ZappoMan.com - Fitness Blog

Week 6 Report

February 11th, 2007

Week 6 complete - “Base 1 Period” officially started… So we should be into more organized training now, and focusing on our bike swim run disciplines; maybe cutting back on cross training and developing a more structured plan around areas of weakness and chances to improve. If this is the score card I should use, then I think I did well, particularly considering the non-training related schedule for this week.

Basically, my training goal for the week was 12 hours of low to mid intensity workouts. This is not unrealistic, but it didn’t account for the fact that I had a great weekend camp out with my daughter’s Y-Guides group this scheduled. I also had a lot of work to do, and many mid-week commitments as well. So I really had to juggle things around to get my training in. All in all, I had a good week and accomplished most of my goals, but I was only able to do this by sacrificing lower priority goals.

Details follow…

Strength Training - 1 hour (2 sessions) - Ok so here’s a perfect example of sacrificing less important goals. At the beginning of the year, I had set a process goal of doing some strength training every day. I had worked into a pretty solid routine of doing a 3 day rotation of relatively light weights. I was enjoying it and seeing great results in muscle tone. I’ve kept my weight the same, but I’m sure I’ve been trading body fat for muscle mass. My arms and legs are becoming very nicely defined. I’m still not happy with my gut, but I haven’t really been working on that, so how can I complain. This week I did 1 workout with Tyler on Tuesday, and I haven’t done anything else. I do plan to do a quick set before I go to bed (after writing this). Anyway, I’ve clearly abandoned my every day strength training goal, and now I simply want to shift into a goal of at least 2 workouts every week.

Swimming - 2.25 hours (approx 2.5 miles) - I feel really good about this weeks swimming. First of all, I swam on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I swam more than 30 minutes for each session, and I did lots of TI drills. I mostly did these drills so that I could think about my TI post, but it was great to get in the water and deconstruct my stroke and really think about where I can improve it. I didn’t swim a lot of miles because for at least two of the sessions I was swimming extra slow focusing on form and stroke breakdown. I have picked up a few key details I want to focus on in more of my full stroke at pace swimming and hopefully by thinking about these things I’ll get some speed improvements without losing form.

Flexibility - .75 hours - Another area that I sacrificed. Although I really don’t think it’s good that this one is falling off. I stretched a little bit every day I exercised (Saturday was an off day) but I only have 6 minutes listed in my daily logs except for today… why, well, because I was clearly just doing a quick calf, quad, hip flexor, and bent over hamstring stretch, which means I wasn’t really getting good deep stretches. Today I did a longer stretch after my 52 mile bike ride.

Running - 1.5 hours (8.65 miles) - After last week, I felt like I may have pushed myself a little too far to hard, so I decided to take it very easy this week on running. I only ran twice this week, both times on the treadmill, and both times only a little over 4 miles. Next week I will run at least 3 times and do two longerish (7 mile) runs.

Cycling - 6.93 hours (123 miles) - Great week of cycling, three longish rides of 44 miles, 26 miles, and 53 miles, all on my fixie. I am seriously considering riding my fixie in a century ride. We’ll see how Chilly Hilly goes with the fixie… assuming I get lots of crazy looks from other cyclists, my ego will force me to continue to train on it. But I am eager to see how all this fixed gear riding has effected my standard geared road cycling performance. The idea of being able to crank on a bigger gear than 42/18 and being able to fly down a hill at more than 25mph is sounding more and more like a holiday! I have finally passed myself for last years accumulated miles… 509.19 vs. 468.93 total miles. Outdoor miles I continue to remain significantly ahead, and frankly I can’t imagine falling behind at this point since I don’t plan to do much indoor cycling this year.

Total Exercise Hours (including Strength and Flexibility): 12.43
Total Swim/Bike/Run: 10.68 hours (note, this is a new max for the year)

Charts? You want charts? Here you go…

Entry Filed under: Fitness, Triathlon, Diet, Weightloss, Swimming, Ironman, Running, Cycling, Marathons, Strength Training, Flexibility, Stretching, fixie, single-speed, fixed-gear, Camping