Ironman Training Days 10,11,12!

Wow, I've been so busy this week I've barely had time to sit down!

DAY 10

Monday morning saw me back at the cycling studio. Note to self: 3 beers and 5 hours sleep on a Sunday night are NOT conducive to a successful class on a Monday morning.

After some warmups and one-legged pedaling drills, the main body of the class included two 15 minute intervals at 90rpm. We began at around 110% of threshold and stepped it down 10 watts every minute for 5 minutes, then brought it back up 10 watts each for 2 more minutes, then finally held threshold for 8.

The first interval went pretty well. I nailed the power levels. But the SECOND interval was uuuuuuuuuugly! When all was said and done, I averaged 20 watts lower on the second than the first. Harumph. That'll teach me to get to bed earlier!

The graph below shows the two 15 minute intervals. Green is cadence, which I maintained at 90. Power is yellow, which is clearly lower on the second interval. Lower power, higher heartrate (red). Not good.

DAY 11

One mile swim, 5.5 mile run, all before 7am! Not a bad way to start the day!

I feel like I had a bit of a breakthrough on my swim kick. My first two sets of 500 were nothing to write home about. But my LAST set was amazing. I can't exactly describe what I was doing differently, but I was moving much faster. I swam a 10:28 500! This will sound ridiculously slow to a real swimmer, but it's a solid 30 seconds faster than any of the 500s I've done in the past two weeks.

Between each of my 500s, I did a 50 yard kickset. I think that helped me concentrate on kick efficiency, and that translated into me paying more attention to it on the last 500. All I know is that it worked, and I will try to replicate it again tomorrow.

After my swim, I changed into run gear and (mostly) ran the 5.5 miles home. I'm still rehabbing my knee, so I did Run 4 Walk 1 x 11. 56 minutes back to my house put me at 10:10 per mile. I think that's not half bad for a run/walk.

In the afternoon, I went to Sweetpea and had a complete cleat fitting, and got the fit on my tri bike dialed in. I'll post a picture when I get it from the fitter. We made quite a few adjustments, and I'll be interested to see how it feels on the open road.

DAY 12

Back to the cycling studio! Today's workout was labeled "intense hill climbing intervals" Geez, you ain't kidding. The main workset was 50 minutes, which included 33 minutes at or above threshold. Most of the climbing was done at 55-60 rpm, so these were steep, power building hills. 10 hills in all. TEN!

I did pretty well until the 9th interval, when I was starting to lose some steam (surprise!). I made a joke about getting gapped, to which the coach responded by making us do a 15 second out-of-the-saddle surge to catch back up! :-)

This was a very hard workout.