Spring and TiPhoon Season?
With the onset of Spring and nicer weather, my motivation to get out and do some longer training workouts has been increasing. Considering that it’s still only the middle of April, I’m fairly happy with where I’m at considering the long break that I had over the winter. I keep telling myself that I’m going to train during the winter months one of these years, but I wonder if that mental recovery that I get from having to do any kind of training does me more good than physically keeping up? I think that could steer me for a mental breakdown and make for a mentally long season. Maybe more on that in another post…
Swimming: My swimming is in pretty good shape for this early in the season. I’m holding intervals that I remember doing late in the season last year. And I’m actually able to concentrate doing some of these longer distance sets (well, long meaning anything over 100 yards - hey… I was a sprinter back in the day!). It’s nice being able to swim next to those age group club kids (man when did kids get so fast!) instead of just watching their bubbles as they pull away from me in the water. I’m trying at this point to go three times a week and swim 3,000 yards/meters (depending if they have the pool setup for SCY or LCM). I’ll try and up that to 1:30 and maybe around 5,000 in a few months.
Biking: This always seems to be the sport to come back most quickly of the three. It’s gotten up into the 70s a couple times in the past two weeks which is totally AWESOME! I’m loving being back out on the roads. Last week, I only managed two rides and around 55 miles total. I had some… well… rather unpleasant chaffing issues midweek that we won’t get into. But that’s all passed and I did a 43 mile ride on Monday as the season’s first official “long” ride (”long” according to Gordo being over 2 hours in time). I averaged 19.2 over the course of that ride which I was really happy to see. In honor of Bolder, I’ll post my geeky graphs. It hasn’t been nearly colorful enough around here lately, anyway.
Half of my four rides outside have been with the tri club here. It’s a great group of folks. Trimama rewarded us with a guest appearance on yesterday’s ride with MN Tridaddy. I forgot again to bring a camera, so no pictures to share. Sorry.
Running: My lower leg ailments have moved from ITB, to shin splints, to Achilles tendonitis, and now back to shin splints. Of the three, I’ll take shin splints as it’s by far the least painful and annoying injury. I’m still keeping my weekly mileage down low. I’m trying maybe 3-4 runs a week and maybe doing a total of 15-20 miles a week or so? I did just over 8 miles on Tuesday and man has my endurance gone to crap. I did hold just under 9 minute miles, but I was hardly in any shape at the end for that to be the half way mark of my long run. Ugh. Definitely some work still yet to do in that department.
Weight/Diet/Nutrition: It’s gone to crap. I know that I said I was cutting back to 1500 a day until I hit my goal weight. That lasted about a week. So I’m going back to my normal high volume self in hopes that I’ll be working out so much that I don’t have time to eat. When I do, I’ll try and only eat half a pizza instead of the whole thing.
That’s about it. Sorry to bore you all with the mundane details, but I haven’t done it in a while so thought it was appropriate. I suppose in more interesting news, what do you guys think of this:
With maybe a set of these:
I do still like:
But close out prices on the Tiphoon are making me think it might be time for something new? At least this post is “colorful”. :)
What do you all think?