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
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| 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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