Just got back from swim class; we did 500 free as a warm-up, then 800 meters worth of drills, including lots of kick and rotating drills.  Then 5×100 to finish.  It was fine — with all the drills, it felt slow and relatively easy, more work on form than anything else.

This morning I ran for 22 min. and my foot is feeling a little weird right now — the place it was hurting yesterday is now fine, but another place feels wrong … ugh.  It doesn’t hurt when I walk or run, though, just when I move it in certain ways, so I don’t see why I need to back off the running right now.

I also rode yesterday for 1.5 hours — a nice ride, pretty uneventful.

The week

I managed to train as many hours as I’d planned, in spite of the dire forecast for the weekend.  Here’s what I did:

4.5 hours of riding (4 rides — I’d meant to ride only 3 times, but the weather made it hard to get out for two hours at a time and smaller chunks of time worked better).

2 hours of swimming (2 swims with the masters team).

1 hour of running (3 runs of 20 min. each).

My foot is feeling a little odd, with some pain in the metatarsal area, but it’s not the area that was causing me such trouble earlier this year, so I’m not too worried about it yet.  I may not increase my running time this week because of it though.  We’ll see how it goes.

I’m hoping to train for 9 hours next week.

Today I squeezed in an hour ride between work and sunset, which was nice, since this weekend will be a washout, it looks like.  I keep checking the forecast hoping it will change, but it only gets worse.  Maybe Sunday when there’s only a 40% chance of rain will be okay for riding …

Yesterday’s swim class was fun, memorable for the 10 25-meter sprints the coach made us do; I haven’t done much speed work in the pool so far, so it’s good to focus on that a bit.  And then a 20-minute run this morning, which was fine.  I’m running all one speed these days, usually 9:45 miles; one of these days I’ll have to vary the speed a bit, but I want to get up to 30 min. of running first, just to make sure my feet are doing okay.  So far so good.

Let’s see — 20 uneventful minutes of running yesterday (I’ll get to a respectable 30 min. one of these years!) and then a rather disastrous ride today — I had been out for a little over an hour when I heard a snap and felt the wheel go wobbly.  I’d broken a spoke, the second one in a little over a month.  I was able to ride the rest of the way home, but I took it slowly, a the wheel was in pretty bad shape.  This means no riding until Friday, when the rain is supposed to start.  Shoot.  I may be faced with the choice of riding in the rain or not riding at all … the shop mechanic told me I can expect the spokes to keep breaking, as the wheel is in bad shape.  I’m not ready to buy new wheels, though, so I’m hoping it will last a little while longer.

Swim class was tonight, and we did lots of drills, mostly involving kicking and body rotation.  I swam 1800 meters — it took an hour, but that was because I stopped for long periods so the coach could explain the drills.  I’ll be back in class again tomorrow evening.

I’m still enjoying my easy week and can feel my muscles recovering.  I ran Thursday and again today, but took yesterday off, except for a walk in the park, and I plan on riding easy tomorrow.  Then it’s back to a more intense schedule.  The weather is beautiful!  It’s almost a shame this past week was an easy one because it would have been great weather-wise to be outdoors a lot.  Oh well.

A brick

Today I rode for a very easy 45 minutes and then went out on an 18-minute run immediately afterward.  I’ve done rides and runs within fairly close proximity of each other, but I think this is my first real brick where I tried to get through “transition” as quickly as possible.  I felt surprisingly good — my legs were a little wobbly and heavy at first, but much less so than I expected.

I will do no workouts whatsoever tomorrow, and I probably won’t on Monday as well.  Time for a break!

Let’s see — yesterday was a running and swimming day; I did my short run in the morning and then swam 1700 meters in the evening.

Today I set out to ride 2 hours with a new acquaintance but the ride got extended to 2:45; this is the first time I’ve ridden with this person, and we weren’t very well matched — for once I was faster than somebody else.  But I had a good ride anyway, and had the fun of being able to take the hills very slowly.

I’m definitely taking a rest week next week — my leg muscles are tired.  I’ll still do some workouts, just maybe 5 hours total instead of the 9 or so I’m doing this week.  I want to do a short run and a very short ride this weekend, and that’s it.

I had a nice short run yesterday morning and then another swim session in the evening, with another 1600 meters and a lot of drill work.

Today I plan on riding for about 1 1/2 hours, but I’m looking at the temperature and realizing I’m going to have to wear arm and knee warmers.  There will come a time soon enough when I’ll be grateful to ride in temperatures as high as 58, but for right now, that feels COLD!

I swam 1600 meters this morning and it felt pretty good — it took me 45 minutes with some generous breaks.  I’m working on some of the technique advice I got last week about body rotation and pointing my toes.  There’s just so much to think about with swimming … it’s hard work mentally as well as physically!

Then I rode for an hour — my legs are tired, but I was able to ride a decent pace for me — 16mph on fairly hilly roads.  On Mondays and Wednesdays I have a late afternoon/evening work schedule, and I’m liking all the daylight hours to ride in.

I had a good (short) run this morning and an hour-long ride this afternoon; I wasn’t sure about whether to ride as I’ve been feeling a little draggy, but the weather was too nice to resist.  I noticed yesterday that I had some slightly sore back muscles from two long swim workouts — this means, I think, both that I was working hard and that I need to do some core strength training.  This is the first time I’ve swum hard enough to feel it afterwards.  It’s nice that with swimming I don’t have to worry about doing too much at once in quite the same way I have to worry about it with running.  Already I can swim an hour with no danger of hurting myself.  I wish building up running endurance were that easy!