Thursday, July 31, 2014

July: NJ and December: Antarctica

Lots of good news to report.

Finished July on a bit of a run.  I was able to put in a pretty high quality 41 hours over the last 11 days of the month.  Despite a bunch of work and personal spikes I was able to pretty much nail my aggregate goals for the month:

My swim is very good right now.  I'm hitting all my volume targets and my intensity, especially in my longer swims, is reaching new levels--I feel like I'm reaching a new level as far as long course swimming goes.  In this month I swam longer than 2.4 miles 6 times and most of those were pretty hard--capped by my 93 minute 3.3-mile swim in Minnesota (67 minutes for the IM distance).

I targeted 40,000 yards this month and hit 46,500 yards.

On the bike, I'm beginning to finally feel my normal legs.  I've been behind in my training all year but over the last two months I've been able to finally get enough high quality riding in that I'm improving in my rides and my bod seems to be comfortably absorbing the progress.  I did my 4th big ride in July yesterday and ended up doing 101 miles in 5:24.  I was at 185 watts avg/195 watts NP when we decided to cool down at 85 miles.  This is about 69% of my FTP of 270 watts and I certainly could have kept going for all 112.  Despite my late start, I'm increasingly getting optimistic about being able to lay down a PB at Kona this year.

I targeted a minimum of 1000 miles in July and despite missing about 10 hours of biking do to personal reasons I was still able to ride 1012 miles in July.

I missed a bit on the run but my back half of the month I did 75 miles.  I did two long runs (1:55 and 2:02) that were encouraging in the last 10 days so I feel like I'm beginning to build some real endurance now.

I targeted 125 miles for June and I reached 113 miles.  I still have a ways to go on the run but its definitely going in the right direction.

Most importantly, my body seems to be getting stronger and everything seems to indicate that I can continue to add training stress in the days ahead.  So all good.

Also, Anders and I received confirmation that we have been accepted to a team that will attempt to climb the Vinson Massif, which is the highest mountain in Antarctica.   We leave on Dec 26th.....can't wait.

All good here!




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