Work your Weakness aka "Hey, Mike, STFU!" Challenge (Page 42)

Here's my battle wound:

I think by now I am 50% skin, 50% scars.

I believe I am opting out of track practice tonight and just going to run longer easy miles through Friday and then dialing in on the intensity next week before taper.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Oh!  That looks like it hurts :(

Your plan sounds good. Take care of you. Have a great Thanksgiving Salty. xo.

Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow everyone!

I got out of bed for an 8km run this morning.  

Salty, that looks outchie, take care of it!

Happy Thanksgiving and good luck to everyone racing.

For your Turkey day giggling pleasure:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxysfeEGwUs

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I hope all of our Turkey Trotters had a great run.

I'm grateful for the input, motivation and general banter you all provide.  Hugs STFUers.

I agree with everything Elesa said!

I think working my weakness paid off with this morning's Turkey Trot!  I went in just expecting to get a new baseline on my fitness level, absolutely not expecting a new 5k PR or anything like that....but it turns out that running consistently, doing the strength and foam rolling maintenance I've been doing, and racing smarter paid off this morning with a new PR.  I have the RR all written up, but I'm debating if I should wait until I can see my overall place and how many people were in my age group before posting...

Now the real question is....after a hard race, what kind of trainer ride should I do?  Maybe I'll see how my legs respond and adjust accordingly.

Hope everyone has a great day.  Thanks so much for all the motivation, inspiration, input, and fun conversation!

Alright, I'm outside of the editing period on my previous post....

Got my RR posted: http://www.beginnertriathlete.com/discussion/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=506483&posts=1#M4905814 

I hope you're still relishing that sweet PR today, Nicole.  So AWESOME!

Matt, it sounds like you had a great race too--blazin!  Nice job :)

What happened with the rest of our Turkey Trotters? 

Hope you all are getting some good family time, training and rest!

Look at you go Nancy!  How are those shins?

No trotting. Some biking. Simpson's 50 x 25! swim workout. Then a good deal of eating.

Congrats on your race.  That's a pretty speedy time. 

Good job.  Keep it up.

That does sound like an interesting workout.  Do you do them in sets or right after each other?

I decided to work on my worst weakness which is poor decision making and did an easy eight mile training run rather than the planned 5k turkey trot.  It would have been the third quality session in five days which would have been a bad idea.  I thought my son would run it with me to keep me in check but it was too early for him and I know I would have run it  too hard on my own.  Another six miles easy today and hopefully get a short trainer session in before we go out this evening.  Family and feast were perfect.  Too much to even begin listing all we are thankful for. 

Thursday had no Masters session, so put this in instead. Wasn't sure I could pull it off with 3 of those in otherwise. There is no pace clock, only an office-type clock where it's hard enough to see the minute & hour hands. From what Bo had posted he's done before, figured this was swum rather fast, but not truly all-in sprints every time. Maybe not for someone of my ability yet. I have done :14's recently, but know I can do limited 15's on command unless exhausted, so went at what should have been :16 effort. Faster than what I swim just about everything else at. Went with ~10 seconds of rest as Bo was Sending on :25, in on :15. Main set time was in the neighborhood of 22-23 minutes. :25 send-off would be almost 21', :30 would be 25'. I just went straight through on it to see how it went. Others may break it up into groups of 10 with an easy in there, or maybe even 5 if they're much newer.

That many reps is a bit daunting, but they're only 1 length of the pool so they tick off rather fast. Definitely gives a lot of practice swimming fast and also gives ample opportunity to correct things throughout the set. I find that harder to do with more continuous swimming. Things definitely were getting tired in the second half of the set, but it felt different than usual. Probably shouldn't be surprising when considering these are more like running walls or windsprints at the end of basketball or soccer practice as opposed to say 800 repeats on a track. Caught myself a few times just trying to put out the effort instead of also making sure to keep form up (namely going around the barrel first). But *think* I didn't get too far along before catching that. In the late ones that was getting hard anyway as it was becoming more challenging to hold things well out at the edges of my range.

I did notice that I held positioning much closer, if not the same as when i do the sprints in masters. And I believe this is a big part of doing the fast workouts and where something like this one will be of benefit. For me, along with the body position (more "downhill") comes a better entry and into the catch. So I had a lot of time spent in this. Even the late ones that weren't quite optimal were probably still fairly good for what I am capable of. This feeling held into a good part of today's workout as well. Had this feeling of wanting to go. It may have slipped a little, but not bad considering. I didn't push as I wasn't sure of the effects such a workout would have on me in the few days following. Certainly going to look at doing it (or similar) again. Think it would go even better with a pace clock, but not sure how to do that yet outside of masters.

Thursday six of us did the 5K turkey trot, and it was awesome! I ended up 397/469...not DFL!! I didn't keep up with the kid, but that's ok--she was fast. Finished the day off with some great food and family time. Overall, one of our best Thanksgivings!

Continuing to work on my running (and keeping the stretching, foam rolling, strength work, and ART in there for maintenance so I can continue to work on my running!).

Question for those who have more running experience: I went out on a short (supposedly easy) run a little bit ago.  My HR was in the range I wanted to keep it in (probably slightly on the lower end of the range, but fine), the pace was a little quicker than I had expected, but my RPE felt way higher.  I suspect this has to do with the fact that I just put in a reasonably hard group ride (high VI, lots of "match burning" efforts) and am still recovering from yesterday's run and the 5k a few days ago.

So my question is -- when HR, pace, and RPE aren't correlating like "normal", what do you pay most attention to?  FWIW, it wasn't like I felt I was WAY over exerting myself, just simply that it was harder than I'd expected given my HR (and my pace, even though the pace was reasonably quick).   

Thanks for the info.  I wasn't watching my pace while I was running....I was only paying attention to my HR and RPE.  My HR was lower than I expected....and my RPE was higher than expected.  I decided to let HR dictate.  Avg HR was 136, max 146 -- this puts me squarely in Z1 (114-146 based on my race effort from Thursday).  

I just wasn't sure if I should back off even more so that my RPE felt equivalent to Z1 as well.  Regardless, I'm sure this feeling is directly related to my hard ride today and incomplete recovery from the last few days of running.  I will monitor it closely....do not want to get injured!  Tomorrow is an easy day, with a swim only. So I think that should help.