Since the triathlon two Sundays ago, I haven't done a whole lot. I swam the Monday night after the race (May 18th), and went biking for 14.76 miles on Tuesday the 19th, and I swam on Wednesday the 20th and Saturday the 23rd, then ran 3.1 miles tonight, Wednesday, May 27th. I also played golf with my dad on Memorial Day, but that doesn't really count as "training." Ironically, though, it'd been so long since I played golf that the repetitive swing motion made me sore the next day.
The reason for my reduction in training is due to the simple fact that I've been very sore recently. Mainly saddle sore. I'm not used to all the miles I've been putting in on the bike. Part of it has to do with my ride on the 19th. 14.76 miles is the longest I've ever been on the bike, and come the Thursday after, I could tell I'd likely been biking a bit too much. The back of my thighs ached constantly, likely from all the time in the saddle, and that ache continued thru Memorial Day. It was far less than pleasant, and I decided to back off a bit and let my body recover from the race and the extra miles I've been doing so as to prevent sickness or injury.
That said, the bike ride on the 19th went very well. I met up with a local triathlon group at the downtown airport to ride, and did four laps around the complex. Not only was this the longest I've ever done, it was a new record for average speed - 15.7 MPH. My goal is to get my average speed up to around 17 or 18 MPH for the half Ironman (HIM) in October, so this is a step in the right direction. I'll grant that this course is mostly flat (two short, but steep, hills), but I'm hoping if I train well here it will translate come race day. I'm also glad I met with the group - had I been on my own, I likely would have stopped after three laps instead of getting the extra 3.7 miles in.
I don't have much to say about the swimming workouts. I did the yardage and felt OK doing it.
Tonight's run went well, however. I did 3.1 miles in 39:19, which is a new record for me. I ran .5 miles and walked .1 to rest for the entire run, and it worked out well. When I first started running last summer, I was doing .1/.1 splits, so to come back after a long layoff and still manage a .5/.1 split for 3 miles felt good. I'm confident that after a few more weeks, maybe a month, I'll be back to running upwards of 5 miles without walking at all.
Overall, I'm glad I scaled back the training a bit. I'm in the beginning of my HIM training plan (it's a twenty week plan) and I think that for my current fitness level it's a bit ambitious. My plan currently is to do what I can, sticking to the plan as closely as I can, and hopefully eventually do all the workouts it's calling for. Even if I never get there, I'm firmly in the "You have a HIM coming up, it's time to train for it" mindset, so I should be able to work up to the distances needed by October and be ready for this race, even if my progress to those distances is slower than my plan would like.
My main focus now is the HIM. I'm planning on doing a 5K on the 4th of July, and I have the Matt Mason Tri at the beginning of August, but both of these are pretty minor races for me right now. I'm doing the 5K mainly because it's going to be a cool, patriotic race, and the Matt Mason tri will really just be a tune-up for the HIM, giving me one more chance to practice my transitions and open water swim skills for real before the big day in October. Of course, the Matt Mason tri will also be really patriotic, which really appeals to me (it's a memorial race for a fallen Navy SEAL, who was killed when the helicopter he was in was shot down in Afghanistan on a mission). In fact, the race's patriotism is what inspired me to sign up for it last year. I'm looking forward to actually experiencing it this year, provided Mother Nature doesn't have other plans again.
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