Thursday, March 25, 2010

Tough week so far.

In my never ending quest to swimbikerun faster, I am constantly working to push myself just a little harder and a little faster than my last workout. The winter months have come and gone. So has the time to work on endurance. Spring is here and it's time to work on speed. I don't feel too fast right now, but I now have some base line numbers with which to build my season on.
Tuesday, I ran a self timed and mapped 5K route to see how far off my numbers are from last year. I was pleased to see that I was only 45 seconds down from last year's peak. This number will still need to improve past my best last year as the run is still where I tend to lose time.
Wednesday was an interval workout in the pool. The plan was to do 5 sets of 150's on 2:50. This means, you finish in whatever time you finish, but when 2:50 is up you start again. After the 5 sets, we dropped the time 5 seconds and did 4 sets. We repeated this process down to 1 set of 150 on 2:30. It ends up being 2250 yards of intervals. While it never seemed that I had enough of a breather between sets, I was able to keep my speed with my last set coming in at 2:17. I'm proud of that. I have to give some of the credit to my attempts to actually kick while swimming rather than just relying on my arms.
This morning, Thursday, we have a regular 7.6 mile route that we run through the tiny kingdom. Last week, we just missed our goal pace by 23 seconds. The rain forced us to take our run in doors this morning and attempt to best our time on the dreadmill. (yeah, I know we're sissies who don't like getting wet). We knew that this wouldn't perfectly correlate to running our route since our course does contain some pretty good climbs, but we had to give it a shot. Well, we hit the goal by 46 seconds. It's not a legit win for us, but if nothing else we learned to suffer this morning. Running 7.6 miles on a dreadmill is 100% suckage. With no wind and nothing to look at except other people working out it absolutely drains the mind and breaks your will to continue. Doing runs like this can only help down the road if I ever find myself struggling mentally during a race. I can draw on days like this and know that I can press on.
This weekend looks absolutely gorgeous. Temps in the 70's and plenty of sunshine. I'm ready to get on the bike and bring the pain. Later taters.

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