Rest Week & The Wall

Rest weeks are always a sight for sore eyes - and muscles for that matter. Typically rest weeks come about every three weeks or 16 days of hard workouts and then 5 days of rest. Now rest weeks aren't 5 days of sitting at home on the couch eating Bon Bons but are just decreased volume weeks. Where last week was a 14.5 hour week this week was only 8 hours. Through all the training for the Half Ironman and during the first 10 weeks of Ironman training I've never really felt like I needed a rest week for any other reason than muscle recovery, until now. Last week was the first time that I've really felt just fatigued and as if I couldn't get enough sleep. Hooray for rest weeks!

On the Saturday after a rest week comes some of the hardest days though. Usually this is when you have a hard brick day - or a day where you have a long ride immediately followed by a long run. These days are important because they are basically race day rehearsals, you get a chance to try and hone in your nutrition plan on the long ride and make sure that it will work and not upset your stomach on the long run that follows. You also try and wear what you're going to wear on race day to make sure that it's not going to chafe. Last Saturday was one of those days.

In a masochistic kind of way I really like these workouts. It's a good way to gauge your increased fitness from the last time you had a hard brick day a few weeks before. It's definitely hard to get motivated to get out the door and start one of these workouts but once you finish a hard 5+ hour brick day there is a great feeling of accomplishment for the rest of the day if not weeks to come.

Last Saturday consisted of a 70 mile ride and a 7 mile run down in Cedar Hill with the coach. I learned that Cedar Hill is called Cedar Hill for a reason, there are hills there to be had. Most hills are just "hills" but only the epic ones get names like "The Wall". We first approached The Wall from the direction that would put us descending it. I usually do pretty good with steep descents and getting up to fast speeds on the bike without being shaken by the speeds, maybe it has something to do with driving a motorcycle. As we approached The Wall it was just like going over the first drop of a roller coaster, as you approached the crest of the hill you couldn't see the road in front of you or just how steep the hill was until just before you started descending. At this point it's too late to turn back and I might have let an "Oh sh*t" slip out. The decent was super fast and luckily on a fairly decent road without many bumps. After the decent we turned around and decided to climb it. I changed the display on my watch so that it would show the gradient of the hill as we climbed so I could see just how nasty this thing really was. 99% of the time I tend to stay seated on climbs because I prefer to keep my cadence steady and reserve some strength for the rest of the ride instead of standing up and getting real physical with it and expending a lot of energy. The climb didn't give me much of a choice, If I didn't stand up I was going to be going backwards. After I stood up and made a couple of peddle strokes my rear tires started skidding out from underneath me. I had to stand up in order to peddle but if I stood up I didn't have enough weight on my back tire for it to get traction. I looked down at my watch and saw 23%, 27% 35% and finally 37%! I tried to confirm this gradient on Map My Ride's website where you can map a stretch of road and it will show you the profile of what you've mapped out along with the gradient of the hills but I found that Map My Ride won't show you anything over 20%. So I'm going to have to trust what my watch was showing me.

I have no idea what the true gradient of that climb was but I do know that I've never seen a hill that steep, climbed a hill that steep or even though that it was legal to have a road in a neighborhood that steep. Luckily it was really only about a tenth of a mile long or I wouldn't have made it.

Bad News

75 Days

Last weeks totals
Swim: 6500 yards
Bike: 136.2 miles
Run: 25.4 miles
Total time 14:38

Of all the things that an athlete can get - sore muscles, satisfaction, exhaustion - the one thing that they don't want to get is an injury leading up to a race. One thing that I've been surprised to find is that for some reason doctors don't understand that the ability to recover from an injury in time for a race isn't good news. Recovery 12 weeks from a race is good news. Being healed by race day means nothing more than you're healed but now unprepared for the race and could possibly re-injure yourself due to the lack of preparedness.

I say all this because Kati has found herself with a nice little injury. She had an MRI done with the speculative diagnosis being a torn Labrum in her hip. This diagnosis was squashed by the orthopedic surgeon that we visited with to see if she just needed physical therapy or if surgery was in order. The surgeon explained that a torn Labrum is common for football players, gymnasts and dancers who take falls or get hit while their legs are in unnatural positions and that runners just don't get torn Labrums. This was good news as well as bad news because we had received the original diagnosis about 5 days before we met with the orthopedic surgeon, that was five days in which Kati was able to prepare mentally and emotionally to the idea that her race might be done. Now to get the news that it just might be either Tendinitis or a stress fracture may just mean that the door still has a crack of light coming through or could still be a game ender. Now we didn't know what to prepare or hope for.

Before we even started training for this race Kati and I made an agreement that if one of us was unable to continue training or race due to injury that the other would press madly on. Talking six months ago it seemed like the appropriate thing to do. Why should both of us sit out when only one of us can't race? But actually having that decision to make was much more difficult than I ever would have imagined. Kati has been my rock during this training. For some reason being out on a 5 hour bike ride is much easier knowing that Kati is out there too, even if we aren't riding together. I know that she's out there suffering through the same cold and the wind and that she's having a good time and somehow that knowledge strengthens me no matter how many miles we are away from each other.

I'll tell you one thing though that I've said before and will continue to say. This chick is a rock. Through all of the "I'm out, now I'm in" she's been able to find a silver lining that few would have been able to. Where most would have used this disappointment to fall into a hole of self pity she has used it to reflect on all the great races that she has done and begun looking forward to training for the Ironman race she might want to do in the future.

Through the next ten weeks I guarantee that she will continue to be my strength and motivation.

Cold & Stupid Cold

87 Days

Last week had quite a few events that made it post worthy. It was rest and recovery week so the distances that I would normally post are pretty inconsequential so I won't bother you with them since they are well below the normal weeks workouts and for other reasons that you will read about below. This is probably going to be a long post so grab some milk and cookies.

It all started on Tuesday when I was supposed to wake up early and get a run done before work. Right after getting up I knew that something wasn't right so I went back to bed thinking that I could get my swim in during lunch and the run done after work. So I slept in a bit. Even after a little extra sleep I wasn't feeling any better but pressed madly on with my morning routine and tried to head into work. Instead I headed right into the back end of a '94 Chevy 1500 truck and crushed the front end of my car.

This was a fantastic way to start my day and give my stomach a little extra jostling that it really didn't need on this particular morning. I finally made it to work and made no one any guarantees as to my ability to work or the duration at which I would be staying. My decision was made for me when I made a run for the bathroom and didn't know whether to sit or kneel. That's a decision that you don't want to leave to a coin flip. At this point I decided that it was time to go home for the day.

About 11 o'clock is when I started making runs to the bathroom and threw up every 1.5 hours for the rest of the afternoon. Normally being sick sucks but add on top of that the fact that my back was really starting to kill me from the accident and everything just compounded. I had to get to the chiropractor but the last thing that I needed was him twisting my gut in my current condition. I waited as long as I could and finally went in at about 3 o'clock and warned them that I might have to make a "run for the border" without notice or explanation - which I think was explanation enough. Luckily I only had a few false alarms during my visit but nothing productive. I spent the rest of the day on the couch and managed to eat 4 crackers in the afternoon and 2 pieces of toast later that night. Oddly enough though I felt nearly good as new the next morning. Go figure.

Saturday was the other very eventful day.

We've only had two really cold days this winter that just so happen to fall on a Saturday. One was right after Christmas and the other was last Saturday. The one that was after Christmas Kati and I used a Get Out of Jail Free card with our coach and stayed inside for our ride and then headed out for short runs in the afternoon. I always felt guilty about that day and felt as though we were unjustifiably copping out of a workout. So when this Saturday came and it was 25 degrees with a 16mph wind from the north that made the temperature in the mid teens I felt like this was something that we needed to do, that it until I went to let the dog out that morning. After I went outside for the first time I was constantly checking my email to see if our coach had emailed me to say that it was too cold to go out and gave us an alternate workout for the day. Alas it was in vain, no email. Then I was waiting on Kati to catch a draft of the temperature and say that she thought it best for us to stay in. This was for naught as well, that chick's a rock.

We headed out at about 9:30 and it was frigid. Heading south was no problem but once you turned north and into the wind it got a little tough. Overall I felt fairly well bundled for the day and was only really hurting in my hands, feet and face.
I learned early on not to let any water from my water bottles drip down my chin because it froze almost instantaneously. Taking in water became more of a difficulty as the day progressed. I had four bottles with me, two were in cages attached to my bike frame and two were in cages attached to my seat post. The two that were up front started to turn to slush at about 1:30 but were still of some use. I tried to start using the bottles in the back at about 2 hours and the nozzles were frozen shut and completely unusable. Eventually the bottles up front were completely slush and so I had to transfer water from the bottles in the back by breaking the ice up that was on the inside to get to the water that hadn't frozen yet and pouring it into the only properly functioning water bottle that I had left.

Nutrition was also a problem. It was so cold that the thought that controlled my mind was how much farther I had left and how cold it was instead of thinking when I needed to eat next and what I needed to eat. I still had a 5.5 mile run after this 60 mile ride and would need some kind of fuel in my system if I was going to have a good run. The other thing that was on my mind was how I was going to run on frozen feet.

I finally finished my 3.5 hour ride and couldn't feel my hands or feet and the colony of icicles on my beard was starting to get pretty ridiculous. My initial plan was to go inside for a little bit and put my feet under some warm water to get feeling back into them before I headed out on the run but I changed my mind at the last minute and knew that if I got warm then my chances of getting back out the door got less and less. So I slapped my shoes on, grabbed the dog and was gone. I don't know if any of you have run with really cold feet before but it's like slapping the bottom of your feet with 2x4's with every step. Eventually when you do get feeling back your feet start to feel unevenly swollen like you have marbles in your shoes. This took about two miles to get rid of. The problem now was that I was running on an empty stomach which generally leads to GI issues for me. I was surprised at how fast the run went by though, I was expecting it to feel like an eternity but once I started getting blood flow to my extremities with the higher HR things actually started to get mildly comfortable.

The entire workout was about 4.5 hours and by the end the temperature had risen to 30 degree but with the wind chill it was still in the low 20's.

There were two reasons that I never turned around and went home during this ride. First is I knew that Kati was out there also and she was slated to do 80 miles in those horrible conditions so what did I really have to complain about. Second was that I knew I could use this day in the future for mental strength. On the next hard training day when I'm doubting my ability to finish the day or the Ironman I knew I could look back on this ride and tell myself that if I can make it through that hard day I can make it through this one as well.

Initially after the ride I thought that Kati and I were pretty tough for making it through the day but as the day went on I realized that we were just really stupid. It was way too cold to be out there for that long (I believe Kati's ride was about 6 hours that day) and I will never go out in those brittle temperatures again. It is now Wednesday and I wish I was exaggerating but I still don't have all the feeling back in my fingertips. I'm starting to wonder if I got some minor frostbite and hope that it will eventually go away and isn't permanent.