October's Training in Review

Here's a glance at October's training:

• SWIM: 12,500 yards
• BIKE: 186.75 miles
• TRAINER TIME: 70 mins
• RUN: 96.09 miles
• STRENGTH TIME: 41 hrs and 10 mins

Technically, it's my biggest SWIM month since before Covid because of 2 reasons: first, I've been pushing my distances a BIT farther (averaging 2500 yards/swim in Oct). But more importantly, the month lined up in a way where I did 5 swims instead of 4.

And my BIKE miles were huge for October: it was my biggest October since recording my miles online in 2009 (and probably my 2nd biggest October behind 2005 when I first got into biking). I posted a bit about it being an oddly big month in this post from mid-Oct. Adding to this was that I biked to work 2 days/week all month long except for the day I ran a fake TC 10 Mile and didn't feel like biking a few hours later.

My RUN mileage was pretty standard. It would have been a bit bigger had I not raced the TC 10 Mile and the Fall Classic Duathlon on back-to-back weekends earlier in the month. I used to say that anything over 80 miles felt like "real" running/training, and now anything around 100 miles is good!

And speaking of those 2 races, I had a good one and a bad one in October. The TC 10 Mile was cancelled because of the heat and humidity to start the month, so I tried my own personal version of the race the following morning (Oct 2nd, which was still warm and humid). It didn't go that well. But then the weather cooled down and I really had a SOLID race WINNING the Fall Classic Duathlon on the 8th (and here are a lot of great race photos in case you missed that post).

Finally, my STRENGTH time was pretty normal, which was EXTRA good considering we were gone for 5 days and 4 nights on a trip to Chicago with the boys! (The evening of the 18th through the morning of the 22nd.) Looking at the previous 9 months in 2023, I've had 4 months with more time and 5 months with less time (but all are in a relatively small window). So no complaints there.

Just hoping to keep this injury-free stretch of training rolling!!!