Lots of Biking! (And Running According to Plan)

Here's what my November looks like so far:

That's 167.75 miles of biking so far this month. In NOVEMBER. Outside. On a tri bike.

I only have 2 other months this year with more milage. And I'm planning on meeting a friend to ride a bit later today, and I'm shooting for more than 32.25 miles to put me over 200 miles for the month. I've only been over 200 miles in a month ONCE in the 6+ years I've been recording miles online (since Sept 2009). That was back in 2010 as I was getting ready to set my Oly Tri PR of 2:15. That was also pre-kids.

These bike miles this month haven't been fantastic TRAINING just because a lot of these were simply "rides," and many were longer rides. (I usually do a handful of shorter, harder rides each month as my training. Note my 2 biggest months this year had 9 and 10 rides. I have only done 6 rides this month, and hope to go farther than those past 2 months on my 7th ride today.) Most were not hard rides this month - not great "workouts." The 2 rides that WERE workouts were my "Time Trial" effort on my normal loop on the 4th, and then 3x5 mile intervals a week later on the 11th. I wrote about the Time Trial PR effort in this blog post, and my 3x5 mile efforts a week later were nothing special, but they were pretty consistent on my out, back, and out again route: 14:04 (21.3 mph), 14:03 (21.3 mph), and 13:58 (21.5 mph).

And I'm doing pretty good sticking to my plan for building my running mileage back up. The first full week of November had three 30 min runs, the next week had 35 min, the next had 40 min, and now I'm in a week of 45 min runs. All have been easy. I've only missed 1 run, and that was this past weekend: my sacrum was getting a little achy last week, and my wife worked this past weekend. So I didn't hit the treadmill at the gym or load the boys up for a below freezing stroller run - I easily cancelled that run for an extra day of rest. Otherwise, 6 out of my 9 runs so far this month have been pushing a stroller.

Oh, and this happened last week:

My wife's caption on FB: "First day of requiring winter coats = perfect time to
take advantage of Izzy's pint sale!" You have to buy 6 for the discount. So we did.

Brad (the guy who should have won the Cinco Du this past spring but took a wrong turn so I ended up winning) commented on that photo: "Steve, I'm not saying you need an intervention or that I'm keeping count, but about 83% of your posts lately have featured ice cream."