The clock is ticking and I love it! It's been another good week for me with quite a few run sessions at different distance and intensity levels and I have finally had some company on my weekend ride!
The week started of quite good with two shorter runs with high intensity where I ran the 30-20-10 approach. Simply put you run 30 seconds easy, 20 seconds fast and 10 seconds full sprint. I did this 5 times in one rotation with 3 rotations in total (if you count correctly that's 15 jog-run-sprints). After each rotation I ran easy for 1 minute. The total time spent on this workout is around 20 minutes (with the warm up and cool down) so it's something that you can squeeze in here and there and it gives very good results.
I am a little lazy to find specific studies which show the effectiveness of this exercise but will find them if you want to :)
I also added 2 1-hour long runs into the mix and I very pleased with my running performances after the bike. I hope that I will be able to keep a 5.15-5.30 pace next week on the race which will result in a sub 4 hour marathon time.
My bike sessions were also quite good. I did a lot of interval training and one longish ride on Saturday with my coworker Ivan Varga who was looking for a confidence boost before his 180 km ride from Zagreb to Rijeka.
It didn't start out to well for him since he was having a hard time riding even 20 km/h which was a little strange to me since we climbed Medvednica (hill just north of Zagreb) together and he was doing pretty good. I even suggested to shorten the ride a little since I didn't want him to completely burn out on the first half of the race.
It was quite confusing for me since I couldn't first figure out what his problem was. Then I saw that his tires didn't look good. This was confirmed on the next gas station where we read his tire pressure to be 1.2 bar (14.5 psi). After I made sure his tire pressure was correct we picked up speed and his confidence grew with every kilometer. I have no doubts he'll make it this weekend.
My swim training didn't really go as planed since crowded lanes and a huge lack of motivation on Wednesday and Friday resulted in only 4.5 km being covered but I'll try to make up for it this week and especially the week after when I'll be swimming in the Mediterranean sea.
Let's close the week of with a look at the numbers:
| Distance | Time | Pace | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Swim | 4.5 km | 1:50:00 | 2:26 min / 100 m |
| Bike | 111.54 km | 5:26:26 h | 2:55 min / km |
| Run | 32.79 km | 2.46:50 h | 5:05 min / km |
And overall it looks like this now:
| Distance | Time | |
|---|---|---|
| Swim | 155.20 km | 60:32:00 h |
| Bike | 3466.32 km | 149:50:58 h |
| Run | 705.00 km | 61:37:12 h |
Until next week, my final week before race week, stay awesome :)