Asphalt Junkies CLOSED AND GETTING OUR FIX (Page 54)

So, I’ve been MIA lately. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks. I won’t get into it all, but I’m back now. The good news is that the time off appears to have allowed my leg to heal. Today I ran pain free for the first time in about 2 months. Now I just need to stay that way.

I’ve spent about 2 hours or so catching up on posts, but I’m only on page 65. I’ll have to finish catching up tomorrow. I can’t wait to read how all of the races went this weekend, especially Pokagon, but I’ll be in suspense. For now, here’s what I’ve got:

AJ, congrats on your first race! You did a great job. I hope your swim coach is working out.

Samantha, I’m glad you get to ride with your dad and share that experience with him.

John, I think it’s so awesome that you and your dad ran a race together. You all will have some great memories you can always look back on. I’m glad you decided to sign up for the race and that you’ll be able to meet David and his fiancé.

Jo, way to go on your first marathon!

Jonathan, your sister is an inspiration. That is a wonderful thing to do to honor someone’s life. Good job on your tri too

Warren, keep up the good work on your running. 1:47 is a great time for a half! Sounds like that is the magic number- good job to Tracy too!

Vero, I understand how you feel depressed about not being able to run. I can definitely relate. Hang in there! I hope you had fun at the environmental camp.

Tony, it’s great to hear that you are getting more comfortable and stronger in the water. Keep up the hard work. You do such a great job of keeping us updated on your progress but also on encouraging everyone in the group.

Dina, I’m sure you will miss the kids at preschool but your daughter will be so thankful to have you at home. Good luck with the transition.

Paul, shingles?!? Oh no! I hope you are better. Brenda, I’m glad your new is feeling better. I’m sorry that I couldn’t meet up with you guys at Pokagon. I hope it was a blast!

Matt, good job on your oly tri. I agree with Brenda- you should be proud! Karl, kudos to your wife on her long run. Very impressive! Sounds like your son going to be quite the athlete too.

All of this talk about no socks reminds me of my first century ride. My husband forgot his socks and had to ride 100 miles without socks… with running shoes… and with toe cages. He didn’t want to get shoes and pedals. I don’t know how he did it!

John, 2nd place age group finish… awesome! Congratulations!

Stan, you are an animal on the bike. Your mileage is unbelievable.

Dirk, good luck on building the porch. It’s already looking awesome (I’ve seen your pics on facebook). I’m sure your wife will love her Mother’s Day present.

I agree with Samantha 100%.  You really need to take a couple of more days with a very light load and possibly a greatly reduced volume.  You have time to get your volume up and not pushing hard right now may save you the hardship of burning out later.  I suggest you reduce your efforts substantially to all easy work outs and drop your volume by up to 50% this week and see how you feel.

As an example of my recovery from my marathons I took almost a week away from running anything at all.  The end of each week I ran 3-5 miles but nothing more.  I also added some easy spinning on the bike to help flush the trash out of my legs.  I did no swimming either, but this was more out of scheduling than anything else.  I slept a lot more, took naps and had some generally lazy couple of days immediately following the race.

Well, I should be back in the posting saddle soon.  The porch has most of the work completed on it as of Friday but I did nothing to it yesterday.  With the race going on and Laiken's prom I was plenty busy.  I did take a nap yesterday too.  So I wasn't totally busy from sun up to sun down.  I'll plan on throwing up a couple of pics of the porch and Laiken and I from our time with her getting ready for prom. (She is quite beautiful, like her mother.)

I have been able to stay up on most of the posts daily but I have been away from the posting and hopefully everyone understands.  I'll try yo get to answering some other questions later today possibly.  But priority today will be finishing up the sealing up of the roof line and siding because we are expecting some rain tomorrow.  The weather has been a little warm since starting the roof, but it has been mostly beautiful.  Now it's time to get the really important stuff done.

Anyway and lastly,  the race yesterday went pretty good.  the bad news is I didn't get any placement awards although I was the fastest person in my AG but I wasn't disappointed...........................I got second place overall.  This is my highest placement for all of my races.  Last season I placed first in my AG and 5th overall at a race I met Matt at, but that was my biggest achievement to date.  Now, for the first time ever I have placed in the overall and it felt really good.  Ultimately I think it was just a really good day for me.  There are some really fast people out there and I think they were having bad days while I was having a tremendously overachieving day.  I'll let you read about the race in my race report here and here for the official results.

Dirk - I saw on Facebook you crushed some dreams at that race!! 2:15 is a fantastic time for an Oly - great job!

Jo - I'm going to echo everyone's sentiments that you chill out this week, let yourself recover completely before going back hard to the volume. Us triathletes succumb to the feeling that if we take a day or two off we'll suddenly wake up weighing 400 pounds and unable to run half a mile - I think for a lot of us it takes more mental strength to not train than it does to train.

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So I was easy on my hamstring most of the week and it never felt better (although it didn't get worse). Having re-evaluated my training logs, I think it was tired from both the ride and from a hilly run I did the following day. I didn't do anything yesterday (although I ALMOST went for a run three times) and I'm going to make myself busy doing other things today. I'll test gently tomorrow and see how it goes.

I'm also going to adjust my training plan to avoid workouts stacking up as they did last week. Lesson learned there.

Have a great weekend everyone, and good luck to everyone racing this morning!

John

Allison welcome back and I am very glad to hear that you are feeling better and that are able to run pain free. Looks like the time off helped a lot it's good to see that you are back on track.

John glad to hear that the hamstring isn't any worse and hope it gets better for you soon. I think you make a great point about how hard it is to back off and take a day or two off from training. I think we are our own worse enemies sometimes when it comes to that.

Dirk you absolutely killed it yesterday! Congrats on an awesome race and effort. It sounds like you left it all out there on the course yesterday and I think it's great that you think that you can still do better. That's a great way to kick off your race season.

Looking good everyone!  Congrats, Dirk, on an awesome race!  I guess you need to build decks for a week before every race! 

Jo...I agree....take a little more time off.

I'm fighting a little cold.  At first I thought it was allergies but the fatigue I'm feeling is just not allergy-like.  Regardless, I had a good bike ride yesterday.  Got my sock issue figured out.  Put the aero bottle on the bike since it's probably going to be a million degrees over there.  Had to get used to using it again.  (I put the fancy water system on my road bike and it's a pain in the butt to change over.)  Everything was comfy!  Today, I'm going to try and do a 13 mile trail run.  We'll see how I feel.

BTW.....my little area is in a direct line to see the annular eclipse.  I have a great spot in our pasture that can see the sun at that time.  I need to get all of my stuff organized so we can "watch" it.  Hopefully the fog will stay away!

Well I thought I'd get in a good chunk of sbr this weekend after skimping out/not getting around to all the workouts I wanted to earlier in the week.  Got in some quality workouts yesterday, and today I got in a run (it was tiring! the heat combined with yesterday's workouts)... and I was going in something else today too, but I'm not sure if that'll happen, since the fatigue from yesterday and the heat is making me feel even more blah.  Tomorrow I'm making a complete rest day, and the rest of the week I'll be keeping it short to try to rest up for my triathlon on Saturday!  Although, with my job, I'll be walking around more than I'd like to be all week.

Then, following that triathlon, I have two weeks before my 8.2 mile run/race.  And after that, I need to decide what to place on the calendar!

Dirk, your race results are amazing.

I swam across the lake and back this morning.  First time in a wetsuit and first time in open water.  It went really well.  

I've never tried sighting before, since I've always been in a pool.  How often do you normally look up?  I was doing it about every 5 breaths, but then sometimes I'd get into a rhythm and didn't want to break it up.  Of course, I also don't want to go far off in the wrong direction.

Fun!

The eclipse was really cool!  I took an awesome picture of it!  My husband and I looked at it on the camera.  Unfortunately, the disk threw up and deleted all of the pictures from this evening.  ~sigh~  Oh well.  It was really frigging cool to experience a total solar eclipse in my home.

BTW....it was weird to have the light come back.  It's now getting toward the "real" dusk.  Had I known the light was going to dim so significantly, I would have set up the video camera.

Proper sighting will depend on your ability to swim straight in open water and therefore determine the amount you need to sight.  Many recommendations will have you sighting every 3-6 complete cycles of breathing.  By this I mean that each time you breath to your favorite side, call it right, is one cycle.  If your a bilateral breather this means it could take a little longer to get back to checking your path.  Typically I sight a little more frequently at the beginning of my OWS to adjust my lines accordingly and then reduce the amount of sighting I do as I become more comfortable and remain straight.

There is an option in the race to stay on the cable or rope line that is used to string the line for the race but this cannot always be done because of the number of competitors, visibility, wave height and ...............

GREAT racing and training everyone...so wish i could catch up and I will later but this week I will be out of town on work...the good part is I won't have to take a computer for this trip, the bad part is I won't be able to post.  I will be working out though...staying in a motel w/o family duties gives a lot of time to w/o 

Oh when I hit the pothole Fri morning before daylight, both tubes AND tires blew.  Just lucky I didn't crash.

YA'LL HAVE A GREAT WEEK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tracy that is pretty cool to experience the eclipse like you were able to. I think the last one I got to see was in the early 90's when I was at work in Manhattan. It went dark in at like noon while we were all out for lunch but it was pretty cool to see it.

Karl sorry to hear about the damage to the bike and yes thankfully you did not crash as that could have been a whole lot worse.

JoAnne did you get to that book signing for Chrissie Wellington and if you did how was it? I picked up the book on Tuesday and just started reading it last night.

bswcpa - 2012-05-21 9:37 AM Here's my race report: http://www.beginnertriathlete.com/discussion/forums/thread-view.asp... If the link doesn't work then you can find it in my race log if you're so inclined. I'll catch up on reading in the next couple days. I've got to catch up on work first. Happy Monday everyone!

Brenda congrats on the great finish this weekend. I read your race report and how ironic it was for you to find the gel when you needed it. I thought that was pretty funny. Glad to see you and Dirk do so well this past weekend.

Dirk, great job in your race!  After a week of construction work it's all the more impressive.  Doing work like that drains me more than my usual training routine does and it's probably like that for most people.

You get the gold star for the 'team' this week.  My Oly race didn't go quite that well.  I'll write up the race reports for both Saturday and Sunday soon.

Gotta catch up, but work beckons first, so this will be quick.  I'll try to comment on some posts tonight.

Unreal races going on.  Not much else to say there.  Just some amazing results.  And Dirk, you're an animal.

Did the blow out ruin the tires or just blow the tubes?

Either way it's great that you were able to control the bike and get stopped without incident.  It could have been a little ugly for sure.

At my race Saturday I witnessed a bike tire blow.  The difference being that the bike was hanging on the rack when the tire popped.  I was cleaning up my T area when I heard a POP and turned to look and there were several other people staring the direction of one of the bikes hanging on the rack.  I guess the sun and high tire pressures got to this one.   It's really a good thing that it happened post race and not while riding.

Something I didn't mention in the RR form Saturday is that someone apparently crashed on the bike course  and broke their collar bone.  This would have happened well behind me because I never saw anything that was unusual while riding.  I also took a turn to wide and went off the road a little bit and had to apply the brakes (lightly to keep from skidding) and slow considerably.  Luckily for this particular turn I was on the horns instead of the aero's.  I suspect I was doing 18-19 MPH through this turn.  (It was a lagre turn that I miscalculated my speed and took to wide for that speed.)

Do all races use a cable or rope line?  How deep is it usually?  I never even thought to look for one... I just figured the buoys were it. I guess I usually swim wide to avoid people anyway.  But I was thinking perhaps this weekend I would try to move over to the inside once the swim got started, still starting on the outside though.

I've been practicing sighting in the pool by closing my eyes while I swim and then only opening them when I sight.  (I make sure I have the lane to myself.)  So far, I have not hit the lane line but I'm definitely "off course".  This little bit of knowledge is helping me figure out how often I should sight.