August's Training in Review

August ended, and it’s like fall just suddenly showed up. September 1st was the first run on the season where the “weather-shield” was down on our Chariot because it was chilly (and not because it was raining):

Nice chilly Friday run with the boys a few days before school started.

Anyway, here’s what my August training looked like:

SWIM: I had 2 swims each week (including a shorter swim on my race on the 12th) which lead to a month JUST over 18,000 yards, or my biggest month in 2 years (since I stopped swimming in August of 2015 to let my elbow heal). The last 4 swims were at the Uptown YWCA because our pool was closed. It turns out that our boys LOVE the smaller “Kids Zone” at the Uptown gym, so they wanted to keep going back to let me have more swims. Not a problem! It lead to a solid month.

BIKE: I ended up over 200 miles on the month (202 outside and also an hour on the trainer on the 2nd) for the 5th month in a row. That’s NEVER happened before. (Note this post from Monday where I compare the last 6 months of biking to Ironman training 10 years ago.) I’m ready to start letting my bike mileage (and my swimming mileage) slip a bit as I build running mileage for the TC 10 in under 4 weeks.

SIDENOTE: After my last triathlon of the year on Aug 12th, I really lost the desire to keep up the effort in the pool and on my bike. I just didn’t feel the need to push myself as much knowing I was MANY months away from my next multisport race. I’d like to keep up the distance to some extent, but I may be dropping into “base” mode with less intensity. I’m OK with that. It’s been a good year - I can back off a bit.

RUN: Nothing too fancy here, but you can see the start of my TC 10 Mile build. All summer, my long run as been around 6-7 miles, and that’s what I did on the 5th. Then the next weekend was a triathlon. Then the next 3 weekends were building long runs: 8.4, 9.4, and 10.3 miles (not pictured - that was September 3rd). I was over 20 miles/week the last 3 weeks straight (20, 21, and 22 miles), when before this, I hit that 1 or 2 times all year. This week is a “back off” week where I expect to go 15 miles total before ramping it up again for the next 10-12 days. Nothing is hurting and everything is staying in check, but I need to back off to build these miles safely.

So here’s the plan: an easy week this week (Sept 4-10), 11 miles next weekend (Sept 17), MAYBE 12 miles just before the following weekend (Sept 22?), and then an easy week leading up to the TC 10 Mile (Oct 1)!