September 10-16: Another Hotel Gym in Another Town?

Thanks to an unfortunate confluence of events, my recovery from the ironman took a clear step backwards last week. The biggest factor was the fact that I didn’t sleep in the same city more than two nights in a row the entire week, which is far from ideal for the phase of recovery that involves slowly building volume back up. Sure, I still got in my scheduled workouts, but I was dragging pretty badly by the end of the week. To make things even more fun, I have some new dietary restrictions that I’m supposed to follow for medical reasons, and it isn’t entirely clear to me how they can work with training.

That all left me frustrated because I still want to do at least one more triathlon and a half marathon by the end of 2012, which means that I don’t have much more time to take it easy if I want to have descent performances in those. I’m hoping that a little sleep early this week turns some of this around.

Oh, and not running all over the country will help, too.

Monday: An hour in the hotel gym in Austin, including a 20 minute warm up on the elliptical before hitting the weights. Yes, WEIGHTS!!! Finally, they’re back after being gone for six weeks because of IM Louisville.

Tuesday: 45 minutes of running on the treadmill in the hotel gym in the morning. I’m sure Austin has great places to run, but I wasn’t about to go look for them by myself at 5:30 am.

Wednesday: 3400 yards of swimming at the YMCA in Austin in the morning, followed by more meetings and then a flight to Denver for another set of meetings.

Thursday: Another 45 minutes of running on another hotel treadmill, followed by half an hour of strength training and stretching before going to a day of meetings and then jumping on an airplane to get home around 11 pm.

Friday: 1:20 on the bike trainer at 5 am, just in time to jump into a car and drive to Greensboro, NC for the annual aquatics convention.

Saturday: “Rest” day, which involved taking a few synchronized swimming judging exams, sitting in a ton of meetings about administration of synchronized swimming competitions, and then driving home until 11 pm.

Sunday: Roughly 33 miles of biking in the morning, low on rest and high on irritability.