Muskoka 70.3 base build: week 8

Strava has been playing around with the profile page, and added this nifty weekly summary feature (although it looks like you can only see it on your own page, you can't creep other people's summaries). Although I swear they have no swimmers on their staff, because who reports swim pace in km/hr?? I'm still pretty much a swim n00b and even I know it should be time per hundred! And I'm not sure how swimming burns 0 calories. It sure makes me hungry.

also, swim elevation lulz. Just leave it blank, dudes.

Edit: just found out this isn't a Strava thing, it's coming from the StravistiX Chrome add on. Sorry Strava! And that chrome add on is sweet and everyone should use it for awesome stuff like this. Even if the swim pace is in km/hr.


Monday: 2000m swim
Tuesday: TR Haku (1 hour)
Wednesday: 8k run
Thursday: 1600m swim; TR Glassy (1:20)
Friday: 8k run; TR Seneca Rocks (1:15)
Saturday: 30k run
Sunday: 2000m swim; TR Cumberland (1:15) + 8k brick run

The week started pretty well, with a swim on the Family Day holiday Monday. But I felt a little blah that day, which carried over into Tuesday and Wednesday too. Not enough to make me want to cancel any workouts, but enough that I could tell I was fighting something. Sure enough, my husband ended up pretty sick on Friday/Saturday. I thought I'd escaped it when I felt fine Saturday/Sunday, but now I'm feeling that little tickle in my throat that tells me I might be next. Damn it.

Tuesday I planned to run at lunch, but woke up to snow covered sidewalks. This winter has spoiled me and I'm now far too much of a princess to go run in that nonsense, so I pushed the run back to Wednesday (and gave up my rest day in the process, which is less than ideal).

To be fair, thanks to the ultra cold weekend that preceded this, there was a lot of ice hidden under that snow, and I didn't want to risk a slip and fall.

Waiting until Wednesday meant running on the rail trail at work. Once again thank you city of Hamilton for doing such a great job with the snow clearing on the multi use paths!

The trainer rides were all pretty solid this week. If anything they felt too easy. Which is a sure sign I'm due for an FTP test.

"This is great! I'm so screwed after I up my FTP and it all gets really hard again!"

I spent all week looking forward to Saturday, since we'd planned a run around the bay and OMG running with people! YAY! Then people started dropping out thanks to illness and sprained ankles and such things, until it was just Sam and Nicole and I (and Sam is recovering from the flu and had to keep the distance shorter). But we had a fantastic run. The sun was shining, the wind was a pain in the ass, the temp was warm, the distance was long. It was one of those long runs that reminds me that running is pretty great.

Obligatory attempt to take a fun picture courtesy Sam. Please note how perfectly colour coordinated we are in our pink tops and purple hats/headbands/buffs. Not planned, we're just that awesome.

Halfway through the run at Copps. I don't care what the actual name is, it's Copps, damn it.

My watch was all 'woo longest run ever!'. Which isn't true, but is true for the watch, I guess.

Nicole had to run an extra 2k at the end to hit her long run target for the week, but I pretty much noped right out of that when my watch hit 30k (bad running partner! bad!). So I amused myself by checking out the beach while she ran out to the end of the pier and back.

Ice at the edge of the lake. So much less of it than usual, though.

Yep, that's some more ice. 

All the way around the bay. Woo! 30k run done. #runnersmakethebestfriends #NextTimeSamWillDoTheWholeThing #aroundthebay #bayracerun

A photo posted by Emma I (@egrrrl) on Feb 20, 2016 at 8:09am PST

(yeah I waited for Nicole to finish because I wanted a post run selfie with the lift bridge in the background. We earned that!)

Sunday I went to the pool and out of nowhere had pretty much my best swim ever.

???!!!

Not sure where that came from, but I like it. Considering that I'm not really working on my swim in any sort of organized way (other than aiming for 3 swims and 6000m a week, more or less), I'll take it!

Then a solid trainer ride, and an amazing feeling brick run. I was feeling ready to tackle another 30k! I need to write down what I ate on Saturday or something, because whatever was going on, it felt awesome.

Fake winter is back! Things are looking good.

Warning: Boring Emma tries to figure out her plan for the next two weeks blather ahead. You should probably just skip down to the end. You've been warned!

So that week wraps up the Trainerroad plan I've been following. I won't know for sure the outcome until I do an FTP test, but I sure feel a lot stronger and like I've really increased my endurance. And the plan itself was great - lots of variety in the length of the workouts and the nature of the intervals, and the long ones built up gradually so that by the time I got to the last, stupidly long one, it didn't seem like such a crazy idea. Two thumbs up to that plan.

What now, though? Start the next phase (a build plan)? It's complicated by the Chilly half and ATB. I deliberately started the base plan a few weeks early to give me some slack in the schedule, which allows me to insert a couple of extra recovery weeks. ATB is, for me, the far more important of the two races and the one where I'm most interested in trying to get a PB. And the one I feel more ready to PB at, to be honest. So I'm going to train through Chilly, and essentially treat it as a catered training run with a medal. But I don't want to start the build plan just yet. With the way the weeks work out, it makes more sense to do the first 3 weeks of build in between Chilly and ATB, race ATB hard, and then take a break to recover. After that, I'll finish out the build plan and move on to the final stage of prep for Muskoka.

So I'm going to repeat one of the harder weeks of the base plan this week (probably week 5 because it's a bit less insane than week 7), just to maintain momentum, and then repeat the recovery week next week so I can go into Chilly feeling good. Then after Chilly the build plan starts.

/end boring blather

So what's on tap for this week:

Monday: rest. (woo!)
Tuesday: TR (?)
Wednesday: run at lunch
Thursday: TR (?)
Friday: run at lunch; TR (?)
Saturday: long run with the girls; swim?
Sunday: swim, TR(?) + brick run

Still have to firm up which trainer workouts I'll do. And due to family life stuff, no weekday swims in the schedule. As much as I hate to miss them (especially after that amazing swim yesterday morning!), I'm kind of excited that I don't have to get up early any day this week!! Hellz yeah more sleep!