still rather slow but I’ll take it. To put that picture into perspective, those are rather large sailboats.



Tuesday, I rode my bike to work. While not a lot of distance, it’s a good speed workout because I try my best to keep with the traffic. Thursday was the typical group ride. Jeff Davis and I got in about a 12 mile warm-up before the group ride though. As always, the group ride turns in to a lung-bleeding hammer fest because we can’t EVER just ride for fun… it’s always a race. Lucas, Jeff, and Jon left me on a decent climb (I suck at longer ones once they top out over 6% or so). It took me a few miles, but I ended up catching them. Lucas said the three of them were working hard together so that I couldn’t catch them… but I did. I was pretty happy with that and really really wanted to vomit once I did though.

We ended up getting a great 60 mile ride in on Saturday. I headed out with Lucas, Rusty, Rachel, and Jon around 7AM. We covered a rather challenging 60 mile route with over 2,700 feet of climbing and still maintained a 19.1 mile average. It was a beautiful route… lots of low fog/mist early in the morning, buffalo, little towns, and other wildlife along the course. While maybe not the best route for triathlon training, I’m sure those hills will make us stronger on race day

In all, I ended up doing 1 run, 3 swims, and 3 bike rides this past week. Not the hardest of weeks. All of the swims and bikes were very strong workouts though, so I’m not too worried about missing a couple runs. I’m hoping Frankenstein has recovered from his injury and can join in on the training this week. We miss you Brett!