Friday Funny 2580: Funny Notes from Teachers

Teachers need to be paid more:

Kid's not wrong...

More funny things on SportsAndLaughs.tumblr.com.

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Shorter Week: Injury and Easter

Last week started decent, but then went down the crapper:

That PURPLE on Wednesday and Friday was noting some left calf pain. That's my oldest injury (been dealing with it since high school), and it flared up a bit on Wednesday's easy run. Then it was OK on Friday's run, but was achy all day after, so I haven't ran at all since. I'm taking off this entire week, and we'll see what Monday brings.

For last week, just shy of 20 hours of training isn't HORRIBLE, but it's the lowest since mid-Feb. I got in some decent bike workouts on Tues and Thurs before skipping the weekend because of family events. (And actually, it could have been that 19 mile ride on my MTB followed by an hour on the trainer on Tues that "weakened" my calf and led to the pain the next day - that's the ONLY thing I can think of that would have caused that.

• MON: normal long run and PT legs. The middle "pace miles" of my long run were at 6:17 pace, which is very average.

• TUES: 8x upper body and back-to-back rides. This was more of my "start outside on my MTB and then end inside on the trainer to get in a longer workout" idea that I wrote about at the end of my "March in review" post.

• WED: easy run, good PT legs and core. Random calf pain near the end of the run.

• THURS: 8x upper body and longer trainer ride. Got in some good stretching after that ride too.

• FRI: failed tempo workout. It was cold on Friday, and I was afraid of ice for my early morning run. AND I was afraid of being a few miles from home if some calf pain came back, so I kept my run on the treadmill. BUT THE FUNNY THING IS THAT OUR TREADMILL SPEED SETTING HAS BEEN ACTING UP. There are "preset" speeds of 1, 3, 6, 9, 10, and 12 mph where you can just hit a button, and then there are the UP and DOWN arrows so you can dial in a specific mph (to the tenth-of-a-mph). The arrow buttons have just stopped working. So I started by warming up at 9.0 mph before it let me hit the down button a few times after a few minutes so I could warm-up at 8.2 mph. When I was planning to run hard for 3.1 miles, I cranked it up to 10.0 mph, but I couldn't get the arrows to take me any higher, and I kept trying a few times EVERY MINUTE. It never budged. Finally, after 2.4 miles at 10.0 mph, I hit the preset to take me to 12.0 mph, or 5:00/mile pace. I held on to that for a final half mile, but couldn't muster out the extra 0.1 miles to make it a 5K. So I ran 3 miles in 17:30 (3:00 half mile splits for the first 5 splits, then a final splits of 2:30).

Graph: fast warm-up, 2.5 miles at 10.0 mph, 0.5 miles at 12.0 mph, cool down after that.

The buttons worked ONE LAST TIME so I could bump up my cooldown pace from 6.0 mph to 7.0 mph.

• SAT: quick upper body early. Then family time.

• SUN: nothing. Just family time and eating lots of sweets.

Last week will put an end to my weekly streak of 1500+ intensity minutes that lasted 8 weeks:

Nice last 8 weeks. Actually 10 weeks of decent "intensity time" back to a mid-Jan trip.

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Semi-Wordless Wednesday: High Training Readiness (Because of Injury)

I had a family-filled Easter weekend, and that was after some calf pain on my final 2 runs last week. So after a lazy weekend and a skipped long run on Monday, my "training readiness" was high yesterday morning:

I don't FEEL "at my best" Garmin... I feel sad. :(

Back with a decent "week in review" tomorrow despite ending the week injured, as well as a WEIRD speed workout on Friday.

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March in Review: a BIG Month

I mentioned in a post last week that March tends to be a good month for me. And this past month was no different:

Here are my monthly totals:

RUN: 106.74 miles
BIKE: 183.82 miles (outdoors)
TRAINER TIME: 15 hours and 2 minutes
STRENGTH TIME: 58 hours and 24 minutes

Total saddle time: 26 hours, 29 minutes, and 24 seconds

183 miles biked and 106 mile ran are both just NICE numbers! (Both a little shy of last March's 217 and 109 miles.)

Strength time MIGHT be my 2nd highest ever! (Again, behind last March's all-time monthly PR of 60 hrs and 33 mins.)

And my trainer time is really big too (especially for getting in 183 miles outside as well!). Just over 15 hours of trainer time is my 2nd biggest month in the last 42 months (since the "big trainer year" of 2022). I had more trainer time in March than in all of 2011, 12, 13, and 14 (shockingly, those were the years with babies in my household, so there's that...).

What's nice when glancing at the month is that I had bike workouts EVERY Tues, Thurs, and Saturday! They weren't always the best, but there were also some nice ones in there as well. And also regarding my biking, those 183 outdoor bike miles totalled out to be just over 100 miles on my tri bike, and 83 miles on my mountain bike. So 83 of those miles were HARD and SLOW because I was on a heavy, rusty, cheapest-mountain-bike-Erik's-Bike-Shop-had-to-offer, 22-year-old mountain bike. I'm not about to say something like "those 83 miles on my MTB are more like XX miles on my tri bike," but I DO feel like I could get more credit for those miles. (My heartrate is just as high as on my tri bike, but I'm going about 2/3 the speed on my MTB: more like 13 mph compared to 20 mph.)

And it was the last partial week of Febuary (slightly grayed out at the top of the calendar above) that I started doing a shorter outdoor ride on my mountain bike on a chilly day, followed IMMEDIATELY by a trainer workout as a more fun way to get in a longer workout. I did it twice at the very end of Febuary, and then 4 times in March (my first 6 times I tried that were within 5 weeks). I hope to only have to do that a few more times before it's ALWAYS nice enough to be outside! In case you're wondering why I do that, there are 2 main reasons... First, when it was icy out, riding my tri bike is a death trap. And second, it's easy to be outside on a mountain bike on a shorter ride when it's kinda chilly as I'm not moving as fast (creating less cold wind) and I'm not out there as long (as toes get colder and colder even on 50 degree days). So to get SOME time outside feels good, but I'll just do enough before I start to freeze. On a recent 50 degree ride, I came home with my 2 smallest toes on my left foot turning white because they were so cold.

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Friday Funny 2579: Easter Funnies

More funnies on SportsAndLaughs.tumblr.com. HAPPY EASTER!

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Friday Funny 2578: Parenting Funnies

Lots more funnies posted daily on SportsAndLaughs.tumblr.com.

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Don't Do This...

Yikes...

ZERO awareness of anything around her. "Main character energy" one might say.

And by the title of this post, maybe some of you thought this was going to be about endurance sport influencer Matt Choi being disqualified from his first 70.3 IronMan, but it wasn't. THAT ALSO happened just a few days ago. Click that link for more, but THIS incident of his seems like an honest mistake. As the article concludes, "When you’ve been banned for life from one of the world’s most iconic races, investigated twice by Marathon Investigation, and have made a habit of bending or outright ignoring race rules in pursuit of content, the benefit of the doubt gets harder to extend — even when the mistake looks clean."

It's been a weird week in endurance sports.

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