Sunday, July 31, 2011

Weekly training recap, biking etiquette.

Similar to last week, except 3 days of swims and 3 days of land training:


Monday: 
30 min swim, 3mph on the knotmeter

Tues:
lower body (sans leg/toe presses)
15m row 3.25km (HR 130-140)
30m ellip (HR 135-130)
15m bike (HR 125-120)

Wed:
30 min swim, 3-4 mph, critique from David, videos taken


Thur:
push routine
15m row 3km (HR 130)
30m ellip (HR 120-125)
15m bike (HR 115-120)

Fri:
30 min swim...3.5 mph, which is faster than my early swims, try to clean up flutter kick..mixed success but working on it...

Sat: 
Rest

Sun:
Long road bike ride. This time I upped the time a bit and covered 26 miles (last week was 20). 



Here are last weeks splits:


Split Distance Avg Speed Avg HR Elev + Elev -
1 5.00 12.4 129 184 53
2 5.00 15.0 136 162 89
3 5.00 16.2 134 114 184
4 4.72 11.5 114 83 214

And here are this weeks splits, this time I punched my watch to make a split start when I get to the open road at 3.48 miles an I punched again when I left the road at the end of split 5. 


You can see that on the open road splits (#'s 2,3,4,5...about 20 miles of the total) I was doing about 15.7 mph. There are rolling hills only..nothing really huge.



Split Distance Avg Speed Avg HR Elev + Elev -
1 3.48 11.4 115 164 16
2 5.00 15.5 118 131 154
3 5.00 15.6 126 112 76
4 5.00 15.8 124 150 142
5 4.87 17.7 130 82 162
6 2.56 14.5 105 0 87

For the first time I'm getting good cardio doing biking.....the muscles are starting to be there and able to do the job.

I'm still absorbing the biking culture on the roads..this stretch of road is very popular (because it his very wide shoulders). There are some people that blow past you with nary a word and others that say hello...I decided the saying hello thing is the right thing to do.

I'll spare you long stories of my encounters with the bikers out there....I don't seem to be the slowest, nor the fastest...(as usual like running). Interestingly I've seen very fast young guys transition to stand-up pedaling on hills even though I can gain on them on the hill without doing anything special ...what's that about? Do they do it for variety ..to stretch out or something.?.dunno..

I'm a very skittish cycler when it comes to going down hills fast. If I get over 17-19 mph I'll just keep my legs moving to keep them warm but not really work hard to go faster...taking a spill would be grim at those speeds.  Also, it's really a waste of energy: even in a tuck air drag is huge at these speeds...from 16mph to 22mph it's like a factor of 2+...

----

....I don't feel crazy that I'm not running. Instead I'm very very happy to be successful at adapting mentally and physically to enjoying swimming and biking. No more chewing the carpet just because I can't run (plus lots of new things to learn and practice).

That said: T-10 days to running! 8)

1 comment:

  1. I'm not big on speed down hills either.......or around corners.

    ReplyDelete

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