Turning Mountains into Molehills

6 mile run, 2750m swim
I think I'm starting to warm to the heat (ha ha). I attempted to get up at 5:30 to run, but it didn't happen. I reset the alarm and opted to sleep a little longer instead. As a result, I was stuck with running at noon. And since I had to do hill repeats, I was stuck running over by Stazio ballfields and the hard-to-recycle-garbage-materials dump. It's really the only hill in running distance from the office. Lovely smells, but served me right for sleeping in. Besides, I only had to do 2x.5 mile hill repeats, so I'm not even sure if it warrants the title of this posting. You can't really see the elevation numbers, but it was a little over 100ft total elevation change. And it was only 80 degrees, so I really can't complain (except to say that it was only 80 degrees when I left for that bike ride on Saturday). Thus, I'm turning this molehill of a posting into a mountain.

Anyhow, the run went pretty well, though the route was really boring. I really made an effort to start off the first interval a little slower so I would not get to that "I want to die" feeling I seem to always experience in my first Z4 set. I discovered that this technique doesn't work so well when you're running uphill. I still feel like I want to die. A half mile couldn't come soon enough, but I finally hit it. One down, one to go. Interval time: 3:31. For the second interval, I started thinking about hills. I'm not sure why because generally I think this is a bad thing to do because I inevitably start thinking about how much I dislike hills and then starts the negative thinking/energy and then starts the doubting and slowing down. BUT, I was able to turn it around. I suddenly remembered the birthday card that I just recently gave my dad. It was a cartoon picture of a hill and a guy riding a bike. It said something like "when you're over the hill, you get faster". Well, I thought it was funny. And it got me through the rest of the interval. Interval time: 3:28. I pretty much crawled through the rest of my run. Trying to stay in Z2 after getting your HR so high is not easy, especially on a warm day. I probably could have walked faster, but I shuffled through it. I didn't look at my intervals until I was finished, so I was quite surprised, and very happy, with my progress.

And naturally, because I can't have 2 good workouts on the same day, the swim was rather unpleasant. The only thing I can come up with is that the heat must have taken something out of me, but even that seemed like a bit of a stretch. I ate about an hour beforehand due to my current always being starving issue, but halfway through I was hungry again. I felt like I had enough energy, but I just wasn't able to do anything with it, and just kept dropping farther and farther behind. We did a kicking set after then main set - 5x50 kick. I usually alternate 25 freestyle kick and 25 breaststroke kick. Wolfgang yelled at me asking how often I did breaststroke during a race in an effort to get me to switch over. I stopped and looked at him. I asked if he had seen how I had been swimming during the workout. That had been so pathetic that how I kicked was the least of my worries. Besides, I usually do a little breaststroke kicking/treading water when everyone gets bunched up at the turns.