Clicking

Last week, was a big training week. When you are four weeks out from your A race of the season, that's kind to be expected. I haven't trained for a half ironman distance yet and there are different approaches to the whole thing, but coach prescripted big mileage on all three fronts from the past week. But the biggest bulk of it all would be on the weekend.

Between Saturday and Sunday I swimbikerun'ed around 8 hours! EIGHT HOURS! In I loved (almost) every second of this! I think what I love most about training for this race is, that Terry is training for the same race and that we do our workouts on the weekends together.

For Saturday, we had 70 miles on the bike and a 4 mile brick run on tap. Actually, the brick portion of the workout was optional, but I decided to do it anyways, because 1) I wanted to redeem myself for last week's sluggish brick, 2) try out a different fuel option and 3) didn't want to sit in the truck waiting for Terry to get done with his brick.

In order to work on points 1) and 2), I actually carb loaded Friday night. Last week, I had a longer talk with a co-worker that also runs and bikes about my experience from last week and how crappy I felt and she urged me to carb load. When I got home from work Friday night (super late), I had two muffins and called it a night... Probably not the best choice of carbs, but it worked. For breakfast Saturday morning, I had wheat blueberry pancakes (Thanks, Terry!) and almond butter. For the ride, I took eight pieces of Fig Newtons, four Sunrise bars and four Honey Stinger Gels. I demolished the Fig Newtons and the Sunrise bars, but didn't need the Honey Stingers. I felt great during the whole ride and I felt great during the run.... No tummy troubles whatsoever and my energy levels were good the whole time! I was one happy camper! Even though, we rode 10 more miles on the bike than we did the week before, I was still feeling good after we were done.... AND I ran my 4 miles brick in a (barely) sub 9 minute/ mile pace... SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!!! I guess, I am one of those people who need a long warm up (Thanks Melinda for that one! ;-).

For the ride itself, we tried out a new route that went out and back from SCTAC to Hwy 88 and back. We found a modified version of this online and really didn't know what to expect from it, but we both agreed, that it was quite possibly one of our best routes yet. Very pretty roads, not a ton of traffic, very scenic in parts... And when we had to get on busy roads, than it was only for very short stretches. If you are in the area and interested in this ride, here is the link to our version of the route. I even recognized some of the roads we were on from the Greyhound Rescue Ride, that I did in 2009 (no blog back then) and 2010. This route sort of connected the Happy Cow loop that we did a couple of weeks ago with the GRR loop.

The only mishap on the ride... I was wearing a white jersey and white armers after it had rained all night. You probably can't see on the picture, but I assure you that I looked like a hot mess once we were done. Terry was pulling on the ride for the most part (coaches orders since he wasn't able to run as much lately) and his bike tire threw all kinds of crap in my fact and on my jersey! But since that is my only complaint for Saturday's workouts, I obviously don't have much to complain about!

Sunday, we were up and running before 8am again. 14 miles were on tap that day and I would have 4x 1 mile harder pace thrown into the middle. We picked an out and back route on the bunny trail and not even half a mile into my run, I saw this:

Looks like we are getting a CrossFit box on our side of town! Wahooooo!

The run was going really well. I could feel, that my legs are a tad tired, but I really do think that wearing my recovery socks religously really helps in my recovery.

Overall, I ended those 14 miles with a (barely) sub 10 minute/ mile pace and while this is nothing great for a lot of runners, for me, this is EXCELLENT and I couldn't be happier.

In general, I have to say that things are just clicking right now. I have been seeing consistantly better speeds on the bike and better paces on the run... So whatever Katie is putting in my training plan, seems to work! Another mantra of mine: Trust the plan! Trust the plan! ;-)

Now that all the "real" workouts were out of the way, I could look forward to out first open water swim of the season:

Yes, there were a couple of brave souls present, that did the swim without a wetsuit. Seriously, you couldn't have paid me enought to swim in that lake without one, but I am really bad with cold in general...

I did around 1.5 in the lake (which is one big lollipop shaped loop) at a comfortable pace... really just swimming along and enjoying the possibility to do all this. We had amazing people paddling for us to keep us safe on a lake that had a good amount of boating traffic going on that day. A special shout out goes to Cynthia for defending "our" territory in her jon boat.

Even after all of this, I feel great. There was a little bit of soreness going on Monday, but nothing a quick 25 miles with good friends and a hail storm couldn't fix! I also did a track workout this morning and felt great. We are getting now so close to the race, that I can start tasting it and I was expecting to be kind of over training at this point, but quite honestly, I still enjoy myself... Enjoy that I get to share this with my husband and that I spend a whole lot of time with a bunch of great people.