Beginner 1/2 Ironman Plan Group (Page 117)

First race down of the season! Unofficially a 2:13ish finish for 15.5 miles of technical, rocky, and hilly Spokane River Run.  that's about 8:34/mi pace.  Setting up nicely to go 8:00/mi in May marathon.

Ninkasi Total Domination IPA as a refreshing after race barly pop.  Think I'll relax a little for the rest of day. 

Next race is a 12K speed demon in 2 weeks.  Lilac Bloomsday event here in Spokane. 

I ran into a fellow PrivateIdaho at this run.  First time meeting a fellow BT'er.  That was cool.

Great job today Kevin!  When he says "technical", he really means at times it was a rocky, muddy goat trail, only a few yards from a raging river.  And on top of that, it was the warmest day of the year... something we have all had zero exposure to since last summer.

I managed 8:52 per mile, and I only did the 10k - Kevin's 25k would have done me in (at least I did manage to hold off my 12 year-old son by 5 minutes, so even though he made the podium, the old man is still king!!!).  I originally planned on a bike ride later in the day, but I re-worked my schedule and instead enjoyed a couple Deschutes Inversion IPA's.

Nice to meet you Kevin, maybe we'll run into each other amongst the other 50,000 at Bloomsday in a couple of weeks!

Congrats on the race! Could have used the beer yesterday!  Well, I am thoroughly confused. I did 2 X 900m today, not swimming particularly hard, in the same hot pool, 100m easy swim between them but no acttual rest (unless you count a few chugs from my water bottle) in 15:22, 15:14. That's 1:41/1:42 pace. I was swimming WAY harder on the time trial. I mean hurting from 300 or 400m. And I can't conceive that I'm more "rested" today. Beginning to think maybe the time trial was 1050, 1:36 pace. Either that or I started too fast, crashed and burned. Oh no! Guess I will see next time, if I can learn to count.....Times very consistent today and sure I counted right--I did the last 25 of every 100m with bilateral breathing, both to practice and help count. I didn't on the time trial because it still feels more natural to do 2-2-4 and I thought the other pattern would slow me down.

Sad day--our school head died today after a long battle with cancer. He was a big supporter of both both student and faculty involvement with swimming and our little swim/tri "club". Felt he would have wanted me to go ahead and do the workout. So maybe he was pushing me in spirit.

 Great job on the races KB and PI.  It was a great weekend here of racing and training.  Was under my 5k goal Saturday averaging 7:15 miles and then we went on a little 6 mile hike with 2,000 feet of climbing.  The weather has finally turned around allowing me to get my first descent ride in, 36 miles averaging just over 19mph.  I was pretty happy with that.

I'm really looking forward to this weeks training.  My confidence is sky high now and I'm really enjoying my first stretch of injury free, sickness free training in the last three years.

Just a little hike .  Nice work on the race and the ride.  Glad things are going well for you health (and training!) wise.  It was nice to have good weather this weekend, wasn't it?

PI, Bloomsday is such a mass of humanity.  Wish you a good race.  That IPA from Deschutes is my personal favorite.  Good choice.  It was a pleasure to meet you as well, good on you for getting your boy out there, as it looks, he'll be racing with you for years to come.

HR, Nice swim times.  Nice to get times like that when your not even pushing your hardest.  Sorry to hear about your school head.  I hate Cancer.

Pops, That's an impressive 5K.  way to get after it.

I spent more time in the sauna and the hot tub then pool and excercise equipement at the Y today!  I probably should have just slept in, but then I would have missed the 16x50's.  1 good thing.  I got them all it at :50, with :40 rest.  I got 3 of them in at :45.  Tomorrow I'll be back at it with mile swim and 5.5 mile. 

Happy training all.  As PI reminded me, You all have HIIM coming up soon.  Get after it.

Happy training all.  As PI reminded me, You all have HIIM coming up soon.  Get after it.

5 and a half weeks and counting - could I do it right now today - yes I could.  I feel confident I can go the distance, will be scared of the swim coz i always am (just that mass panic adrenalin fuelled start).  Bike - will be worried all the time about flat tyres and other stuff but I will get through.  Then it's the run - by far my favourite part, only because I know that's it, nothing else except cold beer and hot chips - and no mechanical things to go wrong!

Awesome!  Smokin fast.

Swim focussed week.  Got my mile swim in at 35:50.  That's 2:02/100.  That's up from 2:06/100 a month or so ago.  It's the little things in life. 

Got in a 5.5 miler on rubber legs.  Hoping my legs are stronger tomorrow for sprint training. 

Happy Training all.

Four seconds per hundred is pretty good improvement.  Good for you getting that second workout in.  I wish I could have but my son and I are building a P-51 Mustang out of legos and he just wouldn't let me take a break.  He even went and got me a snack so I could keep building.  Just finished and its 10:00 and I am exhausted.  Was supposed to ride the trainer for an hour, oh well.

Did get my second track workout in after work though.  2 mile warmup and then 6 x 400 at 6:40 pace with 400 recovery jog between each.  I have not run like that in many years.  I felt great.  The speedwork is tranforming my running to a whole new level.  I strongly recommend it if you can do without injury.

I've pretty much ignored this aspect of training, thanks for the reminder. I'm gonna get some speedwork on the books.

 I also dont pay much attention to swim drills.  There are few things I"ve learned more concretely though this process, however, than the notion that SWIMMING has helped my running.  Immensely.

 Not only in tolerance for more volume but also in pace.    my normal (?) pace is 20 seconds / mile faster than it was a couple months ago, and I attribute that to the timing of when I started the masters swimming program.  It is absolutely brutal (hypoxic drills, are you kidding me) and I just die when I get out of the pool, but man is it working.     As a total newbie here I try not to offer advice but my advice to a new guy would simply be:  sign up for masters swimming at you local pool it will kick your a*s and is worth it.

Absolutely agree about swimming helping running. I know it is kind of counterintuitive, but swimming is a great way to build cardio power and endurance, with very minimal load on the legs, which get a real beating in running and, to a lesser extent, biking, and there is a definite benefit to running. This is especially true once you've mastered the basic mechanics and can really hammer. It's doubly true if you can swim butterfly LOL! And nothing beats staring at a black line and trying to count laps for developing your powers of concentration.

It's one reason I do more swimming than is necessary for me to finish races safely, or even to be FOP in my age group and sometimes overall. (The other reason being, it's damm hot here, and the pool's just downstairs from my classroom!) I think working hard in the pool helps me run decent times on relatively low mileage, and contributed to some of my running achievements when I was a teenager. (Back in the day, I swam about 10,000m a day from November thru mid-March each year, and just did a few easy 3-4 mile runs and one longer run a week during swim season.) With youth or master's programs, you can hammer 5-6 days a week (if you want to); running and biking will seem easy after that!

Totally agree - I knocked an hour off my marathon time from 2010 to 2011.  Only thing I changed was I started swim squad!  I think those hypoxic drills increase your lung capacity so much!  We do heaps of them and lots of sprint and interval work.  Also incorporated more sprint work into my run training - long run at the weekend and sprint work for my two short runs during the week.

No doubt the swimming has helped my running by increasing upper body strength as well as a strengthened core but I think speedwork on the track (running) has had a more profound impact on my running.  With the injuries I had I had to shorten my stride and now that I am past that the speedwork is helping me lengthen it again.  I'm also noticing more power in my running. 

On this note, I got a great swim in today.  I used the EBEH routine the plan calls for for 9x100.  The last time I did this I swam 1:50's-1:55's/100.  Today I hit them in 1:44-1:49's.  I also decresed rest from 2:00 between to 1:10.  I think this is a similar burn to running hard intervals w/o the beating of the run.

I then went upstairs and got on the treadmill and did sprint training.  I use a program called sprint 8, developed by phil campbell.  It is essentially 8x:30 intervals at 100% effort with 1:30 rest inbetween.  It is a great help to lowering pace on my run, and speeding up overall body matabolism, as my body is working for a good hour after my workout.  I used the track last season, and found it to be a better overall interval workout, but the treadmill was conveinient over the winter.

Not the greatest of days... too funny, one problem after another. 

Did an hour run at lunch and decided to go without socks.  I plan on wearing socks for the HIM, but for my sprints and Oly I'm going sockless.

I got new shoes a couple of months ago and have done five or six 30-minute sockless runs - had  some small blisters on the first couple of runs, but the last few have been fine.  Thought my feet were ready to go an hour, but I was wrong... a couple of toes and my heels look like burger.

So, a few hours later, I'm limping around the baseball field while coaching little league practice.  I was pitching batting practice, and all the sudden my elbow explodes - right arm is totally out of commission.

So, I call in my son to do the pitching while I stand to the side and coach the batters.  About ten pitches later, a kid shanks a foul ball into my knee cap.  Luckily thunderstorms brought practice to an early finish.

HTFU and ibuprofen (and socks) for tomorrow's workouts!

OMG!  That's like a Friday the 13th on the wrong day!  Hope everything feels better after some rest and drugs.  Maybe you need to start wearing some body armour when coaching!

I've gone back and forth with socks vs. sockless.  I've found that by wearing my race shoes periodically in training that I develop enough skin toughening through a cycle of blisters that I think I'll be good for the HIM sockless.  I have a 12 mile run scheduled today and was thinking it might be a good "dry run" to do it sockless.

I prefer to run sockless if I can, especially in warm weather, because of all the fluid that gets absorbed into my shoes and socks from constant dumping of water, sweating, and other things.  In Hawaii, my shoes/socks felt like they were much heavier from the fluids and each step I took they would make a squichy sound.  My socks were so gross I just threw them in the garbage after removing them.

I wear Pearl Izumi iso transitions which I love and have because my road race shoe.  Like the Zoots, they are designed to wear sockless but do take some time to buildup a comfortable sockless distance.

Which race are you doing?