IMMT Training Week 4: No sweat

After last week's workouts, coach told me to dial down the intensity and stay put. Bike and run without breaking a sweat, but swim hard. And overall I succeeded. The force was with me, especially in the water.

Swim
Tuesday I took the day off from work because I had some medical exams, so I did my workouts in between. I took a look at my schedule and *gasp* I noticed a 2900m swim. Damn, when did it jump up by a full 1000m? Good thing the pool was open for 2h lane swim, so I could fit it all in.

Warm up:
5 x[100m swim + 25 FD, + 25 kick] no rest
Main set:
 2 x 400 m with 20 sri take 1 min after set
4 x 100 m desc 1-4 on 2:30
2 x 300 pull on 7:00
8 x 25 fast on 45 sec.
Cool down:
150 alt stroke

And voila! (Garmin ate a length on the second set)

 Then on Thursday, group swim - "only" 1700m this time, but very intense as well.

I really wouldn't care to share these times in general, but I'll be damned if they aren't getting faster every week! I never thought I'd say this, but they make me happy. Because all those lengths at near-drowning effort seem to be making a difference and I remember not so far ago losing faith in my ability to make any sort of progress. It may not be much, but it counts to keep me going forward. I promise to stop complaining about masters swimming until next year. Only idiots don't change their mind, right? Morale of this story: trust your coach and embrace the suck. It doesn't get easier, you just get faster.

Bike
Thank goodness for Trainer Road and their collection of easy workouts. The first two I did this week almost put me to sleep. *yawn*

Obelisk

The funny thing about this one is that I changed my Garmin transmitter for my heart monitor strap and when I tried pairing it, it picked up my husband's instead. So imagine how I almost got a heart attack when I was easy riding the first long flat interval and I see my heart trace doing all kinds of weird stuff that my doctor warned me about during my physical. I only figured it out 30 min later when I looked over at Zin's monitor and recognized every bump.

Lazy Mountain

Second of the workouts could not have been lazier. Done entirely in Z1, I did not even produce a drop of sweat. I feel ashamed for the person who put the word "mountain" in it.

By now you probably guessed that my weeks are fairly similar. But don't you worry, they'll get exciting soon. I know my coach well. To end the bike recaps, Saturday was group spin and everyone was on the hook to do Max VO2 intervals, but I was asked to sit these out. Well, I wasn't very happy with the premise of riding easy when everyone else was going to be pushing the wall, so I asked permission to sweat, just a little. I ended doing some spin ups and single led drills, followed by 7 or 8 easy intervals in the big chain ring.

Run
Again slow and boring, but I know that these runs are what I need. I only managed to do two out of the three runs, missing my longest one because I planned it poorly. Every Sunday we've been going to the gym to run long on the treadmill then hop in the pool, but when we got there yesterday the gym was closed because of the long weekend. I was pretty bummed to miss my last 2 workouts but there was no way that I was going to run outside at night without proper sidewalks. Oh well, moving on without regret. I'm sure that my body will thank me anyway.

In a nutshell
Slow week. Missed workouts. Ate too much. No pictures (aren't you relieved?).
BUT I crossed off my list another goal! Hubbs and I organized a bRUNch yesterday with a dozen of friends, old and new, and they all came at home and ran together and ate and talked and had a great time. Loved being able to have like minded people around us and spend a few hours talking all things triathlon and running. We definitely need to do this again before the summer! It's a great cure to cabin fever.

Training to train

Like all resolutionists, I started the year fast and furious spitting out 3 blog posts in three days, then I left you hanging for 10 days. But I had a good reason. I caught THE flu. I thought I had the flu before, but no, this one was IT. I could barely keep my eyes open and my head up without passing out. Seriously, last Saturday I was two glasses of orange juice away from a ride in an ambulance (thank you Montana's manager for offering those to me when I scared you by turning cadaveric white and lost my feeling in my hands and feet). Yup, I had to lie down in one of their booths at lunch time. Anyway, the next day I ended in the doctor's office and I was put on Tamiflu which did the trick. I could return to the office three days later without the feeling of carrying a ton of bricks inside my head. Seriously, don't get the flu. Wash your hands often and stay away from the crowds. It's not fun.

But I also knew that you needed those 10 days to really appreciate the awesomeness of my recap posts (1, 2 and 3). What, you don't want to read them again? Okay, okay, you're excused if you already read them at least twice.

Now, what happened since? Not much because 1. I was in symbiosis with my couch 2. I was busy watching the first season of Orange is the New Black. Yes, there is lesbian sex in it. Get over it. It's really a good show.

Once I started feeling human again, I went to a new therapist and she got me doing some interesting strength training (I'll sure get buns of steel after this) and stretches that made me curse my body with new and colourful words. I also got my IT bands taped to show them who's the boss.

With renewed hope, I returned slowly to riding my bike and swimming. This week I managed to work out for 3h so far, including one hour at masters swim with my tri club. And you know what? I could keep up! It made me super happy about how little pool fitness I lost over the past 2 months. Alas, I also know that I won't finish the IM with swimming only and I still need to start putting in some serious biking and running workouts. So I did more spinning this week: 30 min, then 10k, then 45min. Next stop, 1h!! This may just end up as a date with hubbs and Trainer Road in our Pain Cave on Monday.

I also plan on running 30min on the treadmill tomorrow morning and see how my IT bands and hip hold up. So far, with the biking and swimming, no real negative impact, but I am still cautious. Not going crazy with enthusiasm or I'll pay the price. Learned that lesson once.

Bottom line, things have started looking up and I try to stay positive and take it one day at a time, celebrating every little ounce of progress. The IM is now 7 months away, exactly 31 weeks from now. Time to start the count down!

In the meantime, I leave you with some hypnotic footage of my swim analysis which I had done along with 3 private lessons with Sean Bechtel back in November.

Push it, push it real good!

It is time for a bike update, before I turn on the Around the Bay excitement. HINT: It's ONE WEEK from now!! Ok, enough with the caps or I'll lose my voice before the race. Biking, or rather trainer rides, have been going really well and I don't hate burying myself in the basement, just yet. Kurtie, Neo and I are still in our threesome honeymoon, how cute. We do it 4 times a week:

Monday: 1h easy spin
Wednesday: 1h-1h30 hard workout
Saturday: Long aerobic ride (currently at 2h30)
Sunday: 30 min ez spin after the long run

I just finished the last workout about half an hour ago, and I'm happy once more to have completed them all as requested. Last week I thought I didn't push hard enough over the weekend, but given how difficult Wednesday's group spin with the coach was, I must have looked for an excuse to do the minimum, if that means something. One could argue that spending 2h on the bike isn't minimum effort, but for sure it made me feel like a lazy bum. 2h at 50% FTP is nothing to be really proud of in my books, unless you count patience as a virtue.

This week though, I decided to draw a clean slate and push myself a little more. For the hard ride, coach said I should do "Mist" on Trainer Road, which contained a series of hard intervals. To give you an idea of the effort level, it feels like you are pushing hard up a hill, then you run out of breath half way, but try not to pass out and finish the interval while maintaining the same power, no fading. Repeat 6 times, all the same. I must have gained some power since I first started working on my trainer because I didn't feel like death and even better, I smashed 9 of them records with this ride.
Look at them pretties!

The last two power peaks are there because I felt like it, I was getting bored, not because they were required by any means. Show off! But I was actually curious to see how high/hard I could go for a few seconds at a time. To put these results in perspective, the highest peak is not even the half of what my hubbs can do, but he's a guy and he likes to show off too.

Anyway, I felt really proud of myself after this ride, like I was ready to conquer the world.

For the Saturday long ride, I chose another Trainer Road workout, this time called "Goodale". What I like about those long aerobic rides from Trainer Road is that they aren't boring. If it was just a flat line I would shoot myself trying to hold a somewhat challenging pace, but with those, you have to keep paying attention because the power level changes every 3-4 minutes. I put on a movie "Beasts of the Southern Wild", but it was totally underwhelming and pretty boring too. I think I'll stick with Nick Cage or Christian Bale from now on. Last week I watched "Drive Angry" and that was much more fitting.

During the 2.5h I ate one homemade energy bar (recipe here, wink wink) and drank a bottle of Gatorade and one of water. I was a bit hungry by the end, but I knew that I only had to do a 15min run off the bike, then have lunch, so there was no need for more. 

Two more records down with this one as well. I think I am getting decent at biking on the spot. Not sure I even want to get back on the road for now, where all the crazy drivers and potholes are. Given how Mother Nature is teasing us with another snow storm next week, we may have at least another month or two to feel warm enough to go "out there" where the "wild things are". Oops, another boring movie reference. I better end this post before I start talking about "Life of Pi" too.

Otherwise, I promise not to talk about my bike for at least another week, unless something super crazy happens, like a shredded tyre or a broken shoe. After Mother Nature, I am tempting the Devil ... heh heh. Too many movies in my head. Time for bed.

Gratuitous Salt 'n' Pepa reference link here. Get your mind out of the gutter!

Enter The Pain Cave

I need some pick-me-up self-talk. The last post was filled with so much self-pity, I am not even sure I recognize myself - this isn't who I am 99% of the time. But once in a blue moon the 1% of crazy comes to pick up at my brain. I need to flush it all out, then move on, otherwise those thoughts keep on spinning inside my noggin and I get dizzy and start banging my head against the walls. Not pretty.

So here's me moving on. Moving onto the bike subject that is, because running's been taken care of for now. FYI, 16km this morning on the treadmill and just as prescribed by coach. It's so much easier to manage running in the right zones indoors where there is no wind factor, or inclines that shoot your heartbeat through the roof. 1h40 with Christian Bale and his Batman alter-ego, it felt like a breeze, so that took care of my confidence in sticking with a plan. Next!

Now, biking has been pretty fun too. I bought an indoor trainer and installed it in the basement, The Pain Cave as seasoned triathletes call it. I'm going to be spending quite some quality time with Neo and Kurtie from now on down there... ahem. Thank goodness it's not called the Red Room of Pain. I'd like my workouts to stay vanilla, thankyouverymuch. ;-)

Do you like my raiser block? I bought a real one since.

I also signed up with Trainer Road, a website recommended by DC Rainmaker, that provides cycling workouts and an application that you run on the PC and that is able to calculate the power you produce while biking thanks to the ANT+ compatible cadence/speed sensor. The folks at Trainer Road partnered with Kurt Kinetic and created a very accurate power profile for the trainer that I bought, so I know that I can trust the data. So far I did 4 workouts (they all have fancy names: Gayley, Baxter, Obelisk, etc.) and coach said that I should use the Base Intermediate 2 program for the next 6 weeks and see how it goes.

The night I hooked everything up I also did their 20 minute test to get my Functional Threshold Power (FTP) measured. Alas the program wasn't calibrated properly because I had not entered the correct wheel size and it brought another meltdown upon me after giving me an average power level of 106 watts, which was one of the lowest, if not THE lowest among the users on the website. I really felt like a complete noob. 

This is how exhausted I was at the end of the test. Hard to describe when you are swimming in your own sweat. However, the test did give me pretty much the same lactate threshold that I had found on my own last year, 164. 

For the second workout, Gayley, I corrected the wheel size and decided to push again as hard as I could in order to recalculate my FTP. And miracle, it went up by 60 watts thanks to the proper calibration. I got reassured and proudly jumped my number to 160. I felt like belonging to the brood again.

This is what the aforementioned workout looked like after I was done:

The yellow trace is my power output, the red trace is the heart rate. I chose to go incrementally hard so I don't die in the middle, and make sure that by the last interval I reach the same heart rate level as in the FTP test. I averaged the last 2 intervals to get my new FTP. Normally you have to follow the level of the blue blocks, but since I wanted to test myself again, I only used those intervals as a baseline. Here's for example what it looks like when you do it "right". This was the first bike workout of the two that I did yesterday (I may or may not be a bit of a perfectionist freak).

Bottom line, I am IN LOVE with Trainer Road. The two workouts I did with the new FTP were spot on. I also love my trainer, the Kurt Kinetic Road Machine, it's quiet and smooth and carries a life warranty. It will most likely outlive me anyway, but I promise to make it suffer for as long as I can. Who's your mommy now, eh?