Big Bike Month: A Surprising PR!!

May was an odd looking month in my training log. When I had my last day of class on May 2nd, my schedule (obviously) opened up. So the boys and I started biking to school whenever it would work with our carpool schedule - which was 2 to 4 times/week. Here's what May looked like, and all of the green are my bike rides:

May 2023 totals:

• SWIM: 11,296 yards (a weird number as 1 swim was in a 50 meter pool)
• BIKE: 274.95 miles (A PR SINCE IRONMAN TRAINING 16 YEARS AGO!)
• TRAINER TIME: 4 hours and 11 minutes (SHORT as I had so much bike time)
• RUN: 101.11 miles
• STRENGTH: 46 hours and 15 minutes (A LIFETIME PR!)

My stretch of 10+ hours of strength time every week (except for race weeks) was kept up through all of May. That streak started 11 weeks ago on March 13th of this year - every week had a ton of strength time that only took a dip on race weeks.

My running total was over 100 miles for the 3rd time in the last 18 months or so, so that's great too.

But it's my bike distance that was crazy. Over 200 miles is a SOLID month for me, and 275 is unheard of! In 2022, I only had 2 months with 100+ miles, only 1 month in 2021, 2 months in 2020 (with 1 of those being 216 miles), 3 months in 2019, 5 months in 2018, and finally 8 months in 2017 (with 4 in a row over 200 miles: between 200 and 215 miles). And then 0 months in 2016. So looking back 7+ years, I have 5 months with over 200 miles (4 of those being 5 years ago), and they all were just barely over 200 miles. 275 miles is NUTS, and I was happy to be biking with my boys to and from school (and running some errands on my bike in there as well). In "actual bike TRAINING miles," I only logged 111 miles on my tri bike - the rest were on my "commuter" bike with the boys.

My biking will be dropping in June as I'm still trying to figure out my broken bike issue. The derailleur hanger that snapped is an oddly specific one for my kind of TT bike. Dang.

May of 2023 shows a little spike in my "training time" as those bike rides were all on the slower side:

It's MUCH more dramatic to look at the training by distance which doesn't show trainer time:

So June will take a hit with regards to my biking (for a number of reasons), but I'm hoping to keep my running and strength work up! Maybe I'll be hitting the pool a bit more if I can't be biking as much. I don't have any real specific goals this month other than to hit the track for some shorter/harder speed work.