Tidbits...

Lots of little tidbits going through my head lately but I'm not going to put them all in here... too boring and I don't really have the time.

Training has been going well. I continue to hit the pool very hard. Every time in the water is tough with my swim workouts from coach reading "ALL OUT" a lot. I'm doing between 15K and 19K yards a week and my body is feeling it. In the first 2 weeks of this, I made huge progress on times, but then I think the volume caught up with me. Over the last two weeks, it seems that the only pace I can swim is about a 1:30 100. This is a pretty good pace for me and I'm learning to swim this pace more consistently, but no matter how hard I push, it's still only like 1:28 per 100 yds. I think I've hit a little mini-plateau.

I had lunch with Coach yesterday to talk about a whole bunch of things (but that's another post), and with respect to the swimming effort, we decided to hit it hard for 3-4 weeks at a time and then take a recovery week. I think I'll do one more week hard next week and then do an easier week with 9-10K yards to let my body catch up. Then start the cycle over again. I did manage a 15:33 1000 yd TT compared to a 15:58 when I started this process less than a month ago. 2.5% in 21 days is pretty good, but I haven't been making progress beyond that in spite of the hard work. I am sure it will continue to come though.

On the bike, I have hit it pretty hard, too, doing 3 quality rides a week. One set of intervals on the trainer, one power/spin workout, and one long ride with lots of hills. My most recent test on the bike was a 12:36 compared to a 13:15 with 313 watts compared to 298 watts average. That was after 3 weeks, too. I'm going to keep at it on the bike and in the pool and see how it goes.

In addition, I feel like I FINALLY have my running legs back. I did a ~10 miler this morning with hills and it wasn't that hard at all. Plus, I didn't have any sort of weird feelings in my hamstring or with my stride the way I have been since a few weeks before Louisville. Sort of makes me wonder if doing 4 20+ mile runs leading into L'ville was too much. Maybe I should have more of a bike focus. I'll have to have that discussion with Coach sometime soon.

In other news, my wife did a half-marathon this past weekend and is doing another this weekend. Last weekend was the Nike Women's half to benefit the Leukemia Society and she ran it with a friend. The goal was not to go fast, but this weekend, we are going to see where she is at with respect to getting back from her injury after the last marathon she did in July. I am anxious to see how she can do.

Swim Progress

I haven't been posting as much lately because of too much going on, but I did want to get my latest swim progress documented so when I come back to look at it later, I'll have it noted.

This past weekend, I did a little swim, bike, run action in honor of Kona. I hit the pool first and swam my usual warmup and drills. Then I did a mile straight to see how I was progressing. I hit the wall for the first 1000 yds in 15:38, so that's already a 20 second improvement from just 2 weeks ago. I finished the mile in 27:21, which is the first time I've ever done a mile in less than 30 minutes. Not only was it under 30, it was easily under 30.

And on some of the main sets I've been doing lately, I've done a 200 in 2:50, a 100 in 1:24, and a 50 in 0:39. I had never broken 1:26 for a 100 before or broken ~0:41 for a 50. The first week back at training, I did 19K yds and the 2nd week back at it I did 15,350. This week, I'm going to get in a fair amount, too. I know the extra volume is helping so I am going to keep at it for a while (2-3 months at least).

19,050

A new swim record for me for the week. I swam 7 times in 7 days and twice on two of them. I was pretty tired on Wednesday after doing 13K yds in 3 days, but then took a day off from the pool on Thursday because of time constraints and on Friday, I had a great swim! I was consistently hitting 3:50-3:55 on 250 yd repeats and was holding 1:30 or less on 100 repeats.

Today, I topped off the week with another swim and a 2-hr ride with hill repeats at the beginning. The swim put me over 19K yds for the week, which is about 8K more than I've done in a week before. Week 1 of my higher-volume swimming experiment is in the books!