I’m back in NYC, but my heart is in LP.
Placid paradise
Along with my arms, legs, and entire body. We had a monster training weekend at #WorkLiveTriCamp!
General training notes: ah, a recovery week. With #WorkLiveTriCamp scheduled for the weekend, we stuck to easy workouts during the week. My body definitely needed the rest. Although now I feel like I need a few days to recover from camp! (And there will be a more detailed post on Lake Placid.)
Monday – off
Tuesday – a.m. run in Central Park
Easy 45-minute run along the trails
Wednesday – a.m. CompuTrainer ride at Tailwind Endurance
Recovery ride with a handful of intervals that focused on cadence
Thursday – a.m. run in Central Park
A few weeks ago, I did Cat Hill repeats as a recovery run; this time, I did 800s around the lower loop. I really enjoyed this workout, and my legs felt much fresher and looser afterward.
Friday – p.m. swim in MIRROR LAKE
My car left for Lake Placid shortly before 8 a.m., and we arrived around 1 p.m. Since we couldn’t get into the rental house until 3 p.m., we hit Mirror Lake for a 1.2-mile loop of the Ironman Lake Placid swim course. It felt great to be back even though the water was the roughest and choppiest its been in the three years I’ve been going there. Another car of campers arrived around 4 p.m., and I somehow got talked into swimming a second loop of the course. (Slash, it sounded like a great idea after two adult beverages.) This time, it was raining, but we had the lake to ourselves.
Saturday – a.m. brick; p.m. swim
The training day started off slowly due to rain and wind in the forecast, but around 11:30 a.m. the skies looked clear enough to ride. Under normal circumstances, I’d ride the normal bike course, but since it had been raining throughout the night and morning, our coaches advised everyone to skip the seven-mile descent into Keene, which can be unnerving even during ideal conditions. Instead, I ended up riding the run course, heading out Wilmington, and then coming back to Lake Placid. (Once I turned around, my route followed the “normal” bike course.) It was incredibly windy, and the 30-mile ride took a lot longer than anticipated, but it was absolutely beautiful.
Forever chasing that cataclysmic bliss
Back in Lake Placid, I swapped out my bike gear for running shoes and headed down to Mirror Lake to log two loops. Per Earl’s instructions, the first loop was easy, and it was during the second loop I had permission to work down to my off-the-bike pace. During my 5.5 miles, I saw a few training buds from the house getting after it too.
I closed out the day with another 1.2-mile swim in Mirror Lake. The focus of this workout was to work on drafting and swimming in a pack, but I was in an awkward place: not quite fast enough to swim with the pros and actual swimmers who were at camp and too fast to swim with everyone else. Earl put me in a group with three other people, and I unintentionally dropped them when it was my turn to swim from the back of the pace line to the front.
Sunday – a.m. brick; p.m. swim
This was a monster training day: I rode the same route as the day before, but kept backtracking from Wilmington into Jay and eventually Keene before turning around and heading back to Lake Placid. There were four of us who started the ride, but about halfway through, the group splintered to just Earl and me. Granted, this 53-mile outing was my longest one of the season, but hands down, this was my toughest ride in Placid to date. The wind was absolutely unrelenting. When we were about 12 miles from the house, we made a quick stop at a gas station, and that’s when I called in the reserves: Coca-Cola.
Gimme energy. Gimme watts. Gimme another pair of legs.
Even with the boost from this endurance athlete’s elixir of life, the rest of the ride home was a total slog. I still don’t know how I pulled myself together to run three miles off the bike, but it got done.
After a pizza and Coke break (#metabolicallyefficient), I headed down to the lake with a few other folks for an easy swim. After this training day, I have even more admiration for long-course folks. I told one of the coaches I questioned a lot out on the bike ride, and he said, “welcome to long-course racing.”
When you need an energy boost during a workout, what’s your go-to option?
The post Triathlon Training Log – Week 31 (June 27) appeared first on Fitness and Frozen Grapes.
