Archive for March, 2007
Ok, last week was a really meager effort in blogging…. cue sappy violin music… excuses, excuse… now, onward. No more feeling sorry for myself. Hey, it was a busy week. But I got all my training in, and for the most part I’m happy with my results. Good news is, I actually have got this posted by Monday as opposed to dragging it out until later in the week. More good news is that this week is a recovery week, which is good, because I need the extra time for work.
High level summary of what I learned about myself in week 12. Well, when the going gets tough, I gravitate toward what I like. Notice the giant blue pac-man shape eating the rest of my disciplines in the picture to the left. That would be cycling… my true joy, and oh yes… that’s where I go when things are hard… that would be my happy place. 
I’ve written in the past about how amazing triathlon is as a sport with subtleties and strategic complexity… (certainly compared to other endurance sports). I am most intrigued by the idea that different athletes have different strengths and they can tailor their race strategy around their strengths. For me… I am really happy that bike comes right after the swim, and is the longest. Why? Because I can tell myself throughout the swim, “Hey, as soon as you’re done here, you get to ride your bike!” and when I get out of the water, no matter how exhausted I am, I hit T1 and am jazzed that my race is “about to get going!”… Did I mention how much I love to ride my bike?
Anyway, this turned into a bike week… here are the details:
Strength Training - 50 minutes (1 session) - Tyler wasn’t in town this week, and what happened? I abandoned the weights. My only session was Saturday night, which was mostly a “try to get some minutes in so that I can reach my training goals for the week”… But I actually did a chest/arms workout, and felt pretty strong, so all in all the session was good, but the week was a little slim. I guess one upside is this means I had more time to focus on the important disciplines.
Swimming - 1 hour (2 sessions) - Bad Brad! Bad Brad!- Much like I love my bike, swimming? Not so much. I’ve written about it before. I don’t hate to swim, per se. I’m not a bad swimmer, per se. I just don’t love it. I don’t swim fast, and so I don’t get a feeling of accomplishment from it. I don’t struggle and feel like I have to improve, so I don’t have this compelling urge to get down to the gym and swim to get much better. I’m in this zone where I figure, I’m gonna take 90-100 minutes to finish my Ironman swim split, I know I’ll be one of the last people out of the water, but I’ll be relaxed and ready to ride, and I’ll certainly pass a big chunk of the field on the bike. If I was focusing on short distance triathlon, this strategy would never work, I lose to much ground in the swim. But in long distance (Ironman in particular) I have 112 miles to catch you on the bike, and 26.2 miles to catch you on the run… that’s a lot of distance and time to make up the 30-40 minutes that I lost by being a slow swimmer. This thought keeps me from getting more serious about my swimming. When summer arrives, I’ll start my open water swimming, and then I’ll probably bump up my training consistency. In the meantime, here’s a new chart to show my pathetic swimming focus.
Flexibility - 45 min (4 sessions) - A couple of 8 minute stretches, and a couple of 15 minutes stretches. I didn’t stretch after every run, because I allowed myself to let schedule overrule healthy habits. I shouldn’t do that!
Running - 3 hours 57mins (27.5 miles, 3 session) - One long run of 12.5 miles, and two medium runs of 8 and 7 miles. This was a big week of running. My feet and legs feel mostly ok, but I did notice today that my feet are a little sore, and my knee is still a little creaky. I could get nervous about this, but then again, I did run 12.5 miles yesterday on top of cycling 103 miles this weekend, so my body was working hard, and I shouldn’t be surprised to be a “little sore”. My main concern is that my soreness always seems to be in my joints and bones as opposed to my muscles. This seems wrong, although intellectually I can understand it, it frustrates me that my skeletal system could be holding back my performance because I can’t train harder.
Cycling - 10.6 hours (161 miles) - Like I said earlier, I love to ride my bike, so when the prospect of a 17 hour week (or more importantly a 9 hour weekend) was staring me down, I jumped on my bike. All of my riding this week was freewheel. I did a bunch of commuting with my Mountain bike/Hybrid, I did a fair amount of riding on my road bike, and yesterday I completed the upgrade on my Redline to have a new 48 tooth crank so I rode it for yesterdays 40 miler. I did however run it on the single speed freewheel to reduce the load on my knees. Interestingly enough, this was the furthest I had ridden my redline on freewheel. In was interesting to not have gears, but to not by fixed… my brain was all mixed up.
Weight (143lbs) and Body Image (Less than good, but not bad) - Ok, weight rose a little to around 143lbs, that’s ok, but not good. I attribute this to eating more because of the perception of a big training week, plus having friends over for dinner on Saturday, and having a couple of drinks both Friday and Saturday. Body image was down a little thanks to weight being up and the lack of strength training… plus I suspect that the long/busy week just had a basic emotional toll that caused some attitude fatigue. Good thing we have a recovery week this week.
Goals for Next week - This next week is a recovery week, so I will take it easy. Tyler is back in town so I’ll end up doing more strength training. I also plan to do some fitness tests and try to start proactively tracking the results of fitness tests in each of my rest weeks. Finally, I am going to use this week as a jump start for tracking my caloric intake more closely. I will use the following motivation: I ate too much last week despite having a huge 17 hour training schedule… not good… and I have a little extra time (due to not training as much) to apply toward developing a good system. Maybe I’ll document all my favorite (habitual) meals and their caloric/nutritional values.
Total Exercise Hours: 17.13 hours
Swim, Bike, Run Hours: 15.55 hours
I’ve added some new Charts, now in 3D!
March 26th, 2007
Ok, so I won’t beat myself up too much. But I feel like blogging is an important outlet for me. I have a lot of ideas that come to me as I’m out exercising/training, and I think about how much I’ve learned and how much I still have to learn. I want to share my experiences and I really really want to get feedback from people that I’ve met through the blogging community, and hopefully learn from all of you. If I disappear, if you disappear, I can’t learn, and for me… learning, and communication is a very important driving force of what makes me tick as a human being, and frankly, is a huge part of what I believe makes us tick as a human species. So I owe it to myself, and to the world, to blog, right?
Well, in that spirit, here’s a collection of random things I’ve been thinking about for the last couple days that I should have, but haven’t yet blogged about.
Running Slow - I’ve been trying to run slower. What?!Yeah… I admit, I was inspired by a couple of different sources. One what some stuff that John Rankin alluded to on his blog. He mentioned the “less is more” approach to training. Now, I’m not a dedicated runner, so I already only train for running at about 20% of my overall training routine… so I don’t think I’m at risk of over training in my run. But when I run I want to make sure it’s the most productive use of my time. So I am intrigued and inspired by the idea that there may be a big “early season” benefit to training slower.
I also got an earful from Trevor when we sat around at the end of Chilly Hilly waiting for Ray to show up at the finish line. He was adamant about the virtues of 65%-75% Max HR training as a way of building a strong base. I have to admit, I haven’t done any real research into this… but I do believe that it makes sense…. at least what I’ve heard. So, in that spirit, I’ve decided to try to run more of my runs at a slower pace.
Right now, I feel like my top priority for running is 10% more on every weekly long run. I’m up to 12.5miles for this week. Last week’s long run was 11.4 and it was pretty easy for me. I really want to run further and faster and more often, but I am paranoid about my bones. Two stress fractures has got me “running” from my own shadows.
I am also excited about the new found capacity I have for running faster. Last year, I trained consistently at a 10min/mile and when I ran a 9min/mile I felt like I “was pushing myself”… and that I was “running fast”. But since Oct, I’ve been targeting my 8min/mile pace for my Ironman split. I have been consistently throwing down 7:30-7:40min/miles and feeling really good about it. Sure, I feel like I’m running at that pace, it’s not easy running, let alone sub 8’s… but I feel like I can run a full 26.2 miles at that pace without concern. I almost did it at the Seattle Marathon, if it hadn’t been for my injury at mile 23.
Sure, I expect to lose a little bit of energy from my swim/bike legs before the Ironman run, but after last year, I feel like I know a lot more about how my body feels on a full 12 hours of race effort. I’ve done at least 3 full 10+ hour race efforts. Two double century bike rides, and 1 Ironman. Now, I’m not going to tell you I’m a pro… hell no… but I feel like I’ve reach a level of personal awareness with regards to what that sort of extended endurance (ultra endurance) race effort feels like. I am pretty confident that the pace I run an 8 mile training run at, can easily be delivered for 26.2 miles after 7 hours of previous race effort swimming and cycling. But will my bones make it through the season?
Ok… so rambling on… How about kids?
I really should write up a full post on this… but tonight was the Y-Guides Pinewood Derby. Saffron (my oldest daughter) and I built a car and raced it. For those of you who have never heard of a Pinewood Derby you can read more about it here. Although the Cub Scouts (Boy Scouts) are most well known for their Pinewood Derbies, there is a mention of the YMCA Pinewood Derby on this wikipedia article.
I remember Pinewood Derby’s as a kid, when I was a Cub Scout/Boy Scout. They were a lot of fun, but I never got “into it” as much as some kids/dads did. This year was the same. Saffron was interested, but she mostly wanted to hang out with her friends and watch the activity. She helped “design” a car, and she helped carve it, although I probably did 90% of the woodwork, I made her do at least some part of everything… cutting the wood with a hack saw, sanding it, painting it, etc. Well, it turns out that Saffron’s car won 1 of her heats (races) and came in 2nd in 1 race, 3rd in 2 races, and only finished 5th (last) in one race. Her final score was 14 points (lower was better), and she pretty much landed in the top 20th percentile since there were 92 total cars and she was tied by points for 18th place… not bad at all!
I promise to post photos this weekend. Click here to see a short slide show. These photos suck because their from my phone, but the capture the thrill and excitement of the event.
This week has been busy and tough for training. So far I’ve only managed 8 hours 15mins of training, although I have a 17 hour goal… so this weekend will be a HUGE weekend, with 9 hours total!!! I plan to do 60miles of cycling and 1 hour of swimming tomorrow; and then 40 miles of cycling, my 12.5 mile long run, and at least an hour of strength training on Sunday. Jeez! That’s crazy… Oh wait, didn’t I just get done saying how “aware” I was of my body and how I can do 10+ hours of race effort on a single day with no problem! Hah! What a phony I am.
March 23rd, 2007
Well, as they say, better late than never… and in this case, we’ll say better something than nothing. I realize that it’s almost already Thursday, and I didn’t even write a weekly report for last week. The fact of the matter is, last week was a big training week (over 15 hours) and this week is event bigger (17 hours). And to top it off, last week and this week were very busy work weeks. Oh, I’m having fun, and I’m keeping on track with training, but man, I’m getting tired. I am really looking forward to next week’s recovery week. Anyway, here are the quick details from Week 11.
Strength Training - 3 hours (3 sessions) - Two big sessions with Tyler, and one session without him. This week Tyler’s out of town and so I have to keep myself honest (uh… I already haven’t done anything in this department for week 12.)
Swimming - 1 hour 35 mins (3 sessions) - Kinda odd, I had one 40 min session, one 30 min session, and one 25 min session. I’ve decided my pool really sucks. I hate that the pool is only 17 yards long… that means 101 lengths to a mile, that’s one reason I track most of my swimming by time or miles as opposed to yards. My wife hates the gym too, so she is researching alternatives. Ok, there’s very little chance the pool will be worse!
Flexibility - 53 min (6 sessions) - Basically, this means 7.5 minutes of stretching after each run or bike, and one of those sessions was a full 15 minutes. I would say this is basic survival level stretching. I don’t think I’m making any progress on my flexibility, but hopefully it’s not getting worse.
Running - 2 hours 45 mins (18.8 miles, 2 session) - One long run of 11.4 miles, and one medium run of 7.4 miles. I sort of took this as a mini-recovery week for my running. Although since I’m only adding 10% per long run, I didn’t want to skimp on adding that distance. I am eager to get back to marathon distance, and although I am thoughtful about not pushing it too hard, I also don’t want to miss a week of progress. So my logic was if I take a week like this every once in a while in addition to my standard recovery weeks for all sports, then I will hopefully give my legs (and more importantly my feet) a break to recover from the bone and joint adaptations.
Cycling - 6.93 hours (117 miles) - Solid week of riding, rode my geared bike for the first time since last November. That was an odd experience. I got most my miles this week with three 30 mile rides. I would consider these to be short-medium length rides. The rest of my miles I got through basic commuting to the gym. In retrospect, this week was a very low-medium effort week with a couple of bursts of harder effort. Which I guess is good for a Base-2 period.
Weight (140lbs) and Body Image (Good) - Ok, weight holding steady around 140lbs, that’s good. I’ve decided to try to track my general “Body Image Index”… well, maybe… this may be a bad idea but I’ll try it as an experiment. The idea I have is to say, ok, how do I feel about my body? I don’t necessarily mean, how do I think I look… but more how I feel. So for this week, I’d say I feel pretty good. As I mentioned before, I feel like the regular strength training is helping me tone up. My arms, shoulders, back and of course my legs feel muscular, strong, solid. I won’t be posing for any “abs of steel” photos anytime soon, but I do feel as if my torso and core is getting “more solid”, a stronger feeling. I have noticed in my runs I feel more upright and more comfortable. I think my posture has improved, and I think this is from getting more muscles in my core.
Total Exercise Hours: 15.14 hours
Swim, Bike, Run Hours: 11.27 hours
I’ve added some new Charts, now in 3D!
March 21st, 2007
Yep, this weekend I went back to a bike with gears… it’s the first time I’ve used gears since last October, and frankly… it’s weird shit man! What am I supposed to do with all these things? And not having to pedal as I slow down? Being able to actually stop spinning my legs? What a strange sensation?
Friday I took my daughter to the swimming pool where I swam laps while she played at the kids center, and then we did a little swimming lesson. She rode the half-bike and since my knee is still bugging me a little I decided to use my hybrid/mountain bike to pull her along. I’ve made some mods to this bike recently reusing the smaller straight handle-bar and padded/road style seat that came with my fixie to trick this bike out a little. Originally the idea was that Tyler would borrow this bike to commute between his house and my house for our strength training sessions. But it’s been too rainy and apparently Tyler is made of salt because he’s afraid to be outside in the rain (I’m pretty sure he’s not made of sugar.) Anyway, I like the new look of the hybrid… with the smaller handle bar it definitely takes on a more aggressive look.
Swimming was fun, Zola is getting much better… I’m slowly moving her up through the TI drills… but she just wants to start swimming like Dad. The problem is that when she turns face down “to swim” she just flails her arms and legs and… you guessed it… sinks! But she’s got awesome form when she’s on her back, with her “hands in her pockets”. And actually when she shifts to her side to be in “sweet spot” she gets very “vertical” or as my TI coach Bob would say “stacked”… She has no idea why this is good form, and she’s very impatient, but I’m really impressed when I see the TI techniques in action with a 4 year old! Wow!
Saturday, was another bad rain day… but that didn’t stop me from riding. This time, I decided to pull out my road bike. Actually, the day started with gray skies and no rain, so I pulled my bike out and did a “spring tuneup” checking out that the chain was nice and clean and lubed up; the tires were in good shape, and all the shifters and brakes were working well. As I ran through the grears on my bike on the bike stand, I knew it was going to be strange riding the bike. Unfortunately before I shoved off… the rain started coming down.
Originally I’d planned on doing the Lake Washington Loop… 51 miles, 2000ft or so of elevation gain… a good 3 hour ride at mellow pace and shorter if you go hard… I was also considering doing my long run for the week as a brick afterwards. But two things changed my mind: the rain, and a call from Ray. Supposedly the gang was heading out tomorrow morning to do the loop. So maybe I’d shorten today’s ride, and do a longer ride with a group tomorrow. The weather looked better for tomorrow so I figured they’d actually make it out. Ok, it was decided… short ride today (only 30miles) and then a run (11.4miles)… and tomorrow morning a longer ride with the gang. Then the rain started really coming down.
I suited up and jumped on my bike… I figured that rain would slow me down a little, but having all these gears, and the ability to brake a little more aggressively probably meant I’d be able to ride a little harder and have a faster average. My first “that’s a strange feeling” moment came about 2 blocks from my house at the a 4 way stop. I actually stopped pedaling as I approached the stop and my brain screamed WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?! YOU’RE GOING TO KILL YOURSELF! And my legs immediately started spinning again. I had to remind myself, “no, it’s ok, you actually can stop pedaling on this bike.” Wow, that was weird!
Anyway, I ended up making it to 10 miles in the first 29minutes, with a 20.7 mph average I had an average heart rate of only 139… for sure, these gears make a big difference! That’s it, I will not be racing with my fixed gear. Ok, I never really contemplated it… but still. I hit 15 miles with a time of about 43 minutes (~21mph), and made a turn around. My heart rate was low, but I was definitely using my legs and pushing a bigger gear than I have on my fixie. It felt good. I don’t have any scientific proof but I do think my fixie training has made my legs stronger.
I was really excited about possibly completing the 30mile ride in exactly 90 minutes… unfortunately at 2 miles to go (with a then average of 19.95 mph) I hit a pack of pedestrians. I didn’t literally hit any of them, but avoiding them pretty much blew my chances of finishing at 20mph or higher. Several road crossing later (all which required me to stop completely) and I reached home with a 19.8mph average.
I through on my running shows and took off my soaking wet bike jersey and headed out for a “slow” long run: 11.4 miles. I ran as slow as I could… and ended up finishing with a 9:10/mile pace and an average heart rate of around 140. I took walk breaks every 2 miles for about 20secs per… just enough to drink a little nuun/water.
This morning I didn’t get up in time to ride with Ray and the gang. Uh, yeah, I can’t blame them… this was all my fault. I was up till about 12:30am… and the idea of waking up and doing a 50mile bike ride after only 4 hours of sleep just didn’t work for me. It turns out that I had much nicer weather when I did my 30 mile jaunt later in the afternoon.
I got to spend the morning with the kids making a huge feast of “Super Cheesey Omelets, English Muffins, Turkey Bacon, and Cantaloupe”. This is one of the two favorite breakfasts that Dad makes for the family. The other (yesterdays fare) is Chocolate Chip and Blueberry pancakes with Fried Eggs. Actually the Turkey Bacon can be served with either… and since I didn’t make it yesterday, they insisted I make it today. Today was an absolutely beautiful sunny Seattle day. So after breakfast, I washed my bikes… since I didn’t want to ride on a sunny day with a really muddy bike. I admit I am not very nice to my bikes… I ride them almost every day, and I don’t wash them every week, let alone after each ride as I should. But if you’re riding around on a sunny day with a muddy bike, you are clearly admitting that you treat your bike like crap… and well… I just can’t do it.
We decided to take the girls for a picnic lunch, and a “bike ride” at the park. The idea was that Saffron would get some “no training wheels” practice, and Zola would get some practice riding with her training wheels. The problem is, when we went out to the wagon (with the bike racks) we discovered that some vandals had decided to smash one of the windows out of our car. MAN! THAT’S LAME! Glass was everywhere, all over the street and inside the car. Amazingly, the car sat out with a broken window most of the night, yet nothing was stolen from the car. Nothing… just random violence. Sad, really. Apparently a police officer came by in the middle of the night and left a note and a blank robbery report for us to fill out. They couldn’t identify the owner of the car because “their computers were down”. Hah! Technology.
Uh… yeah… this post is getting long… but wait there’s more.
So after getting things cleaned up, and heading down to the park within walking distance (instead of the one we planned to drive to) we had a nice little picnic, and both girls got to practice riding their bikes. Saffron has definitely learned all the essential skills of riding her bike without training wheels… but she is still very unsure of the process. ever time she would see someone in front of her, she would take her feet off her pedals and try to stop the bike. Needless to say, this made her wobbly which reinforced her fear of falling in front of an oncoming bicycle… etc. We need to find someplace where she can ride a longer distance without cars, other cyclists, or pedestrians. I am confident that once she has gained a little more confidence she’ll be set. She did make it two loops around the small concrete patch we were riding on (about the size of a tennis court) without stopping. And so she earned herself a “flashing light” as a reward. I had promised this to her about a month ago when she was making rapid progress on her riding. But the weather has prevented us from practicing for the better part of the last month.
After we got home I headed out for my ride this today. I did 30 miles again, this time at a slower pace: finishing in 1:40. I also stopped at Recycled Cycles to look for a larger chain ring for my fixie. What?! Yep, I’ve decided that I want to continue to do more training on my fixie, but I need a bigger gear. The 42/18 just isn’t enough! So I found a 48T in the “$5 bin”! Unfortunately like my last $5 project, this one looks like it’s going to start to add up… Tonight when I tried to install it, I discovered that my current chain isn’t quite long enough to fit the new larger chain ring. So, I’ll have to ride my road bike for another couple days until I can buy a new chain (or at least a couple of links to add to my current chain). One more thing to learn about in my DIY bike maintenance self-education. I’ll be a bike mechanic yet!
Week 11 report tomorrow.
March 18th, 2007
Previous Posts
Ok, last week was a really meager effort in blogging…. cue sappy violin music… excuses, excuse… now, onward. No more feeling sorry for myself. Hey, it was a busy week. But I got all my training in, and for the most part I’m happy with my results. Good news is, I actually have got this posted by Monday as opposed to dragging it out until later in the week. More good news is that this week is a recovery week, which is good, because I need the extra time for work.
Swimming - 1 hour (2 sessions) - Bad Brad! Bad Brad!- Much like I love my bike, swimming? Not so much. I’ve written about it before. I don’t hate to swim, per se. I’m not a bad swimmer, per se. I just don’t love it. I don’t swim fast, and so I don’t get a feeling of accomplishment from it. I don’t struggle and feel like I have to improve, so I don’t have this compelling urge to get down to the gym and swim to get much better. I’m in this zone where I figure, I’m gonna take 90-100 minutes to finish my Ironman swim split, I know I’ll be one of the last people out of the water, but I’ll be relaxed and ready to ride, and I’ll certainly pass a big chunk of the field on the bike. If I was focusing on short distance triathlon, this strategy would never work, I lose to much ground in the swim. But in long distance (Ironman in particular) I have 112 miles to catch you on the bike, and 26.2 miles to catch you on the run… that’s a lot of distance and time to make up the 30-40 minutes that I lost by being a slow swimmer. This thought keeps me from getting more serious about my swimming. When summer arrives, I’ll start my open water swimming, and then I’ll probably bump up my training consistency. In the meantime, here’s a new chart to show my pathetic swimming focus.
Running - 3 hours 57mins (27.5 miles, 3 session) - One long run of 12.5 miles, and two medium runs of 8 and 7 miles. This was a big week of running. My feet and legs feel mostly ok, but I did notice today that my feet are a little sore, and my knee is still a little creaky. I could get nervous about this, but then again, I did run 12.5 miles yesterday on top of cycling 103 miles this weekend, so my body was working hard, and I shouldn’t be surprised to be a “little sore”. My main concern is that my soreness always seems to be in my joints and bones as opposed to my muscles. This seems wrong, although intellectually I can understand it, it frustrates me that my skeletal system could be holding back my performance because I can’t train harder.
Cycling - 10.6 hours (161 miles) - Like I said earlier, I love to ride my bike, so when the prospect of a 17 hour week (or more importantly a 9 hour weekend) was staring me down, I jumped on my bike. All of my riding this week was freewheel. I did a bunch of commuting with my Mountain bike/Hybrid, I did a fair amount of riding on my road bike, and yesterday I completed the upgrade on my Redline to have a new 48 tooth crank so I rode it for yesterdays 40 miler. I did however run it on the single speed freewheel to reduce the load on my knees. Interestingly enough, this was the furthest I had ridden my redline on freewheel. In was interesting to not have gears, but to not by fixed… my brain was all mixed up.
