The big event of this week was a second trip down to Shenandoah National Park in this training block. Monday morning I was up at 3:30 and rolling with my Java at 3:50am. I was at the trail head by 7:50am down in the Panorama parking lot. For this iteration, I elected to do 5 repeats of the Mary's Rock climb. In total, this took me 9 hours and 19 minutes to do the 5 ascents, which covered 18.6 miles in total plus 1,210 ascent ft (and descent ft) per repeat....so pretty big day....
Net/net I was about 4% faster in my VAST2 vs VAST1 at a slightly lower HR. Not surprisingly, my rate of energy burn was also up about 4% at the lower metabolic cost. Gotta love the training effect!
Of course, it's hard for me to really judge if this is good enough progress or not--such is the unknown nature (to me) of the 29,029 event. That said, 4% improvement is better than none and I still have 19 weeks to Show Time. I was a little disappointed with the last rep on this cycle but that may have been as much mental as physical--hard to grind away for 9+ hours. Although that really isn't a good excuse because being able to put continuous time on task is what this event is all about.
For this trip I decided to tack on two more days of regular trekking (vs. 1 day for VAST #1). The second day, I did what I call the "Cemetery Hike" past the famous Bolen Cemetery and the lesser known Dyer Family Cemetery. Here is what that looked like:
My legs actually felt pretty good once I warmed up although I could feel the VAST effort in them. Still a pretty solid effort on a beautiful day!
19 hours and 42 minutes in total over the three days with 20,000+ ft of total vertical (half up and half down) across 40.8 miles.
Here is how the full week played out:
Swim: 3,000 yards (less than I wanted but with travel and fatigue, this is what I did)
Bike: 130 miles (over 4 days)
Walk/Run: 57.1 miles--this took over 24 hours to do given the terrain. I ended up taking just Thursday off.
PT: 3 hours 50 minutes
Total Training time: 37 hours 33 minutes.
You might not find it surprising to learn I'm pretty whipped today (did a 3 hour hike with 1,000 ft of vertical today as well). Probably need to think about backing off given my last 4 weeks have been 31:19, 31:12, 31:54 and 37:39...
Onwards and Upwards!
Oh, also last week, week 11 had the following totals:
Swim: 4,500 yards
Bike: 244 miles
Walk/Run : 33 miles
PT: 5:55
Total Training Time: 31:54
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