Monday, April 4, 2016

#OperationTop5 Week 13 - First Race of the Season!

Happy Monday!

I had every intention of writing this post yesterday but my weekend got away from me.  As did much of this week.  If life continues to be this crazy, I may have to look at taking a break from the blog for a while.  But we shall see.

This past week was pretty low key in terms of workouts.  I put in a huge amount of work the week before and I really needed to recover so I didn't have anything on the schedule until Wednesday.  I took full advantage of the no workouts and got as much sleep as possible.  My body needed it.  I slept really well almost every night last week.  No middle of the night wake ups.  It was solid, uninterrupted sleep.  SO good.  Wednesday I went back to my Masters swim and barely made 2100m.  It was pretty sucky.  I felt sluggish and slow.  I worked on my new stroke but that tired me out quite quickly so I had to really break it down and focus on ONE element (reaching forward).  I was pretty tired when I got out of the pool and I think I was in bed asleep by 9:00 pm that night, ha ha.  I had a brick scheduled for Thursday and I opted to do it in the morning.  I got on the bike and did my 60 minutes with 30 minutes at 80% of my FTP.  I'm not going to lie,  It was hard.  My legs still felt pretty heavy and it took them a while to warm up.  I had to work really hard to stay at that 80%. 

My Garmin has a feature called "Recovery advisor" and I do believe it uses the data from your heart rate / power to determine how long it will take you to recover from a workout.  It usually beeps about 10 minutes into a workout to alert you.  During my ride it beeped and it said "Recovery / Good".   Sometimes when it beeps good, I have to wonder what metrics it's measuring because there are times when it says good and I certainly don't feel it.  This ride was one of those times.  When I laced up my shoes to go out for my run, I started my watch in run mode and took off.  I actually felt really good on the run.  My heart rate felt a tiny bit high but not too bad.  10 minutes into my run, my Garmin beeps again and I look at my recovery advisor.  It says "Fair".  Ha.  Ok.  Clearly I wasn't recovered just yet.  Luckily I only had to run 20 minutes so it wasn't too taxing.  After uploading that workout in Training Peaks, I was given the option to skip my masters swim on Friday if I wanted to.  So I did.  I had a 2h 30 minute ride on the schedule for Saturday and my coach had said I could skip that too if I wanted to.  It was all about being healthy and fresh for Sunday.  I opted to ride 45 minutes just to spin my legs out.  That was about all I felt like doing.  After riding outside every day, being back inside on the trainer is horrible.   We had a belated Easter dinner at my parents in Guelph so we headed out there around 2:30.   We didn't plan on staying too late as I had to be up early and there happened to be a snow storm that rolled in.  Thank you Mother Nature.  We got dumped on again last night as well.  Seriously, it's APRIL.  Ugh.  Can I go back to Florida please????



Anyway, yesterday was my first race of 2016.  After 2 DNS, it was nice to finally get a race under my belt.  I did Around the Bay 30km as part of a two team relay.  What a blast.  There will be a race report later on this week but in short, it was EXACTLY what I needed.  I held a good solid pace, even on the hills.  My knees didn't hurt and I felt strong the entire time.  After everything I've been through with this injury nonsense, I was uncertain of what I'd be capable of, especially coming off of the massive week of training the week before.   Having the race I had, gave me a huge confidence boost.  So much so that I signed up for the Mississauga Half Marathon on May 1st.  I've done the 10km twice and the marathon once so I figure it's time to do the half!  And I have a bunch of friends racing as well as two of my athletes.  So it should be a blast for sure.



With all that, this is how my week actually went down - I'm linking up with Holly (HoHoRuns) and Tricia (Mississipi Piddlin) for their weekly wrap (a day late but hey, better late than never!)



Monday:  OFF
Tuesday:  OFF
Wednesday:  2100m swim
Thursday:  60 minute ride, 20 minute run

Testing out the remote control app on my phone for the GoPro - nice shot of the Pain Cave!

Friday: OFF
Saturday:  45 minute ride
Sunday: 15km race

Total time:  4h 8 minutes.  

I'm 99.9% sure I will not see a week this easy until my taper week for Tremblant.  My coach just updated my training plan for the next three weeks and it's massive and I have to admit, I'm excited.  I must be crazy but I can't wait to start tackling some bigger distances and some solid running mileage! 


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