Less Than A Week Away

My blog reporting has gone dry in the last few weeks. I am frankly shocked at the response from a few of the readers. Yes thats right I actually had readers.

To get you up to date, the training has been going well. I am either training or sleeping from training. These last few days has been a lot of "not training". On Wednesday I had a really long run of about 10 miles. I was very sore the next day or two and had some blistering problems and whatnot and decided to take a few day of so that I can begin this week with some light workouts in preparation for Sunday's race. My days off were fine, I had some business meetings and got some new shoes and made one last adjustment to my bike in preparation for Sunday.

In addition I am scaling back my workouts in an attempt to avoid something I always have done in my life...cramming. For my last race I ran 6 miles two days before my race. Which is ludicrous especially since I was sore for my race. This time I am taking it easy, squeezing in some light workouts and working on preparing myself mentally. I will be blogging all week and thanks for reading

Progress and Lessons Learned

Today's workout was tough. I was scheduled to swim 2600 at race pace in a series of drills. I decided I would use flipturns as much as I could from now on so I had to work real hard. Making things more difficult, I was going to do so without a warmup. A warmup is a great luxury to have because it allows you to get accustomed to the water and start off on the right track.

I started off with 4 200s with flipturns. It was okay but I felt real sluggish and even muffed a turn. To execute a flipturn you have measure a certain distance from the wall, flip over, push off the wall, twist your body and begin your stroke. As the set goes, on and you get more tired, it becomes harder and harder to execute the turns properly, plus you lose your technique and all sorts of other things happen. It feels really awful to mess up, lose your stroke, have water go up your nose etc. etc.

My next set was 500 yds with flipturns. I screwed up a turn early in the set and lost my stroke. I wanted to stop the whole workout but I pressed on, gather myself and vowed to finish the set. It stunk though, I had snot all over me, water in my nose and it took me about 45 strokes to get to each wall.

My final set consisted of 6 200s. After doing one of them without flipturns I was able to complete six of them. I went from wanting to quit and almost walking out of the pool, to finishing the set strongly and even doing an extra 200. I kept thinking to myself 'is this ever going to be easy'. I guess the simple answer is, 'as long as I keep working on them'. It doesn't really feel like I have made progress but the flipturns are going much better. I can easily complete them on 100s, 200s are getting better and as seen today, I can survive on doing them over 500. Plus I am pretty much doing them throughout the workout, so I am not far away from doing them as a rule.

Song in my head "PDA" John Legend http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4R_oswROic

Freaking out, well, sorta

Yes its been a while since I wrote. I have been away. I went on vacation to Boston, Cape Cod, and Martha's Vineyard. Good time, but with work and family obligations I could not find an opportunity to work out. I thought I could but it was not in the cards. So I spent my time re-calculating my workouts so I could be on track for the race. I realized that when I got back home, I and screwed unless I stick to the program to the letter until race time. No excuses anymore. Work will take a backseat, family will have to wok in conjunction with training. I am not about to repeat the madness that was my first Olympic race, where I was severely under-trained, and thus suffered during the bike and run.

This week was good. I got back on Monday and cycled, ran, cycled some more and swam. Tuesday was a tough one. I was scheduled for an easy 50 minute run. But it was raining so I went to the gym and did a 30 minute run; 20 minutes less than needed. When I finished the run I bumped into some of my triathlon friends and started chatting just as they went into the spin room. Although I did not need to spin that day, I went in anyway and did 30 minutes easy. I then followed them to the track and did a tough 30 minutes on the track. It amounted to 90 minutes and my legs were dead (a good dead). Very happy I did that. There is a big difference between finishing a workout okay and finishing a workout gassed. I experienced the latter, and hopefully it pays off in the race.

Wednesday was a hard, yet short bike. Thursday I intended to skip, however Mary Anna needed to get out of the house. Therefore, I put together my stuff and instructed my wife to bring Mary Anna to the pool after my workout so we could swim together. It worked out great. I did the workout and swam with Mary Anna. I used all flipturns and set myself up for a nice rest day on Friday. Saturday is a monster day but I can rest easy knowing I totlly brought it all week.