Monday, July 15, 2013

July 8-14: (Kind of) Race Week

Training last week was a little light because of a Saturday race, but as it was Olympic distance, and, more importantly, as it was 5 weeks out from Ironman Mont Tremblant, I didn’t really taper aside from cutting back on strength training and going light on the running later in the week. In fact, I was originally supposed to ride 60 miles on Friday, but was derailed by a severe overnight rainstorms that closed down ALL the roads we bike on. That ride got moved to Sunday, and I spent most of Friday pouting about that and dealing with some minor illness of undetermined origin that left me dehydrated even though I tried to pound Nuun as much as I could all day.

Not exactly ideal for the day before a race, and while it wasn’t a GREAT race, it went well enough that I wound up winning my age group.




(Let’s not talk about how all the fast women in my age group apparently found other races to do this weekend, or that the real age group winner won the overall race, which left me to take the top podium spot for the age group awards.)

Monday: 4200 meters of swimming with Rachel in the morning, then 45 minutes of strength training in the evening.

Tuesday: Rest day.

Wednesday: In the morning, a6.05 mile run, with 1.5 hilly tempo-effort miles (8:27 pace) and 5x200m hard efforts on a long, flat straightaway on Nebraska Ave. near AU (:51-:49-:48-:48-:49).



The neighbors probably thought I was insane, but it got the job done.

Thursday: More morning swimming with Rachel, 4200 yards with many fast 100s (1:14-1:17) with some longer stuff in between.
                                   
Friday: 1500 meters of warm up swimming and nothing else, thanks to the flooded out roads that ruled out biking.

Saturday: One mile of swimming in 23:40 (1:21/100 yards)*, 27 miles of biking in 1:38:54 (16.5 mph), and 5 miles of running in 43:15 (8:39/mile), for a total race time of 2:49:51 and 1st place in the women’s 30-34 age group.

Sunday: 60ish miles of biking in just under 4 hours, covering lots of hills out to Poolesville and back before 10 am to beat the oppressive heat…but not the humidity so thick that it was visible.


*If you go and look up the race times, my official swim time is different because the timing mat was an 0.15 mile run away from the swim exit, and included some stairs for extra fun. I hit "lap" on my watch at the swim exit, because I was interested in knowing how fast I actually swam.

6 comments:

  1. You still won your age group. I'm glad you had a productive week of training with a race and I hope that Mount Tremblant goes well (wow, only 5 weeks away...where is the summer going?). I saw the photo you tweeted by the way and it looks awesome! Yesterday's humidity was awful so I can imagine how tough that bike session was!

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  2. Uh, YOU WON YOUR AGE GROUP! Also, it's such a triathlete thing to say, "Oh, you know, the race wasn't great, but I still got on the podium." I can totally relate; takes one to know one, right? ;) Speaking of, recap soon, please?

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  3. ha. i kept trying to say the same thing last year when i ended up with an AG win. but then i realized it totally made my day, no matter what the circumstances :) congrats!

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  4. Congrats on winning your AG! That is awesome!

    I heard a stomach bug was floating around on 4th of July. I, and some of my friends, got it and it was rough. Glad you got enough Nuun in you to feel better.

    Also you aren't the only one who has neighbors who question your sanity. The other day I had to do 8 second hill sprints. So I was sprinting up and down a tiny steep hill right in front of our house. I'm sure I looked like an idiot.

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  5. Lol do you find you have a lot of stalkers who look up your race times and accuse you of lying? I am going to start checking into your claims from now on.

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