I’m gonna try to keep a weekly post summarizing the prior week’s training. For the most part, rain storms made it hard to get everything in, but I did; including an open water swim from hell. I believe I ended up training for 15hrs and 59 mins. Figure I’ll cut it short one minute to keep it under 16 hrs right? Anyway, I’m racing this coming weekend. My coach said “this is a gut check for you because I’m definitely not taking it easy on you leading up to it.” Hmmm, guess I’ll see what I have on tired legs. My guess is I’ll have something; you can always dig down and find something when you need it.
Swimming – Typical pool workouts. Aside from the open water swim (which I’ll discuss below), nothing exciting or new. T-Storms created some lightening that cut my Wed WO short.
Now Open Water is another story. Upon heading to the lake Sunday morning, I checked the weather. The hourly said 20-30% chance of scattered rain. No big deal. Even if it rains, I’ve swam in that. So Duane and I headed to Anderson Creek. We swam a lap up by the beach then started a lap out by the buoys. I don’t know how far they are, they can’t be more than 200 feet from shore if even that. We were about 5 mins into the loop when we felt some chop in the water. I thought, “This is nice, good training”. Then, 30 seconds later, Duane sits up so I join him. The clouds look like black hell is coming our way. So we instantly head towards the shore. Within seconds, the chop turned into a whitecap-nightmare like nothing I’ve swam in. Where we swim, the lake spans for a long way, so wind can really pick up. It got very dark, seemed to be raining and the waves were bouncing off each other insanely. I’ve done an Ironman swim, I’ve swam in the ocean, I’ve done crazy wave starts with people swimming over, under, and all around me, but I can’t explain to you how crazy this was (I’m in the picture shown here; wave start at Nationals, and that was a cake walk compared to what it felt like Sunday). It took every ounce of me to stay focused and calm (now, I lost it a few times). You couldn’t swim… it was impossible to get a breath. It was a modified breaststroke/treading water towards the shore. I seriously got slammed under water and tossed around several times. No question about it, the lake was making me its bitch. Anyway, those 5 mins of getting no more than 150 feet to where I could somewhat stand were the most physically challenging, and scariest, moments I think I’ve ever encountered. Thus, regardless of OW support, I will be doing my swim training while pulling a lifeguard’s floating can (seen this done by others).
Bike – nothing to exciting. Normal training covering about 180 miles. Due to rain, I did sit on the trainer pushing a Zone 2 HR effort for 1 hour and 30 mins. That was actually hard. Not having any pickups, rest/coasting, etc. makes for a grueling WO. But, it’s good to just sit and push. Get the HR up to about 150 and hold it.
Run – nothing to exciting here either. My “long run” consisted of 22 loops around my neighborhood. It wasn’t really all that boring. In fact, it’s good training for the mind in my opinion. I did have a good track WO where I was able to hold paces in the 6:40s and keep my HR in Zone 3. That was promising.
Takeaways from this week of training – you can’t EVER be too safe in OW. No matter how good you think you are, when a storm blows up, the shit hits the fan fast. Ride the trainer some; it makes you stronger. Although it’s pissing me off and killing my ego, I’m learning to run at lower HRs and let my pace be whatever it needs to be. It will eventually catch back up.
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