This is STARTING to Look Like ACTUAL Training!

These last 2 weeks had some decent looking numbers (compared to the last 6 injured months):

Here are some general thoughts (with some specific workout thoughts coming up after this):

• SWIM: My swimmer's shoulder (impingement) is getting better. I started swimming 7 weeks ago with it hurting, but I realized swimming a BIT helped it. It's not sore afterwards - just feels a bit tight. All my swims except for the last one were a little freestyle, then some kicking to break up using my shoulder, then a little more freestyle. All easy or easy/mod except for a bit of that last one. Shortly, I may try working up to a swim every 4 days instead of just weekly.

• BIKE: The only ride in this stretch was with the boys to the gym and back. I started teaching the day after that, and being on my feet more often while teaching along with walking Henry to school most mornings has caused my lower right leg to ache a bit more. So the biking took a bit of a back seat for a while. Yesterday, I biked 16+ miles with Charlie (not shown on the calendar above because it was the 19th).

• RUN: I'm stalling out with my "run easy every run and add 5 mins to each run every week" plan. I don't need to be going a whole lot further now (which I realized when my wife and I had a chat about that a few days ago), but I hope to do more "training" and not just "running." The achy leg is about the same, but PT said that was OK: if we increased distance and it didn't get worse, than it's considered a WIN.


Here are a couple more specifics I want to point out:

• Sunday, Sept 4: RUN: [not shown on the calendar] my first attempt at hard running in nearly 6 months. I posted about that here - it was an easy run with 1.5 miles in the middle at 6:30 pace.

• Tuesday, Sept 6: SWIM: a typical easy - easy/mod swim of 425 freestyle, 300 of kick drills, then 500 of freestyle (in 8:16 - 1:39.2/100 ave).

• Saturday, Sept 10: NOTHING: because I was at "Farming of Yesteryear" with my boys as seen in yesterday's post.

• All 3 runs the week of Sept 5 - Sept 11: this was my "40 min run" week, and they were all easy/moderate with averages of 7:41, 7:18, and 7:30. Nothing much to report (which is good). I took it a bit easy all week because of my "taste" of speed at the end of the prior week.

• Monday, Sept 12: SWIM: 500 freestyle, 300 of kick drills, 600 freestyle. FINALLY starting to feel like "actual" swimming. The first 500 of the 600 were done in 8:23 (1:40.6/100 ave). The FUN news with this swim was that I tried swimming hard for 100 near the middle just to test the shoulder, and I cranked out a 1:34 and didn't die.

• Wednesday, Sept 14: RUN: my first tempo run in 6 months! As I noted above, I stopped increasing my runs each week. Instead of this being a "45 min run" week (x3 for the week), I did less than 5 miles on Wednesday, but I did the middle 3 at tempo pace. It still felt a lot like a "test" and not totally like a "workout." But the test was successful. There were no issues with my broken body as I tried to run fast. (In fact, my strike rate is always better when I run faster - I don't heel strike and my form is better.) My half mile splits for those fast 3 miles had a nice descend: 3:08, 3:07, 3:06, 3:05, 2:57, 3:03 = 18:26 (6:08.67 pace). Mile splits of 6:15, 6:11, and 6:00. (There was a decent hill for that second-to-last half mile.)

• Friday and Sunday, Sept 16 and 18: EASY RUNS: nothing fancy here. And my legs and body felt fine after running hard on Wednesday. Win.

• Saturday, Sept 17: 2x500 SWIM: a common workout in the past for me is 3x500 with about a 60 second rest. So I thought I'd try a simple 2x500. When I started swimming again after my sprained ankle 2.5 years ago, my 3x500s were the slowest ever: averaging 8:15-8:20. I was hoping these 2 would be a bit faster than that. (And at my best, I averaged 7:26 for FOUR 500s last August before I stopped swimming.) When I started cranking out the 100s, I was happy with my times and my consistency. I swam:

- 1:32, 1:35, 1:35, 1:33, 1:33 = 7:49.54
and
- 1:30, 1:37, 1:36, 1:33, 1:31 = 7:48.65

(The 2nd one wasn't as consistent as I had my fastest and slowest 100s of the 1000 in that 500.) So yeah, that's still WAY off my sub-7:30 pace (for TWICE as many intervals), but I'm still happy with this startup back to swimming.


FOR THE FUTURE: I don't need to up my swim workout distances by much, but I want to try to work on the frequency (without hurting my shoulder or forearm) and the intensity. I still haven't been on my tri bike since April, but there's no hurry - I'll just keep hauling the boys around and hit the tri bike on the trainer in a month or 2. And I want to slowly transform my running into actual workouts: have a long run each week, and maybe a tempo run. And then an easy run between all those harder/longer runs. My hope of doing the 15K relay (3 guys doing a 5K each) in nearly 4 weeks shouldn't be a problem.

Speaking of hauling the boys around on the bike, here's an Instagram post from yesterday:

Caption: "Ran into and then biked with @rrweinzierl this morning,
and Charlie gave his booty a big 'thumbs up.'"

Then my wife ran into him as they were both biking home 8 hours later! We may have a stalker...