Wake Up and Back to Work...

28 mile ride, ~2200m swim

The vacation is over and it's back to the serious training. Well, this is still a relatively easy week and I can play it by ear in terms of what I want to do. But, I still have that goal to meet and have maybe another 7 weeks to prepare.

I got up at 5:30 to ride. How I was able to do this is beyond me. We didn't get back from the airport until about 12:30 Tuesday morning. I slept maybe 6 hours and then got up for work. Last night, the intent, as always, was to go to bed early. But then Matt gave me his massage and who was I to say no? Thank you Matt! And thank you Jess for the "feel-better-comfort-massage"! I still had to unpack my bike and get it back together in order to ride. And since there was no way I'd be competent enough to do this at 5am, it had to be done last night. This process, as always, takes much longer than it should. Although this time, I took our lessons learned from the faceplate incident in CA and was able to get the handlebars on in about a quarter of the time.

The schedule was to ride 40 miles on Tuesday but there was no way that was going to happen. And getting in a 40 mile ride before work is not exactly feasible, especially since it was all Z2. So I opted for 28 instead. I was surprised how warm it was after being so cold in CA. It was 70 degrees at 5:30! The ride started off pretty slow (well, it always starts out slow since my first few miles are all uphill). Since I am now feeling quite a bit better, I was kind of hoping that I'd just start to fly on the bike. Wishful thinking...Once I got past the big hills on 36, I was able to settle into some sort of rhythm. For the most part, I felt pretty good. No soreness. My hamstring felt great. And my knees were finally back to themselves after the damage I did to them from the cold ride. I averaged 16.8, which isn't really much to go nuts about. Except for the fact that most of my training rides last year averaged in the 16 mph range. Since this seemed more like a recovery ride to me rather than a training ride and since it was all Z2 and it was really early (and I never ride my best first thing in the morning), I am pleased with the results. I finally feel like I'm seeing some results on the bike. They are not huge leaps, but they are still something. I'll take what I can get.

After a relatively calm day at work, I headed over to the pool for masters. The "One Good Workout a Day" rule applied. The swim sucked. Okay, maybe not quite that bad. There are some days where I feel like I'm drowning more than swimming and this was not one of those days. But I just could not keep up with my lane. I had to keep taking breaks or else got lapped. Of course, we were being led by Adam, the swim superstar after Sunday's swim. How he pulled that off, I don't know. But 28 minutes! Crazy! Endurance-wise I felt fine. I felt like I could keep going and stayed for the whole workout. I just wasn't moving quickly. I guess I can still use my being sick excuse since I'm still not at 100%. But there's also the just raced excuse as well, so I'm trying not to be too disappointed with it. Besides, my swimming never seems to be consistent.
Now that Vineman is over, I need to rethink my plan a bit. I still have Harvest Moon to meet my time goal for a half, but I think I have a lot of ground to cover to get there. But I'm also trying to take some of the pressure off of myself- the same pressure that I put on myself. The one nice thing about being sick for Vineman was that I was totally calm throughout the race. I wasn't nervous at the start and never panicked during. That's a huge weight that's lifted off and I'd like to try and keep it that way. But it's a double-edged sword. By having a time goal, I sort of have to pressure myself in order to meet it. I'm not quite sure how to fine tune this so that I can have the best of both worlds. That's my assignment for the week.