Weekly training recap, biking etiquette.

Similar to last week, except 3 days of swims and 3 days of land training:

Monday: 

30 min swim, 3mph on the knotmeter

Tues:

lower body (sans leg/toe presses)

15m row 3.25km (HR 130-140)

30m ellip (HR 135-130)

15m bike (HR 125-120)

Wed:

30 min swim, 3-4 mph, critique from David, videos taken

Thur:

push routine

15m row 3km (HR 130)

30m ellip (HR 120-125)

15m bike (HR 115-120)

Fri:

30 min swim...3.5 mph, which is faster than my early swims, try to clean up flutter kick..mixed success but working on it...

Sat: 

Rest

Sun:

Long road bike ride. This time I upped the time a bit and covered 26 miles (last week was 20). 

Here are last weeks splits:

Split	Distance	Avg Speed	Avg HR	Elev +	Elev -
1	5.00	12.4	129	184	53
2	5.00	15.0	136	162	89
3	5.00	16.2	134	114	184
4	4.72	11.5	114	83	214

And here are this weeks splits, this time I punched my watch to make a split start when I get to the open road at 3.48 miles an I punched again when I left the road at the end of split 5. 


You can see that on the open road splits (#'s 2,3,4,5...about 20 miles of the total) I was doing about 15.7 mph. There are rolling hills only..nothing really huge.

Split	Distance	Avg Speed	Avg HR	Elev +	Elev -
1	3.48	11.4	115	164	16
2	5.00	15.5	118	131	154
3	5.00	15.6	126	112	76
4	5.00	15.8	124	150	142
5	4.87	17.7	130	82	162
6	2.56	14.5	105	0	87

For the first time I'm getting good cardio doing biking.....the muscles are starting to be there and able to do the job.

I'm still absorbing the biking culture on the roads..this stretch of road is very popular (because it his very wide shoulders). There are some people that blow past you with nary a word and others that say hello...I decided the saying hello thing is the right thing to do.

I'll spare you long stories of my encounters with the bikers out there....I don't seem to be the slowest, nor the fastest...(as usual like running). Interestingly I've seen very fast young guys transition to stand-up pedaling on hills even though I can gain on them on the hill without doing anything special ...what's that about? Do they do it for variety ..to stretch out or something.?.dunno..

I'm a very skittish cycler when it comes to going down hills fast. If I get over 17-19 mph I'll just keep my legs moving to keep them warm but not really work hard to go faster...taking a spill would be grim at those speeds.  Also, it's really a waste of energy: even in a tuck air drag is huge at these speeds...from 16mph to 22mph it's like a factor of 2+...

----

....I don't feel crazy that I'm not running. Instead I'm very very happy to be successful at adapting mentally and physically to enjoying swimming and biking. No more chewing the carpet just because I can't run (plus lots of new things to learn and practice).

That said: T-10 days to running! 8)

My first swim technique video

I think I've about done 6 swims now (two per week). My co-worker David has been coaching me on technique....he's given me a lot of pointers that have really helped. He also pointed me to a lot of youtube videos when I first got started.


Yesterday, he brought in his underwater camera and we played around videoing our technique. This is a clip that shows where I am right now.. the current is set to 4mph, (probably way off).


There are lots of things that can be improved but the biggest problem is that my flutter kick sucks. My legs are not high enough, knees are bending, feet are going apart too far from each other, kick rate too slow.  Basically just about everything that can be wrong, is wrong. 

But I will fix it ;)


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Other cross training is going really well.  Really want to try out the running but holding off for another two weeks.