There are workouts where you just feel like everything is going your way and you don’t even realize you are done. You are completely immersed and just feel like on autopilot. This state is what psychologists call flow.
I usually experience it when working on some hard problems during my work as a software developer but it can happen also during physical exercise.
Well, this week was pretty much a flow week.
As usual, I started my week with some swimming and strength training. I then moved to some speed workouts where I could really feel like everything was going my way.
My key bike session was a 12 x 1 minute effort at around 250 watts. I could have knocked out 20 more at the end. That’s how great I felt :)
The key run session was a 7 x 1 minute effort at a pace of around 4:10 min/km. I soon realized that I can go a lot faster so I started clocking some 3:55 min/km 1 minute efforts which is insane for this part of my training but I’ll keep an eye on it and hope that this wasn’t just a good day.
I wrapped up the work week with a 2300 meter swim on Friday which had its main part broken up into 3 sets. Each set had 3 repetitions of 100 pull (easy) and 100 front crawl. The pull sessions were always done at a 1:50 min/100m pace while the front crawls got progressively faster with each set (1:48, 1:44: 1:40). And, again, I felt like I can go for one more workout right after that.
I also did an (optional) 1 hour ride on Friday on low effort which then flowed into the weekend sets of 2 hours and 10 minutes on the bike (with a 20 minute run) on Saturday and a 1 hour and 10 minute run on Sunday. All done at an easy (conversational) effort.
I hope to have a lot more weeks like this in the future which would make my target of a sub 10 hour Ironman no that far-fetched :)
Let’s have a look at the table as well.
| Distance | Swim | Bike | Run | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week | 4.5 km | 113.3 km | 25.47 km | |||
| Total | 7.5 km | 304.8 km | 62.94 km |
| Time | Swim | Bike | Run | Strength | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week | 1:20 | 3:59 | 2:11 | 0:38 | ||||
| Total | 6:23 | 9:01 | 3:42 | 2:45 |
The 4th week will be a recovery week which will have 2 workouts in each discipline plus 1 or 2 strength sessions.
Now it’s time to rest a bit and get ready for the week after where we will start turning the intensity of the shorter 1 hour sessions and the duration of the longer workouts a bit.
Until then,
Stay healthy