Rachel's IM Canada training: week 3 (of 24)

Posted by Rachel

I like Chen and Katie's blog posts because they're constantly talking about what they learned, rather than just listing stuff they did. So I'm going to try to throw that into the mix (my biggest lesson came on Saturday). Here's the rundown of my week:

Monday
46 min trainer bike ride ride/12.0 miles. This was the day after that brick/5k back-to-back combo and my legs did not want to go anymore. Plus, I've found that the seat of my bike is more uncomfortable on the trainer at home than it is on the road. What am I doing wrong??

Tuesday
am- 4800 yard swim. I stole an endurance set from a stranger on the internet and I really liked it! After warm up, I did:
5 x {2 x 250 fr @ 3:45 + 300 fr @ 4:00} (no extra rest between sets). Granted, the internet stranger I stole this from did those intervals in LCM and I did them in SCY, but good enough! It's a 4k set with 1500 pretty hard- the 250s should be able to be done fairly easily with ~15 sec rest and the 300s should be hard with 5 to 15 s rest. Highly recommended.
pm- instead of doing track, I counted the 5k from the previous Sunday as my speed work and just ran 6 mi (8:33)

Wednesday
I've been thinking a lot lately that I should be putting more effort into the bike, so I did a very hard 60 min interval workout at the gym (19.7 mi). I am hoping hard intervals will help my biking improve. Speaking of help, the fact that indoor bikes have no wind resistance also helps the pace on them look pretty good!

Thursday
am- 45 min strength and core. I hit the weights pretty hard because I was worried I was getting complacent with my strength workouts. Turns out, increasing weight makes you more sore than normal.
pm- 7.1 mile run, comfortable effort (8:22)

Friday
3500 yards at master's swim practice. My arms were tired, who knows why.

Saturday
20 mile training run with the Oakland Marathon practice group (~1050 ft climbing in miles 3-10; 8:43 overall). I was a little bit worried about the distance because my last "long" run (> 12 miles) was 4 weeks ago. Turns out the distance was completely fine and I had no issues with the endurance part or the uphill. However, there is a small part of the course where you run downhill 300-400 ft in the span of about 0.5 miles. On that downhill my quads and knees were KILLING me, but after that section was over the pain immediately disappeared. I thought I was home free (ha!) until about 8 hours after the run, when a really slow burn began in my quads (hello, lactic acid?). I woke up today VERY SORE. I don't think I was out of shape for the distance, but the hills on sore legs were a bad idea. I will adjust and skip my weight session before the Oakland Marathon in 3 weeks. Lesson learned: quads do revolt.

Sunday
Given the information from Saturday, I decided to do my step back bike here and do a longer ride next weekend. It was a good move because my legs felt WAY better after the short, 28 mile ride (~2000 ft climbing). My pace was so slow that it would borderline miss the bike cutoff in the IM, but I'll worry about legit biking next week. On the plus side, it was another clear beautiful day in the Bay!

In summary: My arms were dead on Friday. My legs are dead today. Today/next week will see a reduction in training volume before ramping up again for week 5. Coincidentally, Chen got this fortune in her dinner (which she ate at about 4 pm) and since she already posted I'll share the message she/we received with the blog world:

Will do, fortune cookie.... will do.