Solid Week of Training and a VERY Tough Bike Ride

AHHHH What a week. The week before a rest week is always very intense. I was able to hang with it though even through a very difficult and challenging bike ride on Saturday. Here’s the update on the week:

Swimming I clicking along very well. I had a 3100 yds swim scheduled for Monday which went very well and with these longer swims it’s great to have access to a lake. I have distances between docks on the lake plotted on my gps so I know where I have to swim to in order to get 3100 yards in (1.76 miles). It would be very hard to do this in a pool; I would have to do 124 laps. I would absolutely lose count, and lose my mind!!!!

So the swim went very well and finished up with a nice easy endurance pace at 1:02:00.

The Run, no problem. My long run this week was 15 miles and that was done very easy. No problems at all. Nutrition was good, hydration was good, temperature was about 70 degrees for the first hour and then warmed up a bit but not much. Obviously, it will be much hotter in Kona but as Coach Sonni said, it’s better to get the run in during cooler weather and get the conditioning instead of just trying to survive a training run in the heat. I agree whole-heartedly.

Now the bike. I always consider the bike as my strong suit and I have proven this in short course tri’s. but this weekend I was scheduled for a 90 mile ride again and deciding to do the Lake Norman Excursion which had about 600+ riders and you could choose between 10, 40, 65 and 100 miles. Well 100 miles sounds like the distance I should go, so I went after it.

There were only about 50 people who did the 50 miler.

Did I have problems on the bike, yes but it was a lesson learned, big time!!!! I learned I may have a bike ego. I have been so accustomed to going fast on the bike for 2 hours and then the race is over I felt the same way on Saturday. So when the excursion started after about 5 miles it school out and we had a group of about 20 riders who were flying in a pace line. I was right in there with them and having a great time no matter what it was costing me. I just figured that some of the cyclist who were in the pace line with me, if they could hang I surely could hang with no problem.

Even though my heart rate was up, my speed was beyond where I really needed it to be (5 mph more than I needed it to be), I was having fun but not riding according to plan. I was having fun until we got to a part of the course where the signs said the people riding 40 miles and those riding 100 miles had to split off. It was a lonely feeling when the whole pace line split off doing the 40 mile loop and I still had the 100 mile loop to go. OUCH!!!!!

So I linked up with other riders from time to time throughout the course and, yes, often riding beyond where I should have been riding for a training ride. We had water stops about every 20 miles and the last one was 28 miles from the finished line. I stocked up on some water, and not feeling overly energetic to say the least, I took off solo towards the finish line. Now at this point we had some very large hills to conquer and it was hot! As Matthew Broderick said in the movie “Beloxi Blues”, it was “Africa Hot.” Of course, since I had blown my legs out, sapped my energy and was trying to deal with extreme heat, it was only natural that I run out of water with 10 miles to go.

There was nowhere to stop and get water, I was out in the boonies and I was heading toward Mooresville where the ride began but I didn’t see anywhere to get water until I got into the town of Mooresville. So with 2 miles to go There was a red cross water stop at the library in Mooresville and I stopped and took 5 minutes just to get water, Gatorade and ice in me. WOW was I over heated.

I rode the rest of the way to the finish line and I spent the rest of the day drinking by my calculations 5 lbs of water over the next few hours. Dehydration is nothing to play with!!!

So here are the lesson I learned in this ride that I hope everyone will learn from:
Don’t ride beyond your plan on long rides
Drink often according to plan. I limited my fluid intake the first 90 minutes due to the intensity of the ride and the speed of the ride.
On a hot day, don’t be afraid to intake more water than you usually do
100 miles on flat ground is NOT the same as 100 miles on a hilly/mountainous course!!
Do not pour water over your head unless you are certain where the next water stop is. I did this to cool down and that’s why I ran out of water.
There are some scary places in North Carolina when riding a bike 100 miles through the back roads around Catawba, NC. There were also some great views as well like the herd of deer at mile 10, the horse farms at mile 85 or riding along the Catawba river at mile 76.

Yes, I am so glad I am in the middle of a rest week right now. I only had a 7 mile run this morning which was like walking to the mail box and back…how much fun is that!!!

See you next week!!

Training Builds and Saddle Sores!! Ouch!

I have a bit of catching up to do since I skipped last week. I didn’t have a lot to report on since I had a rest week and nothing new happened and I was very busy at work and with other things I needed to catch up on but this week I am fully, and I mean fully into my next “build” week.

I’ll start with Swimming which is going well. On Monday, I had 3,000 yards, which is about 1.8 miles. The only thing I can say is being in the water that long, it gets awfully quiet!!!!! I did this swim in the lake which I enjoy much more than the pool, but we have had recent thunder storms this past week so swimming in the lake tomorrow morning will probably not happen. The reason being is that the storms dump a lot of run off in the lake and I don’t think the water is as clean as I would like to see it and I usually let the water calm down for at least 2 days before jumping back in. I also have another reason…Saddle Sores!! (I will cover this under biking)

On the biking side, it going fairly well. I say fairly well just because I have developed a good case of saddle sores. For you non-bikers, saddle sores are when you really start putting in the miles and there will be points of contact between your saddle on the bike and your rear-end! If you have seams in your shorts or wrinkles in your shorts or you don’t use body glide or Vaseline to keep everything down there running frictionless, saddle sores can develop quickly. As a side note, when you research saddle sores on line many people swear by using Bag Balm as the cure all for saddle sores. I read what this stuff was and I just can’t bring myself to use it yet. Bag Balm is a thick pasty lotion similar to Vaseline but is it used on Dairy Cows to soften and heal raw areas on the utters (more specifically their Teats!) I do have my limits!!

…and yes, they are painful! They have been coming on for about a week and they peaked today on a 90 miles bike ride. Not to go into the gross details but this is good news because now they will be much easier to treat, heal up and prevent going forward. I will most likely skip my bike ride on Thursday this week just to get the healing time in and I should be good to go for next weekend’s 100 miler.

Getting back to the bike, I had an intense 60 minute session on Thursday this past week focusing on speed which went very well and then I had a 45 mile ride on Saturday and a 90 mile ride today (Sunday).

This is what poor nutrition will get you. On Friday I was very busy and didn’t eat lunch until 3pm at work and that consisted of no carbs at all (Salad), that night I ate Granola and Yogurt (I know I should have known better) but I wasn’t really hungry so I just ate something lite. Needless to say the next morning my 45 mile bike ride was the longest 45 mile ever!! In addition to having no power, having saddle sores, starting my ride at 11:30 when it was 85 degrees (later getting to 92 degrees), and finally have some pain in my knee (I will cover that under running) it was a long ride.

So last night I ate a ton of Pasta to restore my glycogen stores (power source we all have for our first 90 minutes of intense training or racing). That did the trick!!! Today’s ride was my longest ride ever at 90 miles and I finished up in 5 hours 15 minutes and still felt much better than I did yesterday.

On the run this week I am up to 13 miles, (it will be 15 miles this week) and the run itself was not bad but I felt some pain in my knee after the run. I have a history of quad tendonitis and I had to miss half the racing season last year due to this.

So this pain is a bit scary for me at this point. After the bike ride on Thursday…no pain, everything felt great, but after the bike on Saturday, it was hurting a bit once again. It didn’t hurt today on my long ride so thinking through everything, I think yesterdays pain came from me working Saturday morning at football skills day (I coach little league football). I was demonstrating some of the skill drills repeatedly which put a lot of stress right in the area I was experiencing quad tendonitis, so I figure I need to keep my football activities a little lower key.

Nothing else to report right now but this week will be another build week with a 15 mile run, 100 mile bike ride (in addition to a 50 miler on Sunday) and who knows how far on the swim this week…I need to check my schedule.