Workout Update 2-17-12
Feb 17, 11:26 PM
Well, the past couple weeks have been surprisingly slow. Currently I’ve been swimming 1-2x per week and cycling every other week (not by choice as much as schedule). I’ve been running a lot but that’s mainly because of the fact that it’s not something that takes as much time to prepare for (i.e. driving to the pool or driving home to cycle) since I can just leave from work easily. I met with a friend who has been guiding me and helping me with my training plans and he gave me some really good insight and direction. The biggest one was that if I want to really improve my swimming and cycling as much as I’m hoping, I need to be doing them 3x a week.
In the past 2 weeks, I have actually swam more than anything else. I started this week trying a Monday/Wednesday/Friday rotation on swimming instead of Tuesday/Thursday, to get my 3x in. I actually did Mon/Wed but this morning I was too worn out to get up and swim. It’s been pretty hard to get up early to work out because Sam still needs to be fed late at night. We’re hovering in the 10:30-11:30pm range to start feeding him but at least he’s pretty consistently sleeping until 7 or later. The hard part is getting to bed close to 11:30pm or even midnight and then having the alarm go off at 5:30am to get to the pool at 6am. I have noticed, though, that when I let myself sleep in until 6am, I pretty much never end up getting out of bed. I really just need to get the discipline to get up and do the workouts. I know my swimming is doing better just from swimming 2x a week the past couple weeks, but I really want to get that extra workout in so that it can be just that much faster.
Interestingly, as part of my spreadsheet that I keep track of my workouts in (in addition to online services like Garmin Connect) I have added a calculator that allows me to input various scenarios and see how it’ll affect my time in the race. So I can see what the consequences will be if I have a slow swim, good bike and fast run or whatever combination I can come up with. If I swim around what I’m swimming at right now for that race, I’d only need to average 0.5mph faster on the bike to make up the time. Now, that means my average speed would need to be 21.5mph, which is significantly faster than I’ve ever gone before, but still, it’s only a minor increase to make up for the slower swim.
The real challenge will be increasing my cycling speed. Going from my current 16mph to 21mph is a pretty significant bump. Only time will tell but I am going to do as much as I can to make this happen.
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