Adjusted Reality

I’m not sure anyone in their right mind would ever say that 8 weeks is a perfect amount of time to train successfully for a half ironman race from offseason, but that’s just how I’m feeling right now.  Let’s talk again about 2pm on September 28th depending on whether I’m miles away from the finish or already at the beer tent, but I’ll happily ride the high of it right now.

Also, new tri top and visor.  Love them both!  I won them in a contest, how awesome is that?

My other 70.3 training block experiences have been either after a LONG LONG season as my goal race, or less than six weeks back from zero because of an injury.  Neither seemed to be optimal for me.  Last year (my 3rd) didn’t go so badly, I PR’d by 29 minutes, you can never complain about doing better than you’ve ever done, especially when it’s the amount of a short lunch break.  I may have even done just about the best I had in me at the time (my run game was still in the crapper).  However, I definitely made a lot of training mistakes that I think I have fixed (or at least done better with) this time.

1. Taking a break mid-summer was the best thing I could have ever done.  I was able to do fun summer stuff, I was able to unload all the mental and physical early season stress, and I didn’t burn so many mental training matches pushing through training in the heat, which meant I was able to do it when it counted.  Last year this time I had dealt with heat sickness and heat sensitivity and some pretty decent overall burnout.  I like this year better.

2. Doing a race first week back sounded like a terrible idea when I signed up, but it was a great measuring stick on where I was at, and a great welcome party to season part 2.  It made me super excited for this 2 months to start out with a (really good) race effort at a short distance.

3. My answer to any long distance race in the past has been to throw more and more mileage at it.  This has left me feeling (over) prepared, but a little crispy and mentally blahhhh by the race.  You can’t fix months of tired in 2 weeks of taper without completely shutting down and losing fitness (hi, earlier this year!).  This time, I didn’t have the ability to throw months of long rides and runs and swims at the race, and Zliten gets exponentially crankier the more the hours climb after 10 per week, so we had to train smart.  Each session had to count.  Each session had to have a purpose.

4.  When each session had a purpose, it was easier to remember to pick up the intensity.  The first few weeks were just volume building, but the last few weeks, everything was either tagged recovery or had a specific goal or pace.  And that pace was definitely not 100% easy.  Very little soft pedaling on the trainer, focused running, and swim sets in the pool or alternating easy/hard efforts in the lake.

And when this, or this is where you swim on the daily…

…its pretty hard to get super grouchy about life.

5. Mentally, I never really felt like I was down deep in that depressing hole of “wah, the race is so far away and training is never going to end” because it was so short and focused.  I’ve been able to attack each training session with enthusiasm, instead of whining “is it taper yeeeeet?”  This is so good for my head.

I’m going into this race a little curious about what my legs have, what my lungs have, what my heart has in it.  I’m getting goosebumps to toe the line this year, not because I’m nervous for a race I’ve done and finished 3 times, but because I’m a little more than excited to see what’s inside me that day.  What have I cultivated in this little triathlete garden of mine in the last 12 months?  How different of an athlete will I be on that familiar course?

6. Recovery.  I’m recovering like a mother fucker these days.  In the last few weeks, my legs have sprung back to life like little champions after hard efforts, and I love it.  I can smashy smashy, and it doesn’t lay me up the way it used to.  I wish I could attribute it to some lovely new stretching/rolling/whatever routine, but I’m not doing that stuff (I know, I should, I do sometimes but not as regularly as I should).  On days off, I could certainly picture more recovery miles, and I seem to be able to be pretty much ON on my hard days.

7. Fueling.  Part 1 is the workout stuff.  I gave up on chews and I’m now back to gels.  I tolerate some better than others, and I’m working through those logistics, but it’s much easier to get the gel out every 45 mins than fumble with the bento box or handheld pouch every mile or two to get a crumb out.  Without fail, I eat before any long or hard morning workout, and have butter coffee right after.

Part 2 is the rest of my day.  I am not perfect, and I may have a long way to go to get there, but this whole no bread/pasta/wheat/rice thing is really working for me right now.  Corn and potatoes and fruit are fueling my 10-ish hours a week of training just fine.  My stomach feels less like a bag of farts and fluid most of the time.  I’m pretty sure this is part of the recovery success.

I still do not understand the lack of weight loss, but my body is weird.  I’ll roll with it.  I’m eating much cleaner than I was this time last year, so I’ll take it.

Yes, that’s cauliflower rice.  It was pretty great!

I realized I’ve been very type B about logging my training here, so here’s a little more on this for posterity:

Week 0: 5.5 miles of easy peasy to get back into a training schedule, and then Jack’s Generic Sprint Tri Race.

Week 1: 10.5 hours total – swim focus week, bike secondary.  3 hours swimming, 4.5 hours riding, 3 hours running, one strength session.  Not much intensity.  Just logging the hours again.  This was like dragging myself by the nose, it was rough.

Week 2: 11 hours total – bike focus week, run secondary. 45 mins swimming, 6.5 hours cycling, 2.5 hours running, 1 strength workout.  Another rough week, because I started to pick up the intensity just a little.  Mostly in the bike (this was my first endurance cycle class, another spin class, first Ronald Reagan ride), but I finally start doing sets in the pool also instead of paddling.

Week 3: 10.5 hours total – run focus week, swim secondary.  2 hours swimming, 4.5 hours cycling, 4.5 hours running.  This is where I sort of forgot about pure strength work in favor of strength building (harder) workouts.  Still mostly volume in the run department, (24 miles with a 13 mile long run), but I kept the intensity in the bike with an endurance class, and while I swam easy in the lake, I kept to sets in the pool.  I was happy about a stepback week the next week, but also finally started feeling like this 70.3 wasn’t a crazy idea.

Week 4: steback (7.75 hours) – balanced.  1 hour swimming, 4 hours cycling, 2.75 hours running. I intended to get some test data, and tried, but I’m not quite sure what to do with what I got.  Apparently my zones on the bike are just about as high as I thought (130 tops out my zone 1, if 160 is my lactate threshold), and I just need to work HARDER.  My swim test was 18:20 for 976m (normalized for my werid length pool), though I forgot my garmin and did it on the pool clock and got interrupted twice for people asking me things so I probably could have done better. 😛  I skipped the run test because I was needing the whole stepback part of the stepback week and the only speed I did this week was one fast mile off a long bike.

Week 5: 11 hours – run focused. 1 hour swimming, 6 hours cycling, 4 hours running.  This was the week where “sharpen the stick” started in full effect on the bike.  Stupid hard 1.5 hour endurance cycle class + race pace hour run one day.  Lots of kicking my own ass on the trainer, nothing easy there.  Another easy pace half marathon run where I had energy for days after (easy pace these days is about 1 minute/mile faster than last year’s race pace).  Very encouraging week.

Week 6: 10 hours – the week of the brick.  2.25 hours swimming, 4.5 hours cycling, 3.25 hours running.  I did the endurance cycle class + 30 mins running Tuesday, then a long swim with a hard effort at the end + 2 miles running Wednesday, then a medium paced bike + race pace hour run on Thursday, and lastly a long-ish hard bike + race pace 4 mile run Saturday.  I did 2 hard swims and 1 easy, and lots of smaller recovery runs in there.  I was flying high after Saturday’s brick, it was a great way to close out my last workout before taper, and I feel ready.  Let’s go!

The endurance hay is in the barn.  I’m here, and I feel powerful, capable, and confident.  Now, it’s time to do all those things for the next two weeks that keep you sharp but let you recover.

• Short bricks: short fast bikes with short fast runs.  Keep the legs focused on that cadence and turnover.  Typically, if I can get through the first few miles, speeding up just happens (though I’m ready to fight for it if need be).  So, focusing on those first few miles is key.
• Work in the pool and the lake to keep focus and intensity.  This is mental training I need right now more than physical.   I tend to space out during long swims, and it hurts my open water pace.  I need to quit that shit.
• When I usually taper, it’s like “oh cool, I can ride, run, and swim once or twice this week and be done because I don’t have that many hours”.  This time, I’m trying to keep up the frequency of workouts, for the most part, but turn down the time for each session.  This is supposed to leave you fresher.  It’s a little more of a time commitment, prepping for many quickie sessions, but since I haven’t been going full force since, like, April, I’m ok with 1-2 more weeks of some doubles, it’s not making me throw a fit.
• More sessions at lunch/PM, so I can sleep in.  I haven’t had the best sleep track record this last week or so, so I’m taking care to get my rest.  I’ll have no problems with morning on race day (yay purple stuff), so I’ll train to my strengths for now.
• Continue to work on fueling my workouts as if they were races (when applicable).  I want my body to be used to gels, and I want to know which ones I like/tolerate best.

And, there’s a whole lot of words on the current state of affairs.  Now, along with the stick sharpening, it’s time to really start visualizing the race, focusing on the details, and coming up with the plans and goals and what I want to stick in my head to help me along the way.

Or maybe not.  Maybe it’s time to go into the great (known) unknown and just find whatever the day gives me.  That’s worked well at times this year.

Apparently, there are a lot of sticks to sharpen this week.

I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks head down, nose to the grindstone, so I don’t have a lot of exciting news, but I figured I should come blather on for posterity about how things are going.  And share some pictures of skies and food and my face, because that is what we do.

In three weeks, I will be getting ready race a 70.3.  Six weeks ago, I was on vacation, ending a glorious off season.  Five weeks before that, I was FINALLY having a tri where I felt I put it all together.  A week before that, I was having one where I didn’t.  My head has been a lot of places recently.

I hit some major funk right around April and May which was decidedly burnout, but since I had races on the schedule, I just had to power through as best I could without going insane.  My season was just about 2 months too long (and sadly those two months contained all the triathlons).  I knew I was grumpy and unenthused with training and racing at that point, it was just like “ok, you signed up for this shit, put in the work, so you can not be disappointed in yourself after”.  If that sounds pessimistic as fuck, it is.  That’s just where my head was this spring.

Five weeks off did EVERYTHING I needed.  While I didn’t really feel it while it was happening, once I got back to training, I realized that I had unloaded all the fatigue, all the negativity, all the mental exhaustion.  I didn’t realize how much it sucks to drag myself through training now that I’m on the other side of it – after a few weeks of acclimation, I’m happily bopping through the weeks and checking the boxes and finding myself not completely smashed into submission.  Feels good, man.

It’s happy to have my head, heart, and body all back in alignment again.

It shows how mental this shit is.  Lots of base + specific training + taper + bad attitude = the same as 5 weeks off + no base + no specific training + good attitude in the results.  There is NO WAY I should have done what I did on that Jack’s Generic course in August.

Since then, I’ve made some progress into continuing the STRONG and just making it LONGER.

Swim:

I’m swimming more (generally about 3 times a week) because I love the spaces I have to swim.  It’s so refreshing to get into a nice clean outdoor pool and swim sets in real lanes.  These times are coming down nicely.

Much more often though, I’m swimming in the lake.  I’m pretty sure this is all mental but I swim SO MUCH SLOWER open water.  I thought maybe it was just my calculations, but now that I have a watch, it shows it as well.  I’m regularly 2:20-2:25/100m in the lake, but I’m more like just under 2:00 to 2:10/100m in the pool.  And where I need the speed is the lake.  I suppose it’s time to really push it in the lake the next few weeks.  I don’t think I have much more time to really train my body to be much faster, but I can train my mind to push a little harder and not consider open water = always easy pace.

Bike:

I’ve been maintaining at least 4 hours a week of cycling (6 on bike heavy weeks), which I’m decently happy with.  Would I like to ride more?  Sure.  However, since I have about 10 hours a week to play with, this is probably about the proper ratio considering the proportions of the race.

I am making sure to get good quality rides in when I am riding.  I’ve done three long rides outdoors (and I feel like I really nailed the last 51 miler), and I’ve got at least one more planned before the race.  I’m riding on more difficult terrain and conditions outside than the race, so I’m ready for it.

When I’m inside I’ve attempted to keep the stupid easy TV trainer sessions to once a week.  Of the nine sessions I’ve done in the last few weeks, only 3 of them were those easy steady state rides.  The rest have been videos or spin classes and they’re definitely getting me a better bang for the buck.  I’ve established that I can get my heart rate up to approximately a brisk walk and sit there for hours watching TV and eating junk food for an insane amount of time.  Yeah, there is something to time in the saddle, but I think shorter time amounts and more ass kicking workouts is helping me with this particular race block.

Run:

Ugh.  Running in August.  Enough said.  I remember 6 months ago when I knew there would be a point where I would hate running this year, but I couldn’t fathom it when every day was super pretty.  Well, it’s here!

I’m surviving this time by liberal use of the treadmill.  I’m banking on the fact that I feel pretty heat acclimated when I HAVE to go out in it, but it’s mentally nice not to have to brave that every time I want to get any sort of run in.  I feel like I’m not running enough at all with a total of 71 miles last month, but I checked last year and I didn’t even get in 50 last August.  So, in my least favorite running month, I’ve done a little better this year.

I’ve also spread my running out a bit.  This time last year, I was running about twice a week, one long run every week, and one less-than-long-run.  I remember dreading every one of those and feeling flattened by the heat and the effort and discouraged at how slow I was going.

This year I’m squeezing in more, shorter runs, which crush my soul and my body a lot less (and I can push myself a little more and add a dash of speedwork), and stretching the time out between double digit long runs (every 2 weeks).  I think this will pay off.  At least, I hope.  My goals with my runs have been to a) maintain as many miles as I can without going insane b) run some of those miles faster than slog pace so my feet remember how to turn over and c) run miles off difficult bike rides to prove to myself that my legs will hold up in the race.

Weights… let’s just move on.  I do need to incorporate some core and continue to stretch, but the constant fatigue in my arms and legs tell me I think I’m doing ok kicking my own ass in other ways.

Overall – things are going well.  I’m pleased with my progress.  I’m pleased with how my body seems to need less time to recover, and my mind, generally, is really into the run/bike/swim stuff lately.  It’s nice to really and truly love it again, instead of just going through the motions.

Feeling good about training again may also be a product of “garbage in, garbage out”.  I usually start seasons with the attempt to eat clean (whatever version of healthy diet is my flavor of the season), and by the end, I’ve deteriorated to crap because a) during offseason I better not eat like an asshole or I’ll gain weight so I’ll get it out of my system now and b) the only way I can get through some training is to promise myself a treat.

I’m not above it yet, I really look forward to my once a week splurge meal.  I’d be in the depths of despair if I couldn’t have pizza, ice cream, mexican combos, sandwiches, or burgers and fries ever again.  It’s nice to have something easy, something delicious, something I can just order whatever I want and enjoy instead of making sure I’m somewhere that I can get things sans grains.

However, I’m really noticing a difference in my energy, my recovery, my attitude, and definitely how I feel when I stay away from junk the vast majority of the time, and it’s sort of amazing.  So that is keeping me on what I’m doing.

It’s been a freeing experience – I figured giving up pasta, bread, and rice was going to literally kill me.  I figured that I wouldn’t find anything worth eating.  I couldn’t be more wrong – I found most of these items are really tasteless vehicles for sauce and toppings that really taste just fine on their own, thanks.  And if I’m skeeved out of eating a burger with no bun, I should probably rethink eating it WITH the bun, that means the quality of beef is not worthy of my cakefruit hole.

Also, corn tortillas literally save my life.  Potatoes definitely support my training.  Once you cut out other sugars, fruit tastes SO GOOD.  Another secret is making sure I have a lot of healthy things around that I like to eat that are easily accessible, and I have less desire to get crazy with the junk.  Like below, I got a bunch of yummy things from the store and put together an appetizer plate to munch on, it was so, so, so good.

I’m also back at that point where I’m considering a nutritionist again, but someone particularly specializing in endurance athletes.  This is proving to me that I need a little help.  I’m eating cleaner than I ever have, and I’m seeing some change in my shape, but my weight just won’t budge, and there is plenty that I have to lose.  I’m pretty broken when it comes to food.   I could eat myself into a calorie surplus with only a giant pile of carrots.

I’m not quite ready (financially and mentally) to hand the reigns over to someone else.  However, there is part of me that just wants to hand the problem over to someone else and say “tell me what to do and I’ll do anything just fix me fix me FIX ME!!!”.  I need rules.  I need some assurance that I’m not wasting my time trying to follow said rules.

And, welcome to a tour of my head, circa early September 2014.  Please visit the gift shop on the way out.