To be honest, this year has been pretty good to me triathlon training-wise. No huge breakthroughs, but steady progress towards getting faster times at the Olympic distance.
Other than spending most of May not training and draining gallons of boogers from my nose and some random personal issues that are inevitable, my training hasn’t hit any major snags. Except for this weekend. Actually, just Sunday. I kinda wanted to curl up in a ball and cry a little.
It wasn’t a particularly spectacular or entertaining blow up, but just for the sake of making sure you know it isn’t always sunshine, rainbows and unicorns over here, let’s talk about it. Gotta keep things balanced.
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They Fart Rainbows
Saturday was an easy 2k OWS followed by a hard HARD brick. A two hour blike at faster than race pace and an all out 30 minute run. It was a great swimbikerun session and the bike pace was faster than I’ve seen in a long time (read: ever). It was +90 degrees and my legs were destroyed at the end. I headed home for some ultragen, pulled pork flat bread and 90 minutes in my Recovery Pump boots.
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I inhaled the crap outta this pizza. I’d been waiting for it all week.
Sunday is when the shit show started. My recovery work the day before helped me start to recoop, but I still had a long way to go and my legs still felt like death. Clearly I dug my hole pretty deep on Saturday. I moved my 12 mile to the afternoon in hopes that a few extra hours would do the trick.
The plan was for six easy miles and six tempo miles. The first half was okay. I took a new route along the beach and enjoyed some really interesting people watching. Nahant beach has some interesting characters (I’ll save that story for another day). The second half, I tried to kick it up into some tempo work. The harder I pushed, the more it hurt, but I didn’t go any faster at all. My nutrition with EFS was spot on, but my legs just had no desire to come with me. It was like trying to argue with a toddler. The more I pushed, the harder they pushed back and threw a massive tantrum. Full on Ironman shuffle style. Dragging my feet forward with every step just to hold a 9:30 pace.
I held on for the last 6 miles and was barely able to sustain the same pace as the first 6.
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Here is the route that I took. There is a sidewalk along the beach that goes from right to left. I went out to that little island sticking out on the left and back (twice) for 12 ish total miles.
The moral of the story is that no matter what you do sometimes with your planning, nutrition, stretching, recovery pumping and sleeping, sometimes the wheels just fall off.
In the words of Coach Hirsch: “In the end the legs have the final say in the workout we do!”
