First and foremost, I want to give some shoutouts to some friends who were racing this weekend! A BIG congratulations goes out to Levi for finishing his first Ironman in Texas, where he also raced with Dylan, another first time Ironman! Chuck was out doing a 70.3 in Knoxville, and Robert and Jim both set PRs for 70.3 distance in Chattanooga! Craig set a PR in a 13.1 this weekend as well, blazing fast at around 1:32. Congrats to all!
Anyone who does endurance or distance events knows the importance of cross training. Some of us choose to lift weights, some choose yoga, others might even choose boxing or other endurance-based impact sports. For a while before I started doing tris, I played rugby. I was sort of forced to stop after breaking my hand in Louisville, the week after witnessing a pretty horrific broken leg in Cincinnati. N decided enough was enough, and that I needed to find a new way to stay fit. Anyway.
So while many of us get to choose our ideal cross training activity, some of us are "lucky" enough for their job to qualify as cross training. Being the Audio Visual Director at a relatively small downtown hotel, I am in the unique situation of cross training nearly every day before I get home to do my regular workouts. This past week (which went by without a blog post... apologies) was a fine example of how it's possible for me to not do my tri workouts for an entire week, and still manage to not only maintain my fitness but even make forward strides.
We had our largest show in a couple of years last week, which meant I was tasked with setting up (with a lot of help from a few other people) lots of very heavy AV equipment, and running my tail end off making sure everything went as well as possible. It's very easy to estimate that I walked in excess of 5 miles every day of this show, and some days more, over the course of 12+ hour days. Not only that, but in the evenings N, myself and our family were preparing for a garage sale this past weekend. I was in "go" mode from 7 am - 11 pm every day, and sometimes later.
Anyhow, a couple of weeks ago a couple of my buddies started up Club 5280, a fun and semi-competitive get-together on the first and third Sundays of each month to run a mile to track our improvements. The first week we did group starts by estimated times, what an interesting experiment that was. Being a group of distance runners, everyone seeded themselves based on their average mile times on distance runs. This lead to some serious underestimations of speed, and made it interesting.
The first week I ran a 5:41. I was thrilled. I haven't run a mile just to see how fast I could run a mile in years. So, coming into this week, even though I felt a bit under-prepared, I was expecting an improvement. I had rested up on Saturday, and even got to sleep in a bit that morning, so I was well rested, though not thoroughly.
We took an interesting approach this week, doing a reverse start. This meant that the slowest timed runner started first, and we all started at the interval we were in front of the next finisher the week before. If I finished 10 seconds ahead of the next runner last time, I now started 10 seconds behind them. This was supposed to lead to an exciting group finish, but we got a little more spread out that planned. All in all it was certainly a fun way to do it, and I even improved my time to an estimated 5:31. I forgot to reset my watch, but after looking at my time the previous week and estimating based on the people around me and my warm-up pace, that's what I came up with.
I paid for that quick mile yesterday. My quads were pretty sore most of the day yesterday, but after some water and stretching they loosened up. I missed that soreness, and I got a much-needed mood boost from the endorphins.
More importantly, we are about 30 days out from my first tri of the year: Cicero. N won't be able to attend this year, but I will have some friends running as well, and possibly in attendance. I'm kicking into a training binge, as work is slowing down a bit for the summer and other commitments are as well. I'm still too far out to look too closely at goal times, but I think it's safe to say I'm looking at sub-1:00 this year.
Summer means heat and humidity in Indiana, so I'm getting prepared by stocking up on BASE salt. This stuff saved people in Texas this weekend, and I'm sure Robert and Jim both can sing it's praises after Chatt this weekend. If you're curious what it is, what it does, and why I use it, contact me! I've posted a good deal of my race schedule, so come and find me at a race, comment here, send a telegram... do something to get a hold of me! I may even send you a tube to try out!
As always, I'll try to keep up on posting these. As race season kicks up and training ramps up as well, it will become more sparse, but I'll try to at least post pre- and post-race reports to keep you all in the loop. This is usually where I promise to post more, and maybe even do a product review, but let's be honest: I ain't got no time for that. I'm lucky to get one of these out per week, so you're going to have to just be happy with that. I love you for reading this, and you should love yourself by getting outside and being active! With weather this nice, don't stay inside!Later on...
No comments:
Post a Comment