Bike Ride Sucked but....

Well after the high of having a good run last night, to 10 hours later not being able to complete the prescribed bike workout. Kind of a downer. My legs were tired today. I just didn't have the energy overall. Not sure why, but it just wasn't there. Today I just needed longer recovery times between intervals. I would stop during the easy interval, let me legs recover a bit and then start up again. So again, a bit disappointing for this ride.

One positive thing to note, I had ZERO knee pain during this ride. That was not a limiter at all today. In fact, it was at the end of the ride when I first thought about it. So hopefully we are getting somewhere with that.

Run With Daughter

My daughter the swimmer has decided that she wants to try a triathlon this year. So I have her signed up for my early spring triathlon in April. She was there last year when I did this triathlon as my very first one. She is going to be doing the “novice” division which is a super-sprint distance while I do the sprint distance.

She is a good swimmer, but fears the open water right now, so this is the perfect triathlon for her as it has a pool swim. It is only a 200y pool swim before she hops on the bike for a 6-mile ride and a 1 mile run. She started to do some bike riding last summer on her mother’s hand me down bike and that’s what she will use for this race too.

Like her father, she HATES running. But it is a part of the sport, so we must find a way to do it. So now that her swim team season is finished, she came with me to the YMCA to get a run in. She did a mix of walk/jog while I did my run on the track. She was all smiles, which means she didn’t work hard enough. But now she has some data to go by and the next time she can try and do a little faster.

My workout went surprisingly well. I have been pretty consistent at getting 3.7-3.8 miles in that 45 minutes, while keeping my HR around 145. Today after 3 miles I started doing the math and I thought that I might get 4 miles in today in the same time and I did!

I didn't change anything, just did what I normally do and this was the result. Maybe I was just well rested, or my dinner provided an extra boost but I felt great all during my run tonight. It is nice to see an improvement. I don't know if it will "stick" or not, but it was fun to see the improvement and feel good doing it.

Post-Vacation Sickness

So back from vacation now and while in Vegas I picked up a cough. Not sure if it is related to the cold I had before I left or something new. On Tuesday I headed to the Y for a run on the track. I forgot my water bottle and my HR strap so I ran by “feel” to try and keep my HR in the prescribed zone. I am sure I was too fast. So I ended up cutting my run short as it seemed like the logical thing to do. My swim yesterday was just ok. I wasn’t feeling real strong but managed to finish it.

Today I had a bike ride. I made all the intervals just fine, but my lungs were burning. I am sure that moderate exercise is good and probably helps the body keep fighting this off. I have always been taught that if the sickness is in your nose to keep going and in your lungs then stop. My cough has been intermittent so not enough to cause me to want to cancel a workout, but I just haven’t been giving it 100%

Vacation Workouts

Spending a long weekend in Las Vegas for my wife’s birthday. I packed a suitcase half-full of workout gear. Swimming stuff, running shoes, shirts, shorts etc. I had two runs and a swim planned like I normally do while I am out here in Vegas.

However, my suitcase never showed up. Well it was delayed 3 days. How a suitcase gets lost on a direct non-stop flight defies logic but it happened. So I was unable to do any workouts this weekend. It was actually pretty weird to not do anything at all. Cancelling a workout I could see, but just taking 5 days off is weird.

$10 Pedals on a $5000 bike

With all the knee pain issues, my coach suggested that I take the clipless pedals off my bike and put on a set of flat pedals to see if I can get to the point of pedaling without pain. At this point I am desperate and willing to try anything, and a set of $10 pedals seems like a worthy investment. So, stopped and picked up a set of flat pedals from Walmart and installed them on my tri-bike that is currently on the trainer. They look so funny and out of place on that bike, but hopefully I will be able see some success.

So the ride went ok. I kept it pretty easy at first so I could get used to riding on the new pedals. Finding the right spot so my feet didn't slide etc. Then I ramped it up some. My legs are still surprisingly tired from workouts earlier this week. I eased up a little towards the end again. So not quite the power prescribed by the workout, but a good steady effort.

As for knee pain, it certainly wasn't as bad as it has been. I was never limited today by knee pain which is good. I am often limited by it over time, or at higher powers. I didn't try any higher power. I don't feel the need to ice my knee now, unlike most rides.

I will need a few more rides to fully evaluate whether it is my shoes or not. Perhaps being unable to bike next week while I am on vacation will give my knee a chance to settle down a bit.

2:01's Again

My swim coach pulled out an older workout for us to do. I like doing these sometimes because it provides a good way to offer some comparison. She had mentioned at the previous practice that we would be doing this again, so I went back into my records to see how I had done before.

Basically, the premise is that we are swimming 100 yard repeats every 2:01. However, we only have until the next top to finish. So we start the first one and have 2:00 to finish and then leave on the :01, and the second one we have 1:59 to finish and leave on the :02 and so on. We didn’t start at the top though, each of us started at a different time based on our ability.

The last time we did this, I started at the :10 and completed 17 intervals, missing the interval on the 18^th. So today our coach also had those numbers for all of us and decided that was too easy for me and another person, so she started us on the :15 for a 1:45 first interval.

The last time I basically did 1:36 intervals until the very end when I needed to speed them up. Today I was rock steady on 1:32 intervals until the very end when I needed to get under 1:30. That was tough since under 1:30 is basically an all-out sprint for me. But I successfully completed 17 intervals again!

One of the things that I noticed was that basically my arms got tired. It was less of an aerobic issue today but that my arms and specifically my tri's were tired. I just couldn't will them to pull any harder. I knew those tricep dips I did last night would come back to haunt me today.

I was super happy with my form today. I felt like I was gliding fast through the water, my stroke count stayed low the entire time. So that part went well. I didn't think I would be able to meet what I did last time with number of intervals considering we were starting 5s later this time, but I did. I am super happy with how this swim went today. It is fun to see progress.

When is an Easy Day OK?

I have been fending off a cold for the last week or so. Just a bit of a sniffle, nothing significant. That is until last night. This thing hit my like a ton of bricks. I didn’t sleep well, and was actually awake for an hour in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. That is so frustrating.

So I had a trainer ride scheduled this morning. I was still sore from the kick day at swimming yesterday so I spent some extra time stretching before hopping on the bike. Then I actually got on the bike and rode for 7 minutes at a super easy resistance just to try and stretch the legs out.

I then started the workout and I stopped about 10 minutes in to stretch again. I stopped briefly at each "easy" segment to try and stand up on the pedals, stretch a bit and just will my muscles to keep going. This workout should have been easy, as I just did this one a couple of weeks ago without issue but the combination of health things made this one very difficult.

My coach then commented that if I am not feeling good, or if I am fatigued that it is ok to make it an easy day. But how do you know when to give up on a workout? How do you know until you try? How do you challenge yourself?

Kick Day

Last week on Thursday when my swim coach put the heavily pull-based swim workout up on the white board I groaned. Not because of what she wrote, but because it meant that the next workout was going to be kick day. I REALLY hate kick drills for swimming. I don’t tend to kick much when I swim. Just a 3 beat kick for timing mostly. I get very little propulsion from my kick.

So after a 2000+ yard kick-centric swim workout this morning my only comment in Training Peaks was “Ugh. I survived.”

Knee Pain

So I continue to have knee pain while riding my bike. It has becoming a severly limiting factor in riding my bike and has been going on for a long time now. The cleat adjustments that I have made haven’t made a difference. I am trying to figure out what happened and when.

I went back through my workout notes. I am really glad I am fairly verbose in my commentary after all my workouts because it allows me to find things. So in reviewing those notes, I noticed that the first time I mentioned it was June 17^th, and in that comment I stated that it had happened a few times before that. So it started in May/June of last year.

So what happened in April or May last year? I continued to look through my notes and I discovered that I installed my new pedal power meter on April 18^th and thus the new cleats at that time as well. So in the 6 weeks following that installation my knee started to hurt.

My guess is that my initial cleat installation was significantly different than how I installed them with my power meter pedals. I took pictures of them before I moved them so they “should” have been the same. But maybe how they center in the pedal is different.

Since November this year I have been riding my new bike and the non-power meter pedals. But I used the same location as the previous installation on the power meter pedals so who knows.

Kid is Faster Continued....

My daughter, who basically got me started in this whole thing 3 years ago at the age of 9, has been steadily improving with her 3-5 days a week of practice. I have also been improving, but apparently not at a fast enough rate.

Today was our YMCA Section swim meet. She had a great split in her anchor leg of the 200 medley relay. One that would set a new personal best. The next event she swam was the 50 free and due to touch pad issues, when the final time was listed, she is now the family record holder in the 50 free.

This is the first of the freestyle records she has taken. I jokingly have said that I am going to need to shave and buy a tech suit for the masters state meet in April if I am going to reclaim the family title!