Big Week of Training!

This past week felt like a solid week of training:

• MON: easy ride, good legs, and core. I did an 8K CC race on Sunday, so I didn't do my normal long run on Monday. Instead I just hopped on my mountain bike and went for a spin. And fit in some good legs and core.

• TUES: good upper body, and good trainer workout. I had a good spin early with 3 nice efforts as part of it:

And I had a nice upper body workout just an hour after that. Solid day!

• WED: easy run, good legs and core. A normal/good Wednesday.

• THURS: decent upper body workout, and then a long outdoor ride. I thought I'd actually have to skip this ride as I had a big evening of conferences at Henry's high school, and my wife was out of town. But I got home from class and had a chunk of time, and being it was 55 degrees outside, I quick got changed and headed out for a ride around 2:30 pm! But being it's now mid-Nov, I forgot how quickly it gets dark - it was getting a little darker than it should have been by the end of my ride at 4:45. Oops.

AND I was bonking hard for the last few miles - I looked back in my training log and never saw a 40+ mile ride in Oct or Nov, and I went for 41.57 miles on Thursday afternoon. Luckily (I guess), the 23 mph wind was out of the south, so I was pushed home for the final 5 miles. I was averaging over 19 mph with 5 miles left, but it dropped to 18.3 mph by the time I got home (between the BONK and weaving through rush hour on city streets):

Odd route working around some trail closures and construction.
(Follow the 5-mile laps to make sense of this.)

• FRI: easy run, good core and legs, and riding along side of Henry while he was on a run. Just a nice day of workouts.

• SAT: good upper body and decent spin. I was REALLY hoping it was going to be nice outside as my wife was still gone and I would have loved to sneak out for a ride. But it was chilly, so I dropped the boys off at fencing practice, and I got in a decent spin. I didn't go nearly as hard as my 2 rides earlier this week as I was feeling pretty pooped. So I did a workout similar to Tues where I did 3x10 min efforts, but the efforts weren't as hard, and I spun longer after finishing those intervals. The efforts are harder to see in my heart rate, but that's because I wasn't going as hard:

And my upper body workout that morning was a PR as well! Saturday's I tend to do circuit-style workouts: push-ups, back rows, pull-ups, biceps, triceps, and shoulders... then repeat. A usual workout is 6-8 sets for me on a Saturday. But I did 9 for the first time on this Saturday. And my body was aware that it was more: that 9th set was BRUTAL as I died during the end of most of those exercises.

• SUN: core. Sunday's are my rest day. I just had a nice walk (and stretch), and did some core.

I had 7 hrs and 49 mins of total "saddle time" in all of October. And this past week alone, I had 7 hrs and 15 mins of total saddle time! Sure, nearly an hour of that was riding easy with Henry as he ran, but still, that's a nice uptick in saddle time! And I had more outdoor miles in my long ride on Thursday than I had in all of October.

I had a lot of steps (139K) and a REAL SOLID week of "intensity minutes..."

1827 intensity minutes for the week - the last 3 weeks have been a nice boost.

... ESPECIALLY considering that I didn't have a long run on Monday because of the 8K CC race the day before! So a big week on paper even though I skipped one of my biggest normal workouts for the week! NICE!