Well I survived a big "crash" week. Crashing is a somewhat risky training move where you dramatically up the volume in the hopes of jump-starting training adaptation. I used to do it a lot back in the day whaen i was a runner--I'd jump from 50 mpw to a 100 mpw. The key to this is to have a fairly big base (in my case--I'm counting the last 9 years of training) and to carefully monitor soft tissue stress points to not get injured. I used the month of November to prepare me for this week as well.
So I was able to go over 27 hours of training with in excess of 250 miles on the bike, 40 on the run and 10,000 yards of swimming. The run and swim totals were high points for 2009 and this was my second biggest bike week. i also did some weight sessions. This was also the 5th consecutive week of 30+ miles running. so for an old guy not to bad.
Off course, i found I was tired and dead-legged alot during the week but did generally have some pretty good workouts. My body composition continues to improve and I'd no longer describe my self as "fat". I think I have a decent shot of getting under 170 pounds by New Year's which is a stone's throw from my race weight of 163 pounds. My actual fat composition has now dropped back into single digits.
The key for this week is of-course to back-off and absorb the training and let my body adapt without breaking down. I'll be looking for something more like 15 hours this week with substantially less bike and run volume. i do plan to throw a couple of speed sessions in here to begin to stimulate FT muscle development. I will to try to keep swimming volume up this week as I really did not "crash" my swimming muscles last week.
Nice swim today. The main set was what i call my step-down Oly ladder. This is a 1500 yd set in the form of 500/400/300/200/100 where I go on the 2 min/100 yd pace intervals. I keep track of my total rest time. Today that was 6:54 (ie I swam the 1500 yards in 23:06--av average of 1:32/100). I've always tried to get this up to 7:30+ rest time and I'd like to shoot this winter for 10 minutes of rest which equates to an average pace of 1;20/100 yards. Once i flatten out improvement wise, I'll add a 600 on the front which will give a 2100 yard main set which is an excellent indicator workout for the half-Ironman swim. At 1:32/100 this is equivalent to a 32-33 minute hal-IM swim and at 1:20 it's the equivalent of a 28-29 minutes. I've found that these workouts are reasonable indicators (in good conditions) of an open-water racepace swim with a wetsuit. I'm not saying I'm in 32-33 min half-IM swim shape now but I'm pretty close and in any event, I'm confident I'll be ready to swim well come Oceanside.
It was fun this weekend to train in LA and San diego even though the weather sucked. It was great to be back with Anders my son and old training partner.
All good!
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