Rachel's IM Canada training: week 17 (of 24)

Posted by Rachel

Throughout this IM training I've definitely been tired/fatigued and had some pretty bad workouts, but this is the first week where I felt like I literally got my ass kicked. Unfortunately it's not time to taper yet, so I'll have to suck it up and keep training I guess. Here's is a recap of my training week, with stories interspersed.

Monday
am- 4200 yard swim. I decided to do a "benchmark" workout of 20 x 100 on 1:30. I had read that if you can come in around 1:20, you are possibly capable of a sub-1 hr IM swim. I came in on 1:14-1:18 for all of them and the set felt great. Have I mentioned that swimming is the best tri sport?
pm- Trainer Road- Cartwright (60 min/ avg pace 16.1 mph). This bike workout felt good, too!

Tuesday
9 mile run (7:39 average)- with 4 one mile road repeats (6:57, 6:50, 6:49, 6:47). This didn't feel as good as previous hard runs, but I'm glad I forced myself to crank out 4 hard miles.

Wednesday
Bike commute- 29.7 miles, 13.4 mph (giant headwind and 2400 ft climbing, as usual).
Wednesday was a stressful day at work as a bunch of people got laid off out of nowhere. So I ended up going out to the bar with some people from work after my ride. I can safely say this is the first time (and hopefully the last) I've had vodka on a weeknight during IM training.

Thursday
am- 3400 yard swim (in hindsight, I may have swam a little too hard given the upcoming two mile race Saturday...but oh well.). Either way, I was relieved to not have a hangover from Wednesday's shenanigans. Sure, I didn't drink much, but these days it doesn't take much!
pm- Trainer Road- 50 min workout Freel @ 85% intensity. It was during this workout that I was having major problems with my gearing and it turned out to be my derailleur in the front. I know I've ranted about biking before, but having a sport be so dependent on equipment really irritates me. Luckily the bike shop was able to take it Friday and fix it up

Friday
am- 5.5 mile run, no watch. I would have liked for this to be 7 miles, but my body doesn't acclimate to running 3 min after rolling of bed very well and I had to take a longer than desired pit stop in the middle. The good thing about this is that it allowed me to grab my camera to get a shot of the nightclub-style line forming outside of Lake Chalet at 5:30 am. I guess ESPN was at Lake Chalet (go Warriors!) and people really wanted to be on TV?

For some reason I was thinking of the Willie Wonka scene, "Mom, I'm gonna be on TV!"

Saturday
am- As you may have read in Chen's blog post, 5 of us had signed up to swim a 2.4 open water race (Catfish) at Lake Del Valle. I was actually pretty excited about this because I wanted some sort of reference for what I could expect my IM swim time to be for a certain effort level. Unfortunately they marked the course a little bit short (I had 2.08 miles on my Garmin but Travers' map looks more accurate and he has it closer to 2.0 miles), but it was good enough to get a sense of expected pace. I ended up finishing in 48:30, which is somewhere between a 1:20/100y pace and 1:24/100y pace depending what distance you believe. For the conservative pace, it still extrapolates to approx an hour for the IM swim, which would be great (although I would anticipate adding a few minutes due to swimming with 2000 people instead of 200). It wasn't a very crowded start, although I found myself swimming way too close to another swimmer for almost the whole time. At first I was irritated but he actually kept me pushing the pace which I didn't mind, but I was wondering if he also found me annoying. Afterwards we chatted and he was very nice, so I'm glad we paced each other. And, it turned out, I won for overall women (my first adult win!) and got a watch, shirt, and beer mug! Cool!

It seems like everyone else thought to change before getting on the podium, whereas I'm still rocking my wetsuit. Just staying classy!

rest of the day- the 93 mile, 8950 ft climbing, hot-as-balls death ride from hell (12.3 mph). I'm not sure what I can say about this ride that I didn't sum up in the previous sentence. The very beginning of the ride was ok. We were riding as a group, chatting, doing some climbing but it wasn't too hot yet. The road was pretty deserted, with lots of scenery and wildlife (contained) and it was all going fine. One issue I had was that my toes started hurting at mile 8. According to the internet, feet swell more when it's hotter and I may need bigger shoes, so I'm going to check this out as they hurt the whole entire ride and also this morning. But back to the ride, the first 30 miles or so, although mostly climbing, were very pleasant. The fire department on Mines Road left out a huge bucket of ice water which was amazing! (Not that anyone from the fire department would read this blog, but THANK YOU!) We got to the "base" of Mt Hamilton around mile 38 and it was pretty hot out, but I thought I was ready to climb. Wrong. Very, very wrong. There is a 4.5 mile section which I calculated today to be 7.95% grade. In the heat. With no relief. I thought so many times about stopping, but the only way to get more water was to get to the top. I passed 3 cyclists, but none of them were actually riding- they were all standing in the shade stretching. I should've known it was a bad sign, but I kept plugging away. FINALLY, I got to the top, shoved my face with Gu chomps and drank gallons of water. Obligatory summit pictures:

We are WAY up there

 That's the road you take if you climb up the "easy" side. Little did I know, we did NOT approach from the easy side!!! Hence my confusion in the midst of my misery why all the blogs I read earlier in the week said "the Mt Hamilton climb isn't that bad".

Are we having fun yet? I didn't think so. 

Unfortunately, there was some decent climbing on the way back so the remaining 46+ miles weren't a gentle coast. Mentally, getting back was a huge challenge, but I suppose in hindsight I'm glad I did it for the mental toughness. I've been trying not to use bad language on this blog too much, but when I finally finished the ride I literally felt like someone had beat the shit out of me. Just took a baseball bat and nailed me in the back/shoulders (turned out to be a major sunburn), stomach (should probably start doing core again), and legs. Ugh. It felt like the Catfish swim had taken place days ago. If I feel anything like this starting the marathon in Whistler, it's going to be real interesting.

Sunday

After sleeping for 10 hours, I managed to wake up and go to the grocery store so we can eat this week. Then at 11 am I decided to rest my eyes for a second, and opened them again at 12:37. You know you got your ass handed to you the day before when you can easily sleep for 12 hours. After lunch, it was just getting to the hottest part of the day. I was slightly nauseous and shaky, but I figured why not- I'll go for my run. I was time constrained due to dinner plans and I thought running shaky in the heat would be great practice for possible Whistler conditions. Surprisingly, it ended up being not that bad*; 12 miles, 8:40 pace. I survived!! We'll see how much I pay for this weekend in next week's workouts (to be continued).

*not that bad relative to yesterday's bike ride