26 March 2007
Week 12 Report
Posted by Brad Hefta-Gaub under: Cycle; Diet; Fitness; Flexibility; Ironman; Marathons; Run; Strength Training; Stretching; Swim; Weightloss; bike maintenance; blogging; exercise; fixed gear; fixie; food; single-speed; sports injuries; triathlon.
Ok, last week was a really meager effort in blogging…. cue sappy violin music… excuses, excuse… now, onward. No more feeling sorry for myself. Hey, it was a busy week. But I got all my training in, and for the most part I’m happy with my results. Good news is, I actually have got this posted by Monday as opposed to dragging it out until later in the week. More good news is that this week is a recovery week, which is good, because I need the extra time for work.
High level summary of what I learned about myself in week 12. Well, when the going gets tough, I gravitate toward what I like. Notice the giant blue pac-man shape eating the rest of my disciplines in the picture to the left. That would be cycling… my true joy, and oh yes… that’s where I go when things are hard… that would be my happy place. 
I’ve written in the past about how amazing triathlon is as a sport with subtleties and strategic complexity… (certainly compared to other endurance sports). I am most intrigued by the idea that different athletes have different strengths and they can tailor their race strategy around their strengths. For me… I am really happy that bike comes right after the swim, and is the longest. Why? Because I can tell myself throughout the swim, “Hey, as soon as you’re done here, you get to ride your bike!” and when I get out of the water, no matter how exhausted I am, I hit T1 and am jazzed that my race is “about to get going!”… Did I mention how much I love to ride my bike?
Anyway, this turned into a bike week… here are the details:
Strength Training - 50 minutes (1 session) - Tyler wasn’t in town this week, and what happened? I abandoned the weights. My only session was Saturday night, which was mostly a “try to get some minutes in so that I can reach my training goals for the week”… But I actually did a chest/arms workout, and felt pretty strong, so all in all the session was good, but the week was a little slim. I guess one upside is this means I had more time to focus on the important disciplines.
Swimming - 1 hour (2 sessions) - Bad Brad! Bad Brad!- Much like I love my bike, swimming? Not so much. I’ve written about it before. I don’t hate to swim, per se. I’m not a bad swimmer, per se. I just don’t love it. I don’t swim fast, and so I don’t get a feeling of accomplishment from it. I don’t struggle and feel like I have to improve, so I don’t have this compelling urge to get down to the gym and swim to get much better. I’m in this zone where I figure, I’m gonna take 90-100 minutes to finish my Ironman swim split, I know I’ll be one of the last people out of the water, but I’ll be relaxed and ready to ride, and I’ll certainly pass a big chunk of the field on the bike. If I was focusing on short distance triathlon, this strategy would never work, I lose to much ground in the swim. But in long distance (Ironman in particular) I have 112 miles to catch you on the bike, and 26.2 miles to catch you on the run… that’s a lot of distance and time to make up the 30-40 minutes that I lost by being a slow swimmer. This thought keeps me from getting more serious about my swimming. When summer arrives, I’ll start my open water swimming, and then I’ll probably bump up my training consistency. In the meantime, here’s a new chart to show my pathetic swimming focus.
Flexibility - 45 min (4 sessions) - A couple of 8 minute stretches, and a couple of 15 minutes stretches. I didn’t stretch after every run, because I allowed myself to let schedule overrule healthy habits. I shouldn’t do that!
Running - 3 hours 57mins (27.5 miles, 3 session) - One long run of 12.5 miles, and two medium runs of 8 and 7 miles. This was a big week of running. My feet and legs feel mostly ok, but I did notice today that my feet are a little sore, and my knee is still a little creaky. I could get nervous about this, but then again, I did run 12.5 miles yesterday on top of cycling 103 miles this weekend, so my body was working hard, and I shouldn’t be surprised to be a “little sore”. My main concern is that my soreness always seems to be in my joints and bones as opposed to my muscles. This seems wrong, although intellectually I can understand it, it frustrates me that my skeletal system could be holding back my performance because I can’t train harder.
Cycling - 10.6 hours (161 miles) - Like I said earlier, I love to ride my bike, so when the prospect of a 17 hour week (or more importantly a 9 hour weekend) was staring me down, I jumped on my bike. All of my riding this week was freewheel. I did a bunch of commuting with my Mountain bike/Hybrid, I did a fair amount of riding on my road bike, and yesterday I completed the upgrade on my Redline to have a new 48 tooth crank so I rode it for yesterdays 40 miler. I did however run it on the single speed freewheel to reduce the load on my knees. Interestingly enough, this was the furthest I had ridden my redline on freewheel. In was interesting to not have gears, but to not by fixed… my brain was all mixed up.
Weight (143lbs) and Body Image (Less than good, but not bad) - Ok, weight rose a little to around 143lbs, that’s ok, but not good. I attribute this to eating more because of the perception of a big training week, plus having friends over for dinner on Saturday, and having a couple of drinks both Friday and Saturday. Body image was down a little thanks to weight being up and the lack of strength training… plus I suspect that the long/busy week just had a basic emotional toll that caused some attitude fatigue. Good thing we have a recovery week this week.
Goals for Next week - This next week is a recovery week, so I will take it easy. Tyler is back in town so I’ll end up doing more strength training. I also plan to do some fitness tests and try to start proactively tracking the results of fitness tests in each of my rest weeks. Finally, I am going to use this week as a jump start for tracking my caloric intake more closely. I will use the following motivation: I ate too much last week despite having a huge 17 hour training schedule… not good… and I have a little extra time (due to not training as much) to apply toward developing a good system. Maybe I’ll document all my favorite (habitual) meals and their caloric/nutritional values.
Total Exercise Hours: 17.13 hours
Swim, Bike, Run Hours: 15.55 hours
I’ve added some new Charts, now in 3D!
4 Comments so far...
Week 12 Report « ZappoMan.wordpress.com - Fitness Blog Says:
[...] Anyway, this turned into a bike week… here are the details: (Read the rest of this article on ZappoMan.com…) [...]
Jenny Says:
Fun to hear about how much you love cycling!
I hope you will forgive my saying it, but I am only following your own lead in previous weeks when I suggest that surely the best thing you could do for your training is get a better pool membership! Of course you don’t like swimming if it’s crowded lanes in a 17-meter pool–if I were you I would find a weekend open-water swim clinic where you can take the family and make a little vacation of it, scheduled a couple months from now, and in the meantime find a better pool & start enjoying that part of things more…
zappoman Says:
I agree… a better pool would help.
My wife is shopping around for a better gym, one that is closer to our house or more directly in line between the activities that we do (like taking the kids to school, etc…)… since I only use the gym for swimming, I have less concern about the other features. So I’m letting her take the lead on finding a gym that she likes.
Once summer comes around and the public beaches in Seattle open up (with lifeguards, etc) I will start swimming with my wet suit in the open water.
Jenny Says:
Good luck finding a decent one, then! And yes, the beach thing sounds infinitely superior…
