Putting My New Year’s Goals Into Action

In my big “year in review” post from Monday, I noted wanting to get my training intensity up before too long, as I learned last year (at an early season running race, and during the tri season with regards to my biking) that I need to be training harder if I’m to be racing where I expect to be. I put those thoughts into action in my first 3 workouts this week:

- SUNDAY I did a quick intense trainer ride. I warmed up watching 15 minutes of football, then did all of 35 minute Spinerval 23.0 B: a tempo-based workout. I cooled down for a bit to make it an hour of time in the saddle.

- MONDAY I hit the pool for some 100s. It’s not uncommon for me to do 100s, but I spent all of last year doing “CSS-style” swims: swim workouts of 1600 - 2200 yards at decent speeds with short rest. The idea is that you’re not working TOO hard initially (just below a threshold pace), but after the workout drags on, the shorter rest really gets to you. It helped me a lot when I first started swimming this way a few years ago. But I need to take a step back now and then and train differently.

So I lengthened my rest a bit on Monday so I could hit the 100s a bit harder. I just went from 20 seconds to 30 seconds which doesn’t seem like much. But it allowed me to swim faster - it felt a LOT different. About 1/3 into the workout, I was feeling really pooped in the last half of each 100. But then the longer rest let me recover more to be ready to hit the next one hard. It was amazing how different the workout felt with just those extra 10 seconds added to each rest. I ended with a 1:25.75 average over the 15x100 workout, with ALL of them being between 1:24 and 1:26.xx, and that was the fastest I'd swam 100s in a while (there was a workout a few months back where I averaged 1:24 or 1:25, but the rest have all been slower for the last year or so - usually around 1:27-1:28).

- TUESDAY I took Charlie for a 3 mile tempo run. We went just over 6 total, but the middle 3 were done fast. The trail was in good shape for mid-January:

We ran from the Uptown YWCA, so here we are on the
Greenway Trail near “the lakes” about 1 mile into our warm up.

I don’t know if you remember, but it was WINDY on Tuesday (there were wind advisories for most counties west of the metro - so most of the state). We ran into the wind on the way out, and then turned back with the wind on the way back. Here were my half-mile splits of the hard 3 miles:

INTO the wind: 3:21, 3:19, 3:27 = 10:08 out
WITH the wind: 3:03, 3:08, 2:52 = 9:04 back

3 mile total: 19:12 (6:24 pace)

And then Charlie ran 4 laps on a 14-laps-to-a-mile elevated track when we got to the gym:

He can’t pace himself. Each lap was a dead sprint, followed
by 90 seconds of laying on the ground. Rinse and repeat.

Then I backed off the effort a bit the rest of the week. But it was a good "test" with some speed! Now to make sure I keep incorporating some speed each week!...