Professional Triathlete Training Log - Weekly Swim, Bike, and Run Miles For Jan 21 - Jan 27

Glad to see some others commuting to the pool
Makes me smile :)

This week began a change in focus which included moving out of a swim / run block and into a bike block. Before this week, I had not gone on a single legitimate bike ride since my last race on November 17th at Ironman Arizona. Although I still biked during the last 8 weeks of training, all my bike miles came from running errands, grocery shopping, biking to the pool to swim, and biking to PT. As a result, I did have a small, but decent base built off really easy miles. However, there was not a single ride I went on where my intent was to build bike fitness.

Doing 8 weeks of swimming and running certainly helped my swimming and running, however, I must admit that I was little scared to see how much my bike fitness had dropped. In my entire career I had never really taken more than a couple of days off biking and I figured all bets were off. Despite my concerns, I was happy enough with my first ride back. It was only an hour with a single 20 minute interval (AP 349), followed by a 4 minute interval (AP 399), but it felt good to be back at it. The ride is below. For those curious, PT hub, 155lbs, a diminutive 5 feet 8 inches.

Here are my weekly swim, bike, and run totals:

Total: 220 Miles / 21 hours 42 minutes

Swim: 21,500 yards / ~12 miles / 6 hours 01 minutes

Bike: 175 miles / 11 hours 38 minutes

Run: 33 miles /  4 hours 02 minutes

Core:  0 sessions / 0 hours 0 minutes

Professional Triathlete Training Log - Weekly Swim, Bike, and Run Miles For Jan 14 - Jan 20

With Team Timex athlete Barry Siff @ RnR Expo

The plan for the week was to hammer at the body a bit and show up for PF Chang's Rock n' Roll Marathon with some residual fatigue. After hard treadmill sessions on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday the job of hitting the running legs was accomplished. I coupled that with hard swim sessions all 6 days including Saturday, and I did long MTB bikes on Wednesday and Friday. By Saturday fatigue was definitely setting in and I had thought about pulling the plug on the swim session after a terrible warm-up, however, I opted to tough the session out.

Although the plan was to show up to the race fatigued, I wasn't prepared to break a toe, but somehow I did just that Thursday or Friday. I am not really sure how it happened, but I have cracked toes before so I wasn't super surprised about it. I knew I could probably run on it, but I didn't really want to put too much undue stress on it. 

Now to be fair, I would have normally scrapped the race, but I had already committed to volunteering at the Powerbar tent on Saturday at the expo so I had to be in Phoenix anyway. In addition, since I don't normally race running events I didn't have any real running racing apparel so I had to be "high-maintenance" and put in a last-minute phone call to 2XU. Thanks 2XU for helping me out btw. So I figured why waste a trip and some great apparel?  The compromise I made was that I would scrap the racing part and the Nike Lunaracers and instead run it as a descending run in a pair of Nike Frees. In general, I am a huge fan of descending workouts in training as they give my body a chance to warm up before they start to get difficult. If I had any great pain then the plan was to drop out.

In the end, the race ended up going just fine. It certainly wasn't what I am capable of, but it was a great change of pace to do a race like this while keeping it really casual and fun. In fact, I really don't understand why more people don't race like this. Races are soooo much more fun if you just back it off a bit from what you are truly capable of. Forget the PR, and unless you do it for a living, there is really no reason to beat yourself up so unnecessarily. In the end, I ended up getting a steady dose of endorphins and a great workout that hopefully will allow me to recover much more quickly than going full bore.

Anyway, I have 4 different results from 4 different outstanding triathletes listed below for comparison:

Lewis Elliott, Thomas Gerlach, Linsdey Corbin, Ryan Petry 2013 PF Changs's RnR Race Results

Here are my weekly swim, bike, and run totals:

Total: 210 Miles / 22 hours 05 minutes

Swim: 24,900 yards / ~14 miles / 6 hours 44 minutes

Bike: 157 miles / 10 hours 58 minutes

Run: 39 miles /  4 hours 21 minutes

Core:  0 sessions / 0 hours 0 minutes

Professional Triathlete Training Log - Weekly Swim, Bike, and Run Miles For Jan 7 - Jan 13

Retired ex-British cop makes sure my stroke is flawless,
 and the trains run on time.

Mentally this was a tough week of training for me. I still haven't felt quite right since a ride that pretty much knocked me out about 10 days ago. A recent cold streak in Tucson certainly hasn't helped things out any either. With that being said, there has been so much complaining on social media about doing rides and runs indoors, that it was actually pretty easy to summon up the energy to go outdoors and do the training. I seem to thrive on others' complaints, and although I prefer to train in a warm environment, I can adapt to a cold environment just fine.

Overall this week of training was another week of solid training for me. There were not a lot of flashy workouts, just a lot of consistency. In fact, this week I did the exact same 1600 yard mainset in my swim everyday. Although the mainset is short, it provided an interesting look into mental and physical markers. It also kept me fresh and allowed me to perform the mainset with good form. One thing I have really been aware of this off-season is truncating the mainset any time my form suffers. On the flip side, I have even doubled the mainset if I feel like I can hold good form.  

Too often I believe that athletes are not in tune enough with their bodies to really understand their state of fitness, mental status, and overall fatigue level. Too often athletes just blindly follow a plan instead of really trying to understand their body. A coach and tests can be great tools and objective markers, however there is no substitute for intuition. It is in blind following and/or compulsion where I see a lot of injuries start and staying in the game is the biggest battle for endurance athletes.

Here are my weekly swim, bike, and run totals:

Total: 213 Miles / 21 hours 52 minutes

Swim: 20,600 yards / ~12 miles / 5 hours 38 minutes

Bike: 169 miles / 12 hours 02 minutes

Run: 33 miles /  4 hours 11 minutes

Core:  0 sessions / 0 hours 0 minutes