Snowy Run Week

This week of training was cold and ended with a rather big snow. According to my IM plan, this was a “rest” week in the four week rotations that I’m doing. Anyway, I ended up lifting weights 3 times at 1.5 hours each, ran 3 times (only 5-6 miles each, though, with some speedwork), road the bike (trainer) two times, and swam three times. So, 11 workouts but only about 11.5 hours of training. A good active rest week actually. I am finding that the weight training, I believe, is causing me to gain a little weight. I’ve put on about 3 pounds over the past 8 weeks of lifting. Hopefully as the cardio workouts pickup and weight training dies off in late March/early April, the few extra pounds will fall off.

The best workout this week has to be the run I did just a few hours ago. Friday, and into Friday night, we got a rather big snow (and some ice). Due to the weather, I had to take Saturday off as I could not get out of the house. Kiki and I spent Satuday getting dad to the airport and then we watched 4 movies. That’s right, we sat on the couch and watched 4 movies. Awesome rest day with my Kiki! So today, Sunday, I went to the park and ran the 5.8 mile loop. As you can see from the photo, the roads were completely covered with ice and snow. This actually made it a lot of fun and somewhat technical. The 5.8 loop has a couple big climbs and several other rollers. I passed one other runner and several walkers but other than that, I was alone in the woods running through the snow. It was a lot of fun and running through the deap snow at times made it a great workout.

A couple other cool things happened this weekend. I participated in a study at Vanderbilt where they are doing research on glycogen in leg muscles. The study involved getting an MRI in a very strong MRI machine (7 Tesla – not even sure what that means). Anyway, something didn’t go right with the images, so they’re gonna call me back in later sometime.

The other cool thing was that Scott (Trace Bikes) refitted me on my road bike. He has been trained by the guys who fit Lance and the Radio Shack team so hopefully this new fit will get a little more power out of my legs. Who knows, feels a little weird right now and will take some getting used to, but it makes good sense.

As of right now, next week isn’t looking so good for a long bike, so it might be the week after before we can get another 4+ hour ride in.