First Real Endurance Week.

12th week in: 140 hrs and 1,114 miles of training (149 miles this week alone). Finally broke 1,000! (Just FYI, last week was crazy at work, so I’m just now posting from two weeks ago). This was the first real endurance week I’ve had with very little interruption or deviation in the overall training plan. Two swims, three runs, three bikes, and two strength training sessions and everything was long and at a base building pace.

Swim: I ended up swimming two nice 1 mile swims in the pool. One long course and one short course. Felt good to get out and swim long (as bad as I hate to admit it). So, I’ve totally given up on alternate breathing. I can breathe on both sides; I just can’t go three strokes without a breath. Oh well, I’m not looking to kick ass in the water anyway. This decision turned my crappy swims into nice, long, easy swims. Finally able to build distance.


Bike: On Wednesday, we decided to time trial Percy Warner Park (the 11.2). After warming up and cooling down, I ended up with about 20 miles. My TT time was just under 37 minutes. I think Jeff came in somewhere around 35 or just under, so I feel pretty good about my workout. On Thursday, I actually did 16 miles on my TTX on the trainer (since it was storming outside). This was the longest “ride” I’ve done on the TTX since buying it last year. Saturday ended up being the first very long bike ride of the year (75 miles in Jan was previously holding title to the longest). I finally broke the TTX in by putting 91 miles on it. Patrick and Robert came out and we went to Fly via the trace and back via other roads. Once we were backed, I hopped onto hwy 100 and crossed over the hill and did another 30 out on a decently flat course to Fernvale and a few other places. Turns out I love this bike (imagine that). It was incredibly comfortable given the 5+ hours I spent bent over the bars on Saturday.

Run: This week, I decided to start swimming on Tuesdays during lunch instead of hitting up the track workouts. I did this because I really need to be swimming 3 days a week and it’s the only schedule that works with the pool hours. Anyway, I’m supposed to be doing tempos and track workouts on Tues/Thurs, so I can do my tempo runs by myself on Tuesday AM and I’ll save Thursdays with Johnny to kill myself on the track. However, due to legs being tired from racing and my work schedule consuming nearly every minute of the day, I just ran 6 easy miles Tuesday and Thursday. I ran 8 on Sunday after the long ride Saturday. Total running miles was 20 (which will surprise you as being one of the longer weeks I’ve had over the last 12).

So, as you can see, this weekend ended up really falling into the endurance pattern that I am attempting to transform my workouts into. The first part of this year was all about base and building workout quantity volume; now I’m adding on the distance.