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Training last week has finally settled down after the week in Utah and the week before that which, missing it’s weekend training, was pretty minimal. Last week I managed to get in all my planned workouts, plus an extra run. I’m still pondering how to get another bike ride in, but for now this is sort of working with the rest of my life.

Swim

1hr 53min (5000yds)

Back in the pool twice last week. Tuesday’s session was kind of a regression. My arms seemed tired, perhaps from the Sunday bike ride or just general fatigue from the trip and all the driving. It was time for another straight swim of 2500 yards. This one didn’t go as well as last time, I spent more time at the wall because I felt out of sorts, or because I needed to change lane or other people were entering my lane etc. And then the pool spa started to smoke out the pool with some horrid electrical burning smell which did nothing for my swimming either. So in the end I got in the distance, but it was kind of a mess.

Thursday’s swim went better, at least at the beginning. I swam a 100yd in 1:37, which is a good 5 secs than I’ve swum one before. The other 7 100s were all under 1:45, so this was exciting. About 5 seconds faster for each 100 than a few weeks ago. Hopefully this will translate up to longer straight swims. I’d really like to be able to continuous swim closer to 1:55/100yds.

Bike

6hrs 51min (96 miles)

Monday
Sports Basement trip #1. Took bikes in to get serviced and have them install my new crank and pedals. Running Ultegra throughout now, and hopefully the end of my click noise on each down pedal.

Tuesday
Sports Basement trip #2. Picked up the bikes. Patty’s bike needed a new chain and her front brakes are almost done. Mine needed a new chain as well and they replaced the BB too though I’m not sure if it was damaged or if they just did it for compatibility with the new crank. I’m kind of glad they did anyway.

Wednesday
Back to M2 and did a Downward Spiral. No M2 himself, but still a good class. A downward spiral in this case is: 2min at 100% watts (CP10), 1:45, 1:30… down to 15sec, each with better watts, each with equal time easy spin rest. Then repeat the whole thing a second time after 5min recovery. I was a little skeptical I was going to make it, but the second time through was actually better than the first. Some M2 people have been posting their workouts on Strava and it’s frightening how high their power is for this set. Ouch. Oh well, I can only train at my level, knowing that they are riding 400 watts while I’m doing 250 isn’t really that helpful to me, other than knowing why they are competitive in their age groups or Cat 1 racing, while I’m just hoping to get through a 112 mile ride unscathed.

Saturday
For our long ride we headed back up to Healdsburg to ride some of the roads of our upcoming century ride (in 2 weeks). Here’s the details:
– Miles ridden: 75
– Elevation gain according to Strava for 75 miles: 3756ft
– Elevation gain of the full 100 miles according to website: 3300ft.
– Time left home: 6:05am
– Hours gone from home: 11
– Hours moving: 5:40
– Number of bottles ejected and lost: 1 (Chalk Hill descent)
– Times I completely ran out of water: 2
– Temperature at the end of ride: 89 degrees.
– Number of cracked aerobar arm rests: 1
– Condition of the roads: not good
– Length of snake on Graton climb: 5ft (alive)

Sunday
Sports Basement trip #3. Had them adjust my derailers and brakes a little. Replaced the bike bottle. More carbo-pro. And Patty and I got new bike shorts which we hope will help us with the 100 mile ride. Apparently bike shorts are supposed to last 6 month to a year and be good for about the number of miles = $$ you spend. e.g. $30 bike shorts good up to 30 miles. So I should be good for 135 miles. Biking is expensive.

Running

3hrs 53min (20.4 miles)

Lots of running this week, relatively. Felt good. I miss running.

Tuesday
We met after work and ran around the track a bit before chatting with the LMJS Tuesday track group for a bit. It was their first time at Clark Kerr where we are every Tuesday and Thursdays. It was nice to see them again. We declined their invitation to do quarters with them, instead we ran up the street hill nearby and looped about the bottom the campus. A pretty easy run. Felt good to run the legs a bit after the Sunday bike ride and all the time driving.

Thursday
Did the full Strawberry Canyon loop, although not running too hard. It was pretty warm out and the legs generally felt good.

Sunday
Then Sunday I got up early and ran 1hr 30min on Sequoia Bayview though to Skyline gate, then on another 10 minutes to make it 45 min out. Stopped an had a Gu and a drink then ran back. Again it was warm and people were already on the trail. Lots of dogs and the mountain bikers were just getting going. Legs were tired but it got better as I went.

Patty had stalled on her run all day so by evening she wanted some company so we dropped Kelly off with her grandparents and went up to Redwood park Steam trail and ran out and back for an hour. It was stunning up there. Warm like summer, lush green like winter. Forget me nots out everywhere. By then my legs were quite a bit stiffer than earlier in the day so I took it super easy. Also, my inside heel was letting me know it was there, a problem I had a couple of years ago. I wonder if my new pedals need the cleat loosened up? Anyway, it went away so something to keep an eye on. 2.5 hours for the day, 8 hours of running/biking for the weekend.

Totals for the week: 12hrs 41min

Sport, Triathlon Biking, m2, Running, sports basement, swimming, vineman, wine country century

Another week and my build continues. We’re out of town next week so I added in a little longer bike this past weekend figuring there’ll be a bit of a fallback next week to recover. I’ve been on the bike each weekend pretty consistently for the past 3 months so it was time to put in a harder longer effort and see what my legs will do about it.

Swim

2hrs (5000yds )

I made it back into the pool two times last week. Every time that happens I feel like I’m making real progress towards my training. I’ve started to see actual progress in the numbers too. For one, I can swim 2500 yards twice a week and my arms only feel a little like falling off. Secondly, my 100 yard splits have improved in both speed and steadiness. I used to be able to swim 1:52 or so early in my set, but after 4 or 5 100s it was back to 2:00+. I’m now down around 1:45-1:47 for the whole set.

Tuesday: 2500yard in the pool

Tuesday I did 8x100s then 8x50s for my main set. The 100s were clearly a lot better than last year so I was pretty excited. Interestingly my 50s weren’t too much faster than the 100s, even perhaps slower. I think this points to a couple of things. The first is that when I try to swim faster, I often go slower because I’m less smooth. Yet another counter-intuitive element to swimming like how my kick makes me go slower. The other thing is I really don’t like 50s, they are more anaerobic than I particularly enjoy while having my head under water most of the time so I fall back to my 100s pace/effort too easily.

For drills I’ve been working on 3-5-7-3 breaths to work on my underwater breath out and general lung capacity while swimming. It’s also good to try to breath on my bad side. These are both fairly clear limiters so I might as well chip away at them during drill time.

Thursday: 2500yard in the pool

Thursday I was running late so swam at 8am instead. The pool was pretty much empty but at 9am just as I was getting out it was being cleared for some group class, so I guess 9am is a hard limit on lap swimming. Good to know.

The set of 10×75 followed by 10×50. The pace was pretty similar to Tuesday, but my arms were tired by the time I was done. I don’t think I should increase my swim distances for a while.

Bike

5hrs 37min (84 miles)

Wednesday: M2 Cycling Class (1hr 10min)

On Wednesday it was back to M2 with a pretty similar workout as last week. I think I went a little hard early on and was generally a mess by then end.

Sunday: 60 miles (4hrs 30)

Sunday we headed out to Clayton to do a loop of Mt Diablo, starting off with the Morgan Territory road climb. Since we’ve ridden this loop a few times before it was good to try an calibrate our fitness against the past couple of years.

The ride ended up being pretty hard. My normalized power was 180ish so that’s quite a bit higher than previous trips around the mountain and pretty solid for a 4 hour ride for me. Part of that was that Livermore valley was fairly windy and so there was some good hard pushes in there that kept the power up. I also pushed up Collier Canyon pretty hard into a head wind and had some fun riding by some people (it took a few minutes of 300+ watts to take out two cyclists but it was worth it, I’m usually the one being overtaken).

By the time we reached Danville, about 40 miles in, Patty had more or less had enough. Her new saddle is not breaking in quick enough and she was tired of fighting the wind. I decided to go ahead and get the car while she rode to Sports Basement. She ended up riding about 54 miles, so probably could have just ridden it in anyway.

In the end I had a pretty good ride. Power agent reports it was a new 30min and 1hr power record, plus I think it was probably a NP record too, so I’m hoping this means my cycling legs are on their way back.

Run

1hr 56min (10 miles)

The week was dominated by extremely wet running opportunities.

Tuesday: missed

Tuesday’s run was aborted because a few miles in Berkeley simply wasn’t worth going out in the middle of a storm. We instead sat in Peets across from the Claremont Hotel and watched a river of water pour off the tennis courts.

Thursday: 3.2 miles hill

Kelly didn’t go to gymnastics as she has her parent’s ability to get injured. Plus, I think she’s tired of it and isn’t really making much progress despite 6 hours a week there. I know I look for improvements continuously so I can imagine it’s probably getting to her a bit. She seems to generally enjoy it though and doesn’t want to give up on it, so we’ll see how it goes between now and the summer.

Anyway, that left us scrambling for a run, so we met at home and did a quick run up Park Blvd and back down the canyon.

Saturday: 1.5 hours (about 7 miles)

On Saturday we headed out in another storm to Redwood Regional Park. Driving there we could see the storm front moving across the Bay towards us — a wall of blackness. It started to rain as soon as we got out of the car and by the time we returned we had run an hour and a half in pouring rain, shin deep puddles and lots of mud, plus the temperature had dropped down 10 degrees. It was a run to remember.

In other running news I have a new running watch. Two years after killing my Garmin I have the FR70. The main aim is to get a HR reading off my Garmin HR strap which I use with my Powertap. That way in a race I can get a HR value on my watch when I get off my bike and start running. It also has a foot pod so I get some measure of pace and distance. It is supposed to be as accurate as GPS, though uncalibrated it was about .2 of a mile different from the cell phone GPS track I made. I’m inclined to think the watch may be more accurate because running in a canyon under redwood trees in a storm is possibly the worst case senario for a GPS device. Anyway, I hope to calibrate it at the track to improve it’s accuracy and then will do some more comparisons.

Total

9hrs 33min

Biking, Running, Sport, Swimming, Triathlon 100s, Biking, m2, morgan territory rd, mt diablo, rain, redwood park, Running, swimming, vineman

It’s been awhile since I updated training, so here goes.

First, there’s really too much to update, so I’m skipping over most of the details. In the Fall I was injured for all of October with a calf injury but recovered and ran my first 50k trail race in Marin at the North Face Endurance Challenge. It was a great experience and made me want to run a 50k every weekend. Now four months later I have yet to run another one and have moved back to Triathlon training. Hopefully we’ll be back at that in the late summer and fall.

In January I ran the Epiphany run, which for me turned out to be just over a marathon distance from Skyline Gate to the Lake Chabot marina and back on the trails. Patty had knee (IT) trouble which has plagued her ultra running so turned back. I ended up running part of the outward journey was a guy we know from the Endurables. After that our next goal race, a Coastal Trail Runs race in Marin sold out on us, so after flailing around on our plans for a while we returned to cycling and to begin getting ready for our spring and summer goals:

1) May 5th – Wine Country Century- 100 bike ride in Sonoma County
2) July 28th – Full Vineman – 2.4 mile swm, 112 mile bike, 26.2 mile run.

Yes. I’m signed up for my first Ironman.

Kelly says “You’re going to end up in hospital daddy”. I hope not, but it’s certainly got me back training and especially got me back in the pool.

Swim

1hr 47min (4700 yards)

Tuesday: 2200 yards

Warmup, drill work, and a main set ladder: 25yd up to 175yd and back to 25yd on 30sec

I’ve been back in the pool and have a new routine of getting out of the house early to swim before work. That’s much more reliable because if I try to swim in the middle of the day something usually comes up and I push it and push it until there’s no more lap swimming. So far the swimming is actually going fairly well. I’ve been swimming about 2200 yards, working my way through a series of sets like this one. This is the same set I used last year so it’s interesting to compare lap times.

In the set I averaged about 3 seconds a lap faster that when I did this not far out from Boise last year (first 25yds was in 24 sec, 50-100yd in mid 1:40s/100yds, and the 175 was just under 2:00/100yds. So it’s earlier and I’m swimming faster. At least that’s not a bad sign. For Vineman I really just need to swim the distance and get out feeling like going for a bike ride.

Thursday: 2500yd straight swim.

Got into a pretty good rhythm and felt strong through this. That was super-encouraging as really the swim is my biggest worry. The woman I was sharing the lane with was knocking off laps at about the same rate as me, you know, rather than someone doing frog kick with a snorkel and pool noodles wrapped around their waist, or something, so that really helped. I wanted to tell her she was the best lane buddy ever, but that seemed excessive. Swam the 2500yards, 50 laps, in 50 minutes, which is not especially fast but felt at least sustainable.

Bike

4hr 54min

Wednesday: Cycling class

Back to the M2 bike classes. It’s still the easiest way to get in over an hour of riding mid-week while having someone push me a little harder than I like. This is my one high intensity session on the bike for the week. I’m hoping with a few years of cycling behind me now I’ll see some real improvement this year, but this first session just made me feel like I’ve got nowhere on the bike. My power levels felt about where they were 3 years ago. But that will improve, right?

Anyway, this week’s workout was something like this:

4x(2:30@90%watts on 30sec rest) (~200watts)
3:00@110%watts (~225watts)

4x(2:00@90%watts on 30sec rest) (~200watts)
2:30@110%watts (~235watts)

4x(1:30@90%watts on 30sec rest) (~200watts)
2:00@110%watts (~238watts)

Saturday: 43 mile bike ride out of Danville.

The usual route, out towards Livermore and back. This week added bonus fun of dodging a winter storm coming though the Bay Area instead of the usual pelletons of team cyclists. In the end we probably picked one of the only semi-dry areas around that morning and only got misted on a bit in the first hour. Turned out to be a nice ride.

Run

2hr 16min (12 miles)

Tuesday – skipped.

Missed run because Patty had to go out and I felt too tired to come home and run.

Thursday – 40min hill run (700ft gain)

Ran up Strawberry Canyon in Berkeley to The Hill. We hiked to the top of that, and then returned along the lower firetrail back to the Cal stadium and then along the streets back to Clark Kerr. Since Patty and I now meet in Berkeley on Tuesdays and Thursdays to pick up Kelly from gymnastics, those days are now locked in to running either the hills behind campus (Strawberry Canyon or Claremont Canyon or both) or running on the track.

Sunday – Watched and cheered at the Oakland Marathon as it came by near our house, then did a fairly easy 1.5 hour trail run (about 1000ft gain) in Lake Chabot, pictured above. Wet and muddy fun.

So that’s it. Another week done.

Biking, Trail Running, Triathlon danville, lake chabot, m2, swimming, Triathlon, vineman

Another big training week, over 12 hours this week. I finally completed plan on the swimming and biking, plus my yoga session, but only ran twice. In theory we were going to run off the bike on Saturday, but our ride went so long we high tailed it back to Oakland to pick up our daughter. In general I’m feeling pretty strong right now and the cold I was sniffling with a week ago seems to have mostly gone away. One more big ride in a week and then I’ll begin to taper. Exciting!

Swim: 2hr 28min (6435 yards)

Three full sessions this week which really increased my distance. On wednesday I fitted the swim into my day by swimming at the Oakland YMCA downtown. They have a 25 meter pool rather than 25 yards so I did my workout in meters. Who knew a meter could be so much longer than a yard? Anyway, that resulted in my longest ever pool session: 2734 yards exactly. It was a messy mix of lane swimmers so I didn’t even bother to log my lap times, but the core of it was 500 meters of drills and 10x100m as fast as I could.

During most of these laps a man with a sleek swimmers body stood at one end of my lane watching us. He was waist deep in water and looking annoyed. Eventually I guess he decided we were not good enough to swim with and he left after doing two laps of butterfly in the next lane over. Sorry dude, we are not butterfly swimming freaks like you, but at least we were swimming laps, and I’m not swimming that slow when I’m swimming 100s. I could see why he might be generally annoyed though, in all the other lanes at least one swimmer was pushing the definition of swimming to include -floating with the current- or -jumping up and down shaking hands above the water-. Sigh, swimming sucks. And not because of the swimming part.

Bike: 7 hrs 8 mins

Another two sessions at M2 and I’m feeling like my biking is really coming around. I now classify hills as nothing but rollers that I can mostly cruise over without too much trouble. Tuesdays class I already blogged about. Thursday I was working at home, combined with trying to get a family of raccoons out of our attic so I had to take public transport (bus, bart train, bus) into San Francisco to take my class and then (bus and bus) all the way home again. The instructor was a fill-in so it was a different style. He had us do a spiral ladder 3min, 2 min, 1 min, 30sec, with power increasing up from 70% – 110%, then reverse the durations but keeping the power high (110% down to 95%). After that I think it was 3x5min at 100-110%. I say I think, because I think I blanked out somewhere in there. The session finished with some sprints. 100% is a 10min max power. By my counting I did close to 15 min (broken) at or above 100%, and a bunch more in the 90% range. Ouch. Still threshold workouts like that are what I need.

Saturday we drove up to Windsor, CA and rode a variation of the Vineman course. In total we rode 60 miles, thanks to getting lost a few times. It took us forever, but included stops at goats, horses, muffins at a cute general store, and a lot of stops to look at a slightly blurry printout of the full vineman course map. A beautiful bike route the whole way, the hills are still very green.

Anyway, I spent a good amount of that time on my aerobars and have gained a lot more confidence. I don’t think I’ll change them again, just go with it now I have something I consider slightly comfortable. While Patty and I generally don’t ride too fast together, I did a few sections at what I considered the effort I hope to use in the race. The result was a little over 18 miles/hr on average over rolling terrain. It would be nice to have a power meter in the race, but it isn’t going to happen for this one, so at this point I think I’ll go off my HR, which I think should be 140 or less. I may go into M2 and ride 70-75% on the power for 1/2 hour or so and see what my HR does to get a final plan.

On the down side I partially pulled out my rear shifter from the end of the aerobar and lost my lowest two gears during the steepest climb of the route, so I’ll have to fix that this week. I did still make it to the top though. That course is super-rough in places, I’m surprised anything is still attached to my bike anymore. Also, my hydration wasn’t too good either as again I got pretty tired of the gatorade. I took in about 50oz of fluid containing about 650 calories, plus 220 calories in bonk breakers and a 100 calorie Chocolate Gu. 1050 calories, or 215 calories and hour. Not enough! However, that didn’t count the muffin, and the muffin was good!

Run: 1 hr 46 min

Still not much running, but I did try. We set off to run 13 miles on Wednesday. Following the longest swim I’ve ever done that morning and a pretty tough bike session the night before, we made 3 miles and gave up. Both of us felt exhausted and hungry and decided instead to just go get hamburgers and extra-salty fries! The next morning I ran to Kelly’s school while she rode her bike for Bike to Work day, then ran home. At least that was a decent run so I can still do it. Otherwise it’s getting pushed out of the way to let my other key workouts happen without being compromised by exhaustion.

Biking, Running, Swimming exhausted, hamburgers, m2, muffins, salt, sonoma, vineman, ymca