BIG TRAINING WEEK!

Last week was a SOLID all-around week! Here's what it looked like in my training log:

• SWIM: 2300 yards (OK, nothing amazing about that... shut it.)
• TRAINER: 3 hrs and 23 mins
• RUN: 23.53 miles
• STRENGTH: 10 hrs and 3 mins

Nothing stands out as totally amazing, but it was just a really nice week with REAL good workouts:

• MONDAY: 11.14 mile long run, 1 hr 17 mins of legs. The long run was OK, as it was my first real long run just over a week after the TC 10 Mile. I did the middle 5.5 miles "at pace" in 35:14, or at 6:24/mile pace. Decent, but not amazing.

• TUESDAY: 7x5 min efforts on the trainer, and a quick but decent 4x everything for my upper body. That's a quick "go to" trainer workout, and it keeps me working for a while!

• WEDNESDAY: easy run, and then a long core and leg workout. Nothing too fancy here, but just nice long strength work.

• THURSDAY: "pyramid" swim and 5x upper body workout. Lately, I've been doing swims on Tues and trainer rides on Thurs, but Tues I didn't have time for a swim. (Lots of teaching responsibilities getting in the way last week as noted in this post.) But I was able to get away Thurs for a swim after a HECTIC 5 days prior. I did a 200 yard warm-up, then a main set of 100, 200, 300, 400, 300, 200, and 100 all with (a longer) 0:30 rest between. Then 4x75 kicking drills followed by a 200 cool-down. My "coming down" times were all faster than my "going up:" my first 100 was 1:30, and my final was 1:27 (when I was DEAD). My 200s were 3:06 and 3:04. And my 300s were 4:46 and 4:42.

• FRIDAY: 2x2 mile intervals and another big day of core and leg work. I posted about the intervals yesterday: I ran 11:43 and 11:49 during our first snow of the season. After I posted that, I saw that I ran this workout faster back in March after a great winter on the treadmill, and that was a bit of a bummer (I ran 11:47 and 11:35 back in March).

• SATURDAY: long and random trainer ride, and good circuits for upper body! I posted about this trainer ride on Saturday night after doing it: it was 3x10 min efforts followed by 7x90 sec harder efforts. My family was out of town that evening, so I had time to do what I wanted on the bike. This was great. And that morning, I had a long upper body workout with more reps than usual for EVERY move: push-ups, dumbbell rows, pull-ups, bicep curls, tri dips, and shoulder flies. I did a set of all of those exercises and repeated 7 times. (And did some extra PT exercises for my shoulders and some eccentric moves for my forearms.)

• SUNDAY: long core workout. Sunday is always my rest day from endurance sports, except for when I do my long run on Sunday and then take Monday off as my rest day. Just a nice core workout while watching the Vikings go 5-1!

My strength time was over 10 hours which is HUGE (with a great workout on Saturday), my running included a long run and decent speed workout, my swim was solid, and my trainer workouts were both GOOD with Saturday's being the longest in a LONG time. My weekly running total was my 5th best all year, only behind 2 weeks recently with long speed days on Friday gearing up for the TC 10 Mile, the week of my 10K in the spring which had a longer run on race day (and running to and from the race), and the week I did this 2x2 mile interval back in March as that also lengthened my Friday run as it did this past week. Nice week!