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.