What's Training Like?

I'm going to do my best to keep you up to date on my training. As you can imagine, it's a lot of work to prepare for a triathlon of any significant distance, and training in all three disciplines is extra challenging. Fortunately, I've enjoyed getting back to running, and I absolutely love getting on Bessie the Bike for a ride.

By the way, I just named Bessie today, and there will be more on her in a future post.

The challenge for me is definitely going to be the swim. Not because I don't like swimming - I love the pool and the lake and enjoy swimming, it's just not something I've ever done competitively. I think I've swum laps once in my life. So it will be an extra focus of my training. Of course, the 11-meter laps I can swim in the pool here at our apt. complex limits my ability to be extra effective, so I'll be at the YMCA some (though I think we're going to cancel our membership there soon), and also will try to get in a few swims at the lake just to experience open-water swims.

As you can see, 3000 meters would require a lot of turning around.

I'm still in the base-building phase of my workout, and today's focus was the bike and the run. Pretty simply, just a 60-minute bike ride followed by a 30-minute run. Both were to be at a very easy pace, where I'd be able to keep conversation if I had someone to talk to.

I rode approximately 17.5 miles on Bessie. At an easy pace, that's pretty good for me. For those of you without calculators, riding 17.5 miles in 60 minutes means I rode at 17.5 mph. When you get a good look at Bessie you'll understand why 17.5 mph is a good time!

I then carried Bessie upstairs to our apartment and changed my shoes. I don't have special bike shoes - but I do prefer one pair of my running shoes for the bike (my Izumi Pearls) and felt like changing into my Brooks Addictions to go for the run. I also grabbed Ike, as he makes a good running partner and is less of a pain all day if I get him out. This made for about a 12 minute rest.

Yes, this is a picture from when he was a puppy.  So cute.  

The only adult pictures I have of him are when my wife and 

sister-in-law dressed him as a fairy.  I wouldn't shame him by 

including those here...

This is where it got challenging. You see, this was my first ever "Brick" workout. A Brick is where you train two events back-to-back. Amazingly enough, you use quite different muscles for biking and running. I wasn't very tired at all when getting off the bike, but just getting my body to use its legs correctly to run took a 1/2 mile or so. Very interesting.

So, with waiting for traffic once - I hit rush hour in Greenwood at the cross-walk up the hill from our house, which means 7 cars came down the road all at once - and once for Ike to do his business (why can't he take care of that before or after? I hate carrying a poop bag on runs, but fortunately he went in the woods so I didn't bother picking it up), I ran about 3.4 miles in 32 minutes. SLOW. But, I got it done, and that was the whole point.

Tomorrow is a swim workout, so we'll see how that goes...