"Intensity Minutes" Dropping

Last week was a nice training week (after ANOTHER nice training week), and I ended with 1561 “intensity minutes” on my Garmin, which I think is my 2nd highest week. The chart below shows last week to the far right:

The 4th week back above (to the left) was low because of being out of town 2 different days for Thanksgiving. And then the 4 weeks before these past 4 weeks look like this:

1598 to the right (5 weeks ago) is my highest week in my Garmin.

As I’ve posted about a few times, I’ve been biking to work 2x each week this past semester. And one of those days each week (Monday) was also the same day as my long run. This past Monday we were done with the semester already, but I still biked to work to return some final projects. Because of these big running and bike commuting Mondays, I’ve had 9 out of the past 10 Mondays with over 300 intensity minutes (when it took me nearly 3 months of wearing my Garmin 24/7 to hit 300 minutes/day, which happened on March 6th for the first time).

The 1 time out of the last 10 weeks when I DIDN’T have a Monday with more than 300 intensity minutes was the day after the USATF MN 8K CC Championship race, so I obviously didn’t do a long run that day (but I still biked to work).

And then the few weeks before these last 10 weeks were a bit easier/shorter on Monday because of the Fall Classic Duathlon and the failed TC 10 Mile.

Oh, and my 3 biggest weeks of intensity minutes have all been within the last 5 weeks.

But now with Christmas, family get-togethers, grading final fall semester projects, prepping for spring semester, and not having to bike to work a few times a week, I WILL have some weeks with fewer intensity minutes. And that’s OK - I’ve had a good run!