Boring

This is where life has been spent lately. Well, first off I should say I did manage to take 4 full days off. It was awesome. Although, I got quite bored when I still woke up at 5am and didn't have anything to do. So I watched awesome early morning TV. Pretty cool. Saved By The Bell and Married With Children... so good!

Can I say how boring riding the trainer is? It was crazy boring! You sit in one place and pedal. That's it. I either listen to music or watch TV while I'm doing it so I have some entertainment. Thursday I kicked off the new training block. One hour of easy pedaling on the trainer. It was awesome. It actually felt great to get back on to the new training schedule. Hopefully this time I won't screw it up and lose track of my workouts.

Speaking of the bike, below is the new carbon fiber aerobars! Pretty awesome. They are much more comfortable than my old set. Plus, these have the s-bend aerobars which I like much better.

And speaking of gear, below are my running shoes. By the way, I have apparently turned this into my gear blog.

When I started training again this year my old Saucony running shoes were really hurting my right foot. My left foot felt great but the outside of my right foot was absolutely dying! I had to take 3 days off every time I ran. Not awesome. So I decided to start in on a new shoe search. Here's what I came up with: KSwiss Blade Light and Zoot Kapilani. Now that I've tested them both out I found I like the Zoot's for running and the KSwiss for cross training.

The problem with the K's was that they were a bit too stiff in terms of cushion. I need soft padding because of my right ankle and left knee. Since they were a bit too stiff I turned to the Zoot's and they were amazing! great run platform and movement. Great cushioning. Extremely comfortable. The only downside was that I like the way the K's moved from heel to toe. They are extremely smooth throughout the entire foot movement.

Anyways, the Zoot's have been working well and I'm extremely pleased with them.
Last but not least is my realization that I need to work on injury prevention. Given the multitude of problems I've had in the past I decided to purchase the Trigger Point rollers and ball. They allow me to roll out my leg problems and get them fresh for the next day. I have been having problems with my left IT band and since I've been rolling it out with the quadballer (as its called) I've been feeling a lot better. So, a big thumbs up from me on TP Therapy.
Now I'm off to a quick core and upper body workout. Box jumps, cable machines, medicine balls... good times! I'm hoping I'll feel better than I did yesterday during my 3 mile run. I felt like it was ten miles after I ended up positively splitting my miles (ie. going slower each mile). Work legs... Work!!!!

Long Week

Last week was rough! Work was much too stressful and the workouts were way too tough.

First off, my monthly reports covering my five counties were due last week as we released press numbers on Wednesday. After I already had two of them done, I was informed by my boss over our monthly conference call that we were changing the format of these reports slightly. This means I got to redo two of the reports I already wrote. That was awesome. I was on edge until Thursday when I finally sent in my reports. Then what happens? One of the other economists was reading through mine to check for errors and since she was running a little late getting it back to me I already sent it in... with errors! Yep, I had to quickly redo that one because I honestly have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote a couple sentences in there. Feeling good about that one!

The workouts were really tough last week. I go in 4 week cycles and last week was week 3, the hard one. Week 1 is build-up from a recovery week 4 previously, then week 2 pushes harder on into week 3 which is the peak for each cycle. Week 4 is the recovery week where I am now in active recovery rather than full rest recovery.

Since last week was my week 3 I was dying. Monday was a 6 mile run, Tuesday was upper body cross training, Wednesday was a 3 mile easy run followed by 2 miles of speed repeats, Thursday was another cross training workout done primarily with a medicine ball and the cable machine, then Friday was another 6 mile run (which was supposed to be faster than Monday, but it was much slower). Saturday was a pretty easy hour ride on the trainer followed by upper body for an hour. Now today starts the recovery.

Week 4 is always nice in the cycle because I get to take it easy, but I really hate taking these weeks. No matter how many times I go through these cycles I feel like I'm losing my fitness, when in all actuality it's gaining when I come back on week 1 with noticeable improvements.

In other news it finally snowed in town. It's been snowing up on the pass in the Cascade's, but not down here. It's actually remained quite nice for the last couple weeks, but yesterday the snow came and the temperature has dropped hard! Looking forward to some skiing finally. Hopefully there will be enough for a Thanksgiving opening and I'll actually have something to do. Otherwise I'm just going to hang out and train. Good stuff.

Training

I had it in my head that I'd start using the blog to keep track of my training over the winter, but haven't made much use of that. So now I'm going to start keeping track of things a little better and actually get some use out of this thing!

It's finally gotten cold around here and outside activities are at an end as far as I'm concerned (besides skiing of course). I am apparently too much of a wuss to ride my bike when it's cold and I hate running outside when it's cold. Yep... it is what it is. In grad school I managed to ride my bike to work/school everyday during the winter for the first year, but after I went sliding through a stop sign on my side with my bike right next to me I decided it wasn't a great idea at a certain point.

Training has been going real well the last month. I got a few 80 mile rides in and managed to only bonk during one! I was seriously relying on my americano I had at the turnaround point. It didn't really push me to the end, but it helped.

I've been trying hard to focus on my run this year to round out my swim and bike. Hopefully it works. I started off by getting new shoes. My Saucony's were really hurting my right foot lately, so I decided to try KSwiss and Zoot. The Zoot's won. They're so comfortable and don't rub anywhere. I did really like the way the KSwiss ran, they were really smooth on the entire foot transition, but were a little stiff in the cushioning department.

Anyways, I got 6 miles in today with a good cross-training workout in after that. A solid two hour workout. I had to bring an extra shirt with me to the gym because after about 10 minutes running I'm about through a shirt. And yes, I feel really cool changing shirts when I'm halfway through my workout.

And speaking of working out, I just finished watching Ironman Louisville and man there's some inspiration! Someday...