The struggle

Posted by Katie

This week my goal was to get at least 8-9 hours of workouts (3 of each sport) in as a sad attempt at one week of base building. Tuesday I did a swim morning, track at night day… easy peasy. Wednesday I had a good interval session on the stationary bike. Today (Thursday) I was attempting to repeat that swim/run combo and it was just… a struggle.

The downhill turn really started wednesday night, getting to bed at 11:15 instead of the goal time of 930? 10? 9pm…?! (a girl can dream). I have realized lately that I am so much better off physically and mentally with 8 hours of sleep. I used to assume that I was one of those 7 hour per night people, but I was just kidding myself… 8, I need 8 (#thisis30).

So onto the morning, waking up at goal time was too much to ask, so by the time I was dipping into the water I only had 45min to workout. I also failed to bring my goggles. I was about to resign to a 1500 of kicking when I decided it might not hurt to ask if they have spares in lost and found. Turns out they did! And turns out I really need to buy new (clear) goggles, my borrowed pair was far superior to the pair that I own.

Full credit goes to Matt for turning this swim into an actual workout, the inner monologue in my head on the way to the pool was something like “hmm maybe I will just swim easy the whole time, maybe some 500s, maybe I will just pull forever” and his was something like “hard 100s! Surprise sprint 50s*!”.   

        *Let the record show that I beat him by 1 sec in the first sprint 50 and we tied in the second 50. He kicked my butt in the 6x100 but no need to count that… :P

I also need to thank Chen and her post about swimming technique from the Total Immersion workshop. I am totally an arm crosser… not too surprising since my arms cross my body when I run as well. The coach at the masters group we used to attend always mentioned this but I didn’t really understand how to correct it (or why you need to). I always assumed that to take a breath I needed to cross wayyyyy over my midpoint to push myself up to the surface. Of course swimmers everywhere are cringing while reading this because the exact opposite is true. Enacting the 10 and 2 strategy I actually felt much better breathing (and not sinking like a stone).

On my way to work I stopped to pickup something to have for lunch later which is when I had the sinking feeling that I had forgotten something (my work computer) at home. Long story short I had to turn around to get it and ended up having a busy day and not fitting the in the run I thought I had time for. So I still have to figure out this whole two-a-day ironman training thing and how to make training no such a struggle.

In other news I have been thinking about food and nutrition a lot lately. So in that spirit I got this new cookbook:

So far I like it a lot, the book has three sections for people who 1-do not cook, 2-cook a little, and 3-love to cook. As far as I can tell those sections also loosely translate to how long a recipe takes to make. So far I've made one dish from the "love to cook" dinner section and it was a big hit. My general goal is not so much to acheive "race weight" whatever that is... but more to eat and fuel better (ie less starbust jelly beans.. more avocado).

Chicken with Peanut Sauce, Broccoli Slaw, and Rice

*Apologies for the weird grey and font changes... apparently today blogging is also a struggle