Into the thick of it...

I can tell you this for certain...when all of this is over, I am going to put my bike away for quite some time and be very happy to not have to look at it for a while. Obviously, with the bike portion being 112 miles, this is the area that has to be most focused on during ironman training. First, you just have to condition your body to be on that bike for 5-6 hours. It is not as much about the legs getting tired as it is about conditioning the parts of your body that are actually in contact with the bike (feet, crotch, etc.). That is a long time for the same areas to have repetitive contact and rubbing. Don't worry, I will not go into detail on this...those details are reserved for Anne's ears only!

This past weekend, I rode 60 miles on Saturday followed by 40 miles on Sunday. This brought last week's total training to 9000 yards in the pool, 147.5 miles on the bike, and 24 miles on the run...not to mention 2 weight workouts and 2 abdominal specific workouts. I ended up training a total of 14 hours for the week. On Monday, I started a "rest" week. Scientists have taught us that it is critical for athletes to train at increasing volumes for 2-3 weeks and then follow that up with a reduced volume week. That way, the body has a chance to recover and all of the work that you have done in training has time to set in. We have all heard that training basically breaks muscles down, causing small micro tears in the muscle fibers. If the body is not given proper rest, the muscles never recover and they do not grow stronger. Over time, if volume continues to increase and rest does not occur at regular intervals, you start to see performance wane and injuries set in. So, we are in a rest week this week. This means lots of sitting around and relaxing, something that I appreciate after having trained hard for the past 3 weeks. In the past, I have been on a 2 weeks on, one week off routine. Recently, however, I have switched to a 3 weeks on, 1 week off schedule to see if that will still work. For now, it is fine, but when we get to the big volume weeks, we will see how the body copes with the added week.

That is all for now. Thanks for checking in on me.