The countdown has begun

Today is January 18 and in exactly 30 weeks (and a sleepless night) I will be shivering with anxiety at the swim start of Ironman Mont Tremblant. It is time to start the countdown. 30 weeks of training and a life altering experience to complete it. This week I continued the re-building of my fitness and even though my coach and I agreed that I won't get the official IM training plan until I'm able to train 10h/week again, I am slowly but surely ramping up and adding minutes, miles and strokes to each of my workouts.

I also added more flip turns (to my swims, that is)! Which led to this.

On Monday, I decided to run. My first run this year, so I took advantage of my gym membership at work and I hit the treadmill. I also had a physio session in the evening where I had to do countless butt squeezes, bridges and clam shells, and by 9pm I was craving an ice bath. But not that cold because I'm a wimp these days.

When hubbs told me that the pool was colder than usual that day I knew that I had to go. If I kept moving, I was most certainly not going to feel it in my bones. And so I went. I did 2x100m to warm up, then put on the pull buoy and continued bouncing between the walls. I was doing every length with a flip turn and after a while all that tumbling made me forget completely where I was in my set. I had planned to do 500m, but I was feeling "in the zone" and told myself that I should try and see how long I can keep doing the flip turns. My watch counts the laps and eventually, while I was coming out for air after one of the flips, I looked at it. I had swum 800m non stop and I said, why not go for 1000m and strike one more goal off my "40 steps to 40" list? After all, I never mentioned NOT using a pull buoy. When I don't kick when I swim in a wetsuit, it's still called swimming. Everyone does it. So there, this IS legit swimming, dammit. Plus, I go faster without a kick, so most likely I'll be doing the same "in the field".

Here is the data geekery (the last 100m are buggy because Garmin lost me. Time is correct, but not the length). You can clearly see the 1000m block, the warmup and the cooldown. You'll just have to trust me that I did every single length of this workout with a flip turn. Because I did and I am stupid proud of it!! I promise to provide video evidence of my flipping prowess before the judges change their mind.

Since Monday I also did 2 bike workouts and I even threw in some intervals, more and more intense to remind myself that I can sweat. I managed to get to 1h on the bike with 2 blocks of 20 min spinfest at 95rpm. These felt like the kind of workouts I was doing last year, so not all fitness is lost, phew. 

And today I ran again. Two in a week, wheee! I went to the indoor track for the first time ever since I promised Meg Menzies that I'd run for her. She's no longer among us, but all the #megsmiles logged today will remain in many people's memory, including her family's. We just can't help it, we are family too. She was one of us. What else can we do?

I ran with abandon. I got lost in my thoughts, I did not feel pain, but my heart was aching in more than one way. That I gave it all is an understatement. I did not go to the track to race, but somehow I ran faster than I imagined. I didn't feel tired, so I have no idea where this energy came from. Sometimes there are things that you cannot explain. 

About half way I could still not understand if the numbers I was seeing were real. I started hitting the lap button because I wanted to make sense of what was happening, if not during the run, but maybe after. Now that I know the distance of each lap, exactly 120m, I counted that I must have run 49 laps in 30 minutes. Here are the last 28 of them.

What will happen tomorrow, next week... we'll see. I hope my coach won't read this blog post or he'll lock me in my Pain Cave until I can control my enthusiasm. Until then, I'm enjoying the free benefits of my drug of choice: beautiful, blissful endorphins. Oh how I missed you!!

Anyway, Week 30 starts tomorrow!! Oh wait... do I count up or down? What would you do to keep track of this madness?