Road to Arizona 2017 – Monday Recap 11

2/13/17

Short Run

I notice that I’m calling these short runs even though they are longer every week, but then so is my long run so I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. Pushing the long run to Sunday and then trying to do this run Monday did not work out for me. This was plodding and painful, but I finished it.

2/14/17

Bike Intervals

More short interval  fun on the trainer.  These continue to go really well and I can watch television while I do them which is a pretty good bonus.

 

2/15/17

Short Run

Today was Julianne’s birthday so the run happened pretty late because I surprised her with a night of BINGO.  (The rest of this paragraph is an aside having nothing to do with my IM training and everything to do with BINGO, so feel free to skip it, you’ve been warned!.) This isn’t as strange a gift as it may sound – for a long time Julianne has really wanted to go play BINGO with her Grandma, but they only allow people who are 55 and up.  So I did some research and found a hall near us that is 18 and up.  When we walked in they asked if we wanted someone to come and explain the game to us, but we laughed and said we knew how to play BINGO.  We smiled at each other confident that we’ve got this.  We did not have this. They play over 100 games a night, each one with different rules, they pride themselves on calling faster than any other BINGO game.  We got someone to come over and explain.  There are four BINGO cards per sheet, and each game utilizes all four cards, thankfully they let us both play the same card – once when Julianne went to the bathroom I tried to play by myself and while I was frantically marking the numbers on all four cards with my official BINGO dauber, I realized I had literally no idea what constituted winning this game, and there was no time to look and find out.  The four ladies nearest us were incredibly helpful, the BINGO hall even gave Julianne 25 free games because it was her birthday, and though we didn’t get a BINGO (at least that we know of!) we had a blast!

Anyway…For this run I was assigned a warm up, followed by stretching to try to get my calves not to cramp. Then I was assigned run intervals that are twice as long as I’ve been doing, at a speed that’s about a minute per mile faster than I’ve ever been able to maintain, even at intervals that were half as long.

And I did it!!!!!!!!! I did all the run intervals at or under the goal speed.  Boom!

2/16/17

Bike Intervals

I didn’t get to do this until really late, and while Julianne has been a saint about letting me ride the trainer late a night (I bought a cheap trainer so it’s super loud and in our small house it keeps her up no matter what room I’m in) I didn’t want to keep her up so I headed to the gym to use the spin bike. The spin bikes at my new gym are super nice – especially compared to the bikes at my former gym.  I realized about 3/4 of the way to the gym that I had forgotten my headphones. It was already late and I had the bike and swim to do so I decided not to drive back home, and prepared myself for an excrutiatingly boring ride. Luckily, the spin room was completely empty so I just played some music from my phone without the headphones.  Bullet dodged, long intervals accomplished.

Long Swim

I worked hard during this swim to fix the recovery motion issue that my swim coach noticed at my lesson.  When I get it right it feels great, when I get it wrong it feels very, very wrong, but I feel like I made good progress.

2/17/17

Day Off!!!!

2/18/17

Long Run

Oh glorious day – finally a run that I can build on.  The first third was rough, but the cramping finally released after a few miles.  Then for the next third I did my regular run walk intervals, and I felt so good that the final third I decided to double the run intervals. It went great – like night and say from last week’s debacle. Woo hoo!!!

2/19/17

It was a long day on little sleep and I was looking forward to just doing a bike ride and being done.  I checked my coach’s program notes before I headed out just to be sure that I didn’t have anything special to do on the bike, and what should I see but a swim that I swear wasn’t there before.  SonOfA…

Bike – Steady Ride

One more on the spin bike (and once more with the room all to myself) since the big storm left parts of the bike trail flooded and other parts with big sand drifts and that is more than I’m willing to tackle on my bike! Without any intervals this was super boring so I added some in to pass the time which prompted my coach to tell me that I should do what’s written and “not make stuff up.”  Oops, my bad.

Swim – Speed Work

I could not have been more tired for this swim if I took a shot of Nyquil before I got in the water. My stroke is in the middle of being fixed so basically I was just lucky that this was in the pool instead of the ocean because I’m fairly certain that any shark around would have mistaken me for an injured seal and they

Here are this week’s Selfies (Missing Monday because I just forgot)

Still trying to get Phyxius in on these pictures.

The face of someone who met some seriously stretch goals on her running intervals

I feel like I’m cheating on Phyxius!

Getting ready to work on that recovery motion.

Finally, a long run I can build on. Triumph!

Alone in the spin room again!

Don’t worry Phyxius, I’ll never leave you for a spin bike!

So. Very. Tired.