IM Canada: Week 4 – Chen’s version (i.e., since when does 7 workouts/week make me feel lazy??)

Posted by Chen

As Rachel mentioned, this week was cutback week, and… well… I’d say I nailed it. I ran a whopping 7.2 miles in seven days, which also happens to be my monthly total for March. At this rate, I should be back to square one with running in no time.

I’m not sure why, but I just didn’t feel like lacing up this week, and the one run I did get in was rife with mishaps. I even had grand plans to get out and enjoy nature yesterday (my birthday) with a nice long run, but instead, I was supremely lazy and watched like 12 episodes of Law & Order: SVU. Not that that was the worst thing I could imagine. Oh well, maybe this means I’ll just be extra tapered for the Oakland Marathon in two weeks.

Biking this week was OK, though our long ride on Saturday was a bit of a rough one. Rachel and I were both dealing with a case of dead quads, which made for a pretty trying adventure, but still not nearly as bad as that first 50-miler back in January (when I legitimately thought about quitting at mile 4).

We had been trying to get a picture at this overlook for the past several weeks, but we kept stopping at the wrong locations. Like, this happened multiple times. Well, we finally redeemed ourselves this weekend! #winning!

The one shining light coming out of this week was the swim I did on Wednesday. With my new Garmin 920XT in tow, I swam 4700 yards (or 2.67 miles) STRAIGHT, using all flip turns (I still feel the need to clarify that I use flip turns because they’re still so new to me, but I suppose to real swimmers, they’re just like, “Yeah. That’s how you turn.”).

I didn’t go into this swim intending to swim that far, but once I passed the 2000-yard mark (my original goal) feeling good, I decided to see how much longer I could go. I kept an easy pace and was happy to discover that I never felt limited by endurance – it was more just a mental game of keeping myself calm and convincing myself that I could make it 10 more laps without devolving into panic.

I’m super happy that I’ve now swum further than the IM distance without stopping. Now I just need to do that in open water while 2999 other athletes are aiming for the same buoy. NBD.

Side note: This was also a good chance for me to test out my counting skills, as I can’t actually see my Garmin while I’m swimming unless I basically stop. I lost track of the lap number a few times during the swim, so I knew I’d be off, but I wasn’t sure by exactly how much. When I finally popped up, I saw that I’d swum 94 laps, which was two laps off from the 92 I had counted. I know that I subconsciously err on the side of “redoing” a lap if I know I’ve miscounted, so this wasn’t too surprising. And now I’m wondering why I typed that paragraph, because I’m pretty sure y’all don’t care about my counting skills. Moving on.

I generally loved having my Garmin for this swim, though I encountered some issues when uploading my data, including Garmin not being able to calculate my average pace even though it had my total time and total distance. 7^th grade Algebra tells me that it should have been able to solve for “x”…. Anyone with a 920XT know what happened here??

Although taking two rest days this week made me feel like a lazy bum, I’m hoping the extra rest will translate into good things for my next three weeks of building. Onto Week 5!

IM Canada Week 4 Recap:

Monday: 

• AM:  Swimming 2100 yards (combo of swim and pull, focusing on TI drills) (average pace of 1:50/100yd)
• Immediately followed by easy cycling on the stationary bike: 60 minutes, 16 mph

Tuesday: 

• AM: Swimming 3300 yards, including sets of 500, 250, 200, and 100 yards (average pace of 1:48/100yd)

Wednesday: 

• AM: Swimming 4700 yards all continuously! 1:27:05 (average pace of 1:51/100yd)
• Immediately followed by resistance intervals on the stationary bike: 65 minutes, 18.1mph

Thursday: 

• AM: Comical run: 7.2 miles (~8:33 average pace)

Friday: 

• Rest (planned)

Saturday: 

• AM: Easy Bay long ride with Rachel: 59.7 miles, 13.6 mph, ~5400ft gain

Sunday: 

• Rest (unplanned – took a detour to Lazyville, USA, for the day)