Week 9: April 8-14, 2013

Another week down and another week closer to the end of the "first trimester" of training.  This week was a little hectic with Mark preparing to leave for a long weekend for a bike race in upstate NY, and to be quite honest I was just going through the motions during my workouts.  I looked ahead at the schedule and saw that one of the weekday bike sessions is about to get longer, so I rearranged the schedule a little bit so that I'm now doing run/swim on Tuesdays and a longer bike/mini brick run on Wednesdays.  Although my motivation was lagging this week, I got all of the scheduled workouts in, including a mind-numbing 3 hour trainer ride early Saturday morning.

Saturday's ride actually felt good--nothing hurt, including my back and butt.  I broke the ride up into hour-long segments, increasing the wattage each hour from 100w to 135w to 150w for the final hour, while keeping my heartrate in Z2.  I also worked on my fueling strategy, which still needs plenty of tweaking.  During the 3 hours, I went through three 24-oz bottles of water, one 20 oz. bottle of Perpetuem, a waffle ride sandwich with cream cheese and honey, and half of a bacon cashew rice bar.  I felt dehydrated afterwards and probably should have thrown in another 20 oz of Perpetuem.  I also discovered that the waffles did not hold up too well being frozen and thawed, so it may be back to the drawing board on those.  Next week I think I'll experiement with plain old PB and honey sandwiches.

Since I was a single parent this weekend, I got up pre-dawn on Sunday morning and got my run in before the kids woke up.  It was such a gorgeous morning for a solo neighborhood run...

One of my favorite meals that I made this week was stuffed acorn squash (thank you once again, pinterest).  The filling was brown rice, broccoli, red pepper, green onion, and chicken sausage...

How fun is this?!

Weekly training stats:
Monday: off
Tuesday: 5.25 mi run, followed by 3200 yd swim:
500 sw, 4x50s dr/sw, 50 ez
3x100s on 1:20, desc
50 ez
Ladder set:
2x (100 free/25 stroke/75 free/50 stroke/50 free/75 stroke/25 free/100 stroke); free on :20 per 25yd base, stroke on :30 per 25yd base
100 ez
3x100s on 1:20, desc
4x (50 kick on 1:00/25 sprint stroke on :30)
50 ez
3x100s on 1:20, desc<---these used to really hurt by the second or third time through, but now they are not so bad!
50 ez
Wednesday: 1:15 z2 trainer ride, followed by 2.34 mi brick run
40 min strength and core
Thursday: 50 min z2 trainer ride, followed by 3400 yd swim:
500 warm up, 4x50s dr/sw, 50 ez
3x100s on 1:20 desc
50 ez
3x (100 free on 1:20, 4x25s IM order on :30, 100 IM on 1:30, 4x25s free on :30)
50 ez
Up-and-down ladder set: 100 kick, 25 swim, 75 kick, 50 swim, 50 kick, 75 swim, 25 kick, 100 swim.
100 ez
4x (50 swim, 2x25s sprint)
50 ez
Friday: 7 mi z2 run
Saturday: 3:00 hr z2 trainer ride
Sunday: 7.67 mi z2 run, 30 min strength and core

Weekly totals:
Swim: 6600 yds (4 mi)
Bike: 4:05 hrs
Run: 22.26 mi
Strength: 1:10 hrs
Hours: 11:48

Training cycle totals:
Swim: 49,650 yds (30.09 mi)
Bike: 28:50 hrs + 115 mi
Run: 176.52
Hours: 92:10