It’s crazy where this Ironman journey will take you. Last week I said “Woohoo….150 is the new 100, and 100 is the new 50” after the 150 mile ride to Wilmington. It was such a mental boost to put that kind of mileage in on the bike, and then follow it up with a good long run the next day. It was just a solid way to end the week.
This week was a continuation of the high volume training with about 18+ hrs expected.
Monday – Off
Tuesday – Bike 30 miles, Run 5 miles
Wednesday – Swim 300yd warm up, then 2 x 25 minutes freestyle, the 100yd cool down. This ended up being really cold as the indoor pool was packed. I swam outside with water temps in the 50’s. Not sure if this was a good idea or not. I felt a little punch drunk when I got out of the pool, and had to boil myself in the shower and still felt chilled afterwards. Lifted weights afterwards.
Thursday – Bike 35 miles, Run 5 miles.
Friday – Time Trial 1500yd felt pretty good as I was able to cruise through this in 28:30.
Saturday – 20 mile run at Umstead.
Sunday – Swim 2100yds continuous, Bike 105 miles, Run 5 miles.
I felt great all week. Thursday I was even thinking as I was doing my cool down run that I could run forever if I just kept taking in calories. I never felt any fatigue really set in during the week. It was like a mini success moment as I jogged into the darkness.
Then Saturday rolled around. The plan was to sleep in until we woke up to get plenty of rest. After making it to the trail by noon, we started on our 20 mile journey. So we ran, and ran, and ran. Umstead Park is a pretty hilly place to run in general. At around mile 13-14, there’s this hill by some power lines that just goes straight up for almost exactly a mile. There’s no curves, no real shade, just unrelenting uphill. Most of the times I like the hills because they make me better, but Saturday was different. The hill took something back and it pissed me off. It was all I could do to finish the the final 6 miles without walking. By the time I got to mile 18 I just wanted to be done with it, so I ran as hard as I could, which was only 9min pace at that point. The good news is that I did it. I fought through it and got through 20 miles without stopping. The bad news is that it was only Saturday.
Photo by pareeerica
Sunday called for a really long training day. Swim 2100 continuous, Bike 105 miles, Run 5 miles…seriously. Our motivation level on Sunday morning was a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10. My partner in crime was even worse off than I was from yesterday’s run. So, we decided lets just bag the swim and see how things went on the bike. Well, it didn’t go well at all. About 4.8 miles into the ride we were averaging probably 14 miles per hour. We decided to bag the ride and call it a day. We ended up with a bike ride of 9.6 miles, a shorter ride than our long run the day before. Since this was the very last build day of a very long training process, I’m not disappointed that things didn’t work out exactly according to plan. If I completed every single workout in exactly the prescribed way, I would start to wonder if I was really pushing myself hard enough. If you’re not having failures along the way, you may need to push a little harder. So, in the end we came up short on the last workout. No big deal. The cool thing is that we signed up for this race together last November, and we have taken just about every step together.
With that we are officially entering the taper period. 4 weeks to go!
