ZappoMan.com - Fitness Blog : Thoughts on Fitness, Health, Diet, Marathons, Triathlons, and Ironman by Brad Hefta-Gaub

Week 4 Report

January 28th, 2007

Week 4 Down… This week was definitely random, but I got in some solid base work on all three disciplines. I fell off my process goals for strength training and swimming ever so slightly, but I’m not going to let that distract me. I am going refocus my efforts for next week as I continue to find a workable model for family, work, training, blogging, and play. I definitely want to make a goal for next week to find some more structure; but looking ahead to the schedule I can already tell that’s going to be hard.

As for training goals: I am continuing to progress on integrating strength training into my regular routine. I didn’t do a formal strength training every day this week. Friday I helped move and setup my new strength training system, so I moved weights around, but I didn’t actually do a formal workout. Saturday, I did a real long/hard 51 mile ride with 2000+ft of ascent on my fixie bike, so I’ll call that a leg strength training session, although again, it wasn’t really a formal weights session. I let my flexibility slide a little this week as well. And as a final blow to being process oriented, I only swam twice this week. But, as I said, I’m not going to let this get me off track, I had a solid week of training, and I am happy with my progress.

Detailed breakdown follows…

Strength Training - 1.59 hours - As I described early, I actually did 5 structured workouts this week, but had some element of serious resistance work each of the 7 days. I skipped my Iron Yoga this week, I’ll get back to that again next week. The big news for the week was the new addition of a “home gym” in my garage, which I plan to use for all my strength training sessions from now on. It was convenient today as I was able to slam out a quick arms/back workout while my family was getting ready to go out for a family outing at the park. Without the weights in the garage this workout would have taken an extra hour of driving to the gym, parking, waiting for machines to be free, etc.

Swimming - 1.33 hours - I only swam twice this week, one long session 1 hour, and one short session 20mins, but I got a total of 2 miles of swimming in, so it wasn’t a total loss. I am definitely going to try to find a masters swim program to join for next week.

Flexibility - 1.35 hours - Eh… well, I did some flexibility every day. But it feels like I was cheating on this goal. Maybe that’s because I am getting more used to doing it and so I’m getting lazy and blowing past some stretches. I am really feeling like I’m making no progress with my hamstrings. I didn’t achieve my goal of doing my problem area stretches for 2 minutes each day. Need to work on this!!!

Running - 2.05 hours - 15.58 miles - Yeah! 3 sold runs…. one was even a hill workout. But again, things were random, I actually did back to back days of running on Wed and Thurs. I made Thur a shorter distance run, because it was a hill workout, and it was while I was waiting for my daughter to complete her music class, so I only had about 45 minutes, and I didn’t want to be late. My times were slower for that run (8:15/mile average) thanks to some insane hills, including two times up a short quarter mile long hill that maxes out at 18% grade, and another longer one (about half a mile) that clocks in at 25% grade! There are literally stairs going up half the sidewalk on that hill. In that last tenth mile I was only able to muster a 22min/mile pace.

Cycling - 6.1 hours - 101.83 miles - Good week for cycling, mainly because of the 51 miles I threw down yesterday. Ironically, it was shaping up to be a bad week of cycling thanks to my bike “being in the shop” for most of the week. I’m way ahead of my outdoor cycling miles from last year (216.9 vs. 76.1), and I’m closing in on my total miles from last year(318.69 vs. 339.43).