Around the Bay training update #....something or other

So that was quite the training week. Right up there with some of the hardest weeks I've ever done.

On Monday I rested, although I did have to do about an hour and a half of snow shoveling, so not really that restful.

My small helper mostly took pictures and punched snowbanks. In other words, not that helpful. Why did I have kids again?

Tuesday I had a great swim at lunch, stretching out some sore upper body muscles (sore thanks to that shoveling). Then the usual hour on the trainer Tuesday evening.

Wednesday at lunch I did some ri-damn-diculus intervals. It says in the Run Less Run Faster book that some people have trouble hitting the fast paces, and some people have trouble hitting the long run paces. Well I clearly am one who finds the interval paces kind of batshit insane, while the tempo and long run paces are not really a problem (in cooperative weather, that is).

'thank god those are over' selfie

Wednesday night the usual coached swim, Thursday night the trainer. The swimming is coming along nicely.

Friday 8k at tempo (5:17/km) at lunch, which felt really good. I was thinking about cutting this short because I needed to do 28k on Saturday, and I didn't want the tempo affecting that too much, but my long runs have felt so good lately that I figured it wouldn't be a big deal. I even offered to join Sam and run her pace for her 21k, which is little bit faster than I usually would run a long run.

It was at this point that the running gods got together with Mother Nature to smack me back to reality.

The run started out well enough, but then the snow started falling. And falling. And falling.

Mid run with the other crazy people. Thanks for the pic Patty!

Running on an inch of fresh snow is slippery. Then add in the Northshore hills...

Well it kind of sucked. On the plus side, after Sam and I got pelted by a salt truck (OUCH) the road was clear of the snow, but by that point my mojo was gone and the goal was just to finish the damn run.

I also could have done without the slushy soakers every other block during the last 3k. That was fun.

But we finished. Not as fast as originally planned, but we got it done. A good lesson in maybe not being too overconfident. And a reminder that you can control a lot of things when it comes to training, but you can't control the weather!

Sunday I wasn't sure how my trainer ride was going to go. The workout was Palisade, which is the hardest ride in the sweet spot base I training plan. Given the 28k the day before, I was thinking this had the potential to be the first Trainerroad ride where I'd have to bail.

Those little ups and downs during the intervals can really bring the pain.

It took a while, but I talked myself onto the bike and...it wasn't that bad. I actually felt pretty good through the whole ride. I mean it wasn't easy, but it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Which has me rather excited to re-test my FTP next week and see what kind of gains I've made over the last 6 weeks!

But before that, a nice rest week. Just what I need right now!

Swim: 1:07, ~2500m
Bike: 3:30 on the trainer
Run: 49.1km

Total training time: 9 hours, 27 minutes