Last week was quite awesome!
I swam very good. My running is improving (but I am still keeping it a little slower still) and I had a bad ass ride on Sunday. Let's look into the things in a little more detail.
I finally found an image I saw 2 months ago and was sure I had it saved somewhere but couldn't find it. By accident I discovered that I have in fact added it to my browsers bookmarks but into the "wrong" folder. Instead of the TRAINING folder it was in RANDOM. The image I am talking about is a nice "tool" if you want to get a quick workout done. You can see the image below.
In essence, you just pick one WARM-UP SET, one TECHNIQUE SET, a MAIN SET and something to COOL DOWN. You have a choice of 625 (5x5x5x5) different workouts! I don't think you will get bored in quite soon :)
One of my sets last week included:
- 4 x 100 m (50 swim, 50 kick)
- 4 x 125 m (50 kick, 50 Catch-up drill, 25 swim)
- 15 x 100 m ( 2 easy, 1 hard x 5)
- 300 m easy swim
One thing here that maybe needs some explanation is the Catch-up drill. Normally you pull one arm back as the other is about to hit the water. When doing a catch-up drill you "wait" till both of your hands are next to each other as seen here. This way you teach yourself good body positioning, you keep your body long and straight from the tips of your fingers to the tips of your toes. The straighter you are the less drag you create which in turn lets you get more out of each stroke.
The running part was also nice. I had a slower run on Tuesday but picked it up nicely on Saturday (my Saturday pace was 4:50 min/km which is good but will, I hope, improve quite significantly over the next months).
The "crown jewel" of last weeks training was the (almost) 94 kilometer bike ride to Karlovac and back. I was aiming to finish it in around 3 hours and 30 to 35 minutes. It took me 3 hours and 40 minutes so I am very pleased with how it went.
I had quite a few ups and downs on this ride (I am not thinking about the climbs this time). It's probably due to not eating and drinking enough. I tried to drink every 10 minutes and have something to eat every 15 minutes but it seems that it wasn't enough so I'll try to adjust it for the next long ride on the coming Sunday.
As the weather is getting nice so are my training sessions getting better as well. I hope I can push through it for 2 more weeks and then take a nice week off and get ready for the last 3 months which will be intense :)
Before I sing off let's quickly look at the last week's stats:
| Distance | Time | Pace | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Swim | 5.75 km | 2:25:00 h | 25:13 min / km |
| Bike | 121.12 km | 4:51:22 h | 2:24 min / km |
| Run | 24.01 km | 2:01:36 h | 5.03 min / km |
The overall stats now add up to:
| Distance | Time | |
|---|---|---|
| Swim | 83.40 km | 31:57:00 h |
| Bike | 1122.39 km | 51:01:25 h |
| Run | 315.71 km | 26:28:32 h |
Things are adding up quite nicely :)
Until next week, don't forget to be awesome.