Steve in a Speedo?! Gross!

This past week felt like a solid week of training:

• MON: easy ride, good legs, and core. I did an 8K CC race on Sunday, so I didn't do my normal long run on Monday. Instead I just hopped on my mountain bike and went for a spin. And fit in some good legs and core.

• TUES: good upper body, and good trainer workout. I had a good spin early with 3 nice efforts as part of it:

And I had a nice upper body workout just an hour after that. Solid day!

• WED: easy run, good legs and core. A normal/good Wednesday.

• THURS: decent upper body workout, and then a long outdoor ride. I thought I'd actually have to skip this ride as I had a big evening of conferences at Henry's high school, and my wife was out of town. But I got home from class and had a chunk of time, and being it was 55 degrees outside, I quick got changed and headed out for a ride around 2:30 pm! But being it's now mid-Nov, I forgot how quickly it gets dark - it was getting a little darker than it should have been by the end of my ride at 4:45. Oops.

AND I was bonking hard for the last few miles - I looked back in my training log and never saw a 40+ mile ride in Oct or Nov, and I went for 41.57 miles on Thursday afternoon. Luckily (I guess), the 23 mph wind was out of the south, so I was pushed home for the final 5 miles. I was averaging over 19 mph with 5 miles left, but it dropped to 18.3 mph by the time I got home (between the BONK and weaving through rush hour on city streets):

Odd route working around some trail closures and construction.
(Follow the 5-mile laps to make sense of this.)

• FRI: easy run, good core and legs, and riding along side of Henry while he was on a run. Just a nice day of workouts.

• SAT: good upper body and decent spin. I was REALLY hoping it was going to be nice outside as my wife was still gone and I would have loved to sneak out for a ride. But it was chilly, so I dropped the boys off at fencing practice, and I got in a decent spin. I didn't go nearly as hard as my 2 rides earlier this week as I was feeling pretty pooped. So I did a workout similar to Tues where I did 3x10 min efforts, but the efforts weren't as hard, and I spun longer after finishing those intervals. The efforts are harder to see in my heart rate, but that's because I wasn't going as hard:

And my upper body workout that morning was a PR as well! Saturday's I tend to do circuit-style workouts: push-ups, back rows, pull-ups, biceps, triceps, and shoulders... then repeat. A usual workout is 6-8 sets for me on a Saturday. But I did 9 for the first time on this Saturday. And my body was aware that it was more: that 9th set was BRUTAL as I died during the end of most of those exercises.

• SUN: core. Sunday's are my rest day. I just had a nice walk (and stretch), and did some core.

I had 7 hrs and 49 mins of total "saddle time" in all of October. And this past week alone, I had 7 hrs and 15 mins of total saddle time! Sure, nearly an hour of that was riding easy with Henry as he ran, but still, that's a nice uptick in saddle time! And I had more outdoor miles in my long ride on Thursday than I had in all of October.

I had a lot of steps (139K) and a REAL SOLID week of "intensity minutes..."

1827 intensity minutes for the week - the last 3 weeks have been a nice boost.

... ESPECIALLY considering that I didn't have a long run on Monday because of the 8K CC race the day before! So a big week on paper even though I skipped one of my biggest normal workouts for the week! NICE!

October's training wasn't amazing, but it started with me recovering for a few weeks from the TC 10 Mile so I didn't end up injured for a while like what happened last year (I think the 10 mile distance is the "perfect" distance to hurt my body a lot, so I NEED to take times to heal up).

Here's what October looked like:

I had just raced the Fall Classic Duathlon the weekend before Oct began (Sept 28th), and then the first part of Oct was also pre-race for the TC 10 Mile so I was going easy. Then I had 2 weeks easy after the 10 mile that ended with a few days outside of Chicago for a fencing tournament for Henry (the 16th through EARLY in the morning on the 20th). I was POOPED that morning (as I posted about here) after just getting a few hours of sleep after we drove from Chicago starting around 7 pm on Sunday evening.

Then the final few weeks of Oct were a bit more normal, but I ended the month going a bit lighter as I was resting up for an 8K CC race on Nov 2nd.

Oct totals look like this:

- SWIM: 0 yards (still no pool access)
- BIKE: 40.58 miles (not a single "training" ride)
- TRAINER TIME: 4 hrs 56 mins (2 good workouts the week of Oct 20, but the rest easy)
- RUN: 97.47 miles
- STRENGTH TIME: 51 hrs 10 mins (decent considering there were a few races to work around and a trip)

I also randomly had my biggest month of steps ever, averging nearly 22,000 steps/day for the month: