November in review

Hi internets! I'm still alive! Here's a quick post lunch hour post on how training is going.

Let's start with the good.

The bike

Things are just peachy keen on the bike. I've settled into a nice three day a week routine with the Trainer Road Sweet Spot base I plan. Three more weeks to go on that. I'm enjoying it immensely, and it's so nice to have a workout option at home now. The workouts are reasonably challenging without being too crazy, as you'd expect from a base building plan, and have focused a lot on cadence. Which is great, because one of my goals on the trainer is to bring my cadence up. It's been really interesting to play with how the same power on the bike can feel very different based on how fast your legs are moving, and I'm starting to get a much better feel for how pedaling faster is not necessarily harder.

It's a painful (and sweaty) sort of fun.

The run

I have been, not lazy exactly, but not particularly motivated to run this month. I ran a grand total of 87 km in November, which includes the 21.1 at Road to Hope, so clearly me and my running shoes are on a bit of a break. Which is fine. This has partially been a mental break, but partially because my bursitis-y right hip keeps getting cranky on me, and ideally I'd like to go into my ATB training plan with that settled down. My physiotherapist worked some magic yesterday that had me instantly feeling about 90% better (trigger point therapy is the shit), and I'm hopeful I'll be good to go when my plan is supposed to start next week - but if I'm not 100% I'll keep taking it easy and revise my plan.

Lift bridge selfie from some random run.

I am surprisingly relaxed about the whole thing, really. No pressure low stress running is nice, and it wouldn't be so bad to continue that for a while longer! At any rate, I'm taking a few days off of everything right now to see if that gets my hip back to 100% (and that includes no biking; complete rest, what a concept), and I'll reevaluate later this week.

The swim

Yeah, that hasn't happened. At all. It's partly because my one trip to lane swim so far really aggravated my hip, so I've been a bit reluctant to go back. And the other factor is I just can't figure out how to get it into my schedule in a way that won't make me lose my mind with exhaustion (8:30 pm swimming? By 8:30 I'm halfway to bed and asleep!). I dunno, I'm kind of letting it go right now because the whole thing was stressing me out, and this stuff is supposed to be my stress relief! My current thought is to tag along to some swims with Sam over the Christmas break (hey Sam, hope you are down with that plan!) and then find some sort of weekly coached swim to join in on in the new year.

Some ducks, because that's the closest I've gotten to getting in the water over the last few weeks!

So that's where I'm at. Crossing my fingers a few days of rest gets my body back on track and the training plan starts next week as planned...but I'm fully prepared to change those plans if necessary. Stay tuned...