Greetings from Lake Robinson

Happy belated Easter everyone!

I hope you enjoyed your weekend and got to spend some time with family and friends.

Beyond spending time with the family (long talk with mom & dad over Skype), I chose to spend my Easter Sunday with a bunch of strangers on a relaxed ride. It wasn't in the training plan, I was actually supposed to be off or do yoga yesterday. But when I saw the ride posted, I just couldn't resist. It was a loop in the Lake Robinson area (remember our kayaking adventures a couple of years ago?), so I knew it's going to be a pretty ride, no matter what. It was also posted as a slow and beginner friendly ride and while I don't think that I am slow or a beginner anymore, I just wanted to ride for the sake of riding. Lately, all rides have been about something, be it mileage or cadence or intervals or speed... It was about time to just go on a ride. And in order to not look to intimidating when unloading the bike, I chose to dust off my poor roadie (that hasn't been ridden since October) and really found myself enjoying being on the roadie for a change as well.

We ended up with a little over 28 miles... Just enough to shake out the legs... Funny, how your preception of distance changes when you are getting used to log higher mileage.

Speaking of high mileage and volume... Looki here:

This is my weekly minute volume for the last five weeks.... With the Charleston Half just two weeks away, the training is in the bank. FYI: the "sports" minutes in the graph are mostly doggy walks.

We topped off the training with a 65 mile bike run, followed by a 5ish mile brick run on Saturday. My nutitional medley of Fig Newtowns, Sunrise bars and Honey Stinger gels is still working, so I guess that's going to my plan for race day. Other than that, I had one more revelation on the ride: Don't rely on the Garmin course, because Garmins sometimes screw up (What do you mean, I am 5,782 miles away from the course???). I should have written out a cue sheet, but so far, I always got lucky and the Garmin worked... until last Saturday. Because of that, we fell back on the 55 mile Happy Cow loop, that we can do in our sleep at this point and of course tagged on a couple of miles here and there to make it to 65 miles in total. The run afterwards was alright, I was getting really hot at the end of it and had to battle some side stitches. It can't be rainbows and unicorns all the time.

Because I was off for Good Friday, I switched my rest day to Thursday and did my Thursday workout on Friday. The run and swim was nothing earth shattering, but got it done and out of the way between running errands and getting some house work done. Seriously, the house probably suffers most with all this training! ;-)

Almost on the home stretch now for the race. This week is still pretty packed with two double workout days, but we are going to significantly cut mileage Saturday and Sunday... I can smell taper just being around the corner.