Redlining

Earlier on, I may have mentioned that I'm not a mathematical wizard. Allow me to demonstrate with yet another example. As mentioned before, my objective is to make significant improvements in my swim time. The method by which to accomplish this is simple - swim more. Simple, straightforward - any questions?

So, I chunked through four swim sessions this week, definitely at least one more than the in-training average. Before the fourth, after doing some mental math I figured 2700m would make for a nice even weekly total - 10 000m. Not awe-inspiring by any "serious" standard, but then again, nobody's ever accused me of being too serious, and it would be a big uptick on my "old" weekly average of ~6500 - 7000m or so.

Well, as you might imagine, as the week went on, the arms seemed to get heavier and heavier, and it took longer and longer to get warmed up through each workout. I slogged through them, battled through my 2700m on Friday, justifiably (I thought) proud of myself and went home to get the quiet satisfaction of totalling up the 10-spot in the log. One problem - the Tuesday swim was only 2200m. Add that to two 2500's, and a 2700 on Friday, and I came up with a decidely un-round 9900m. Off by 100m - less than the distance from my front door to the mailbox. Isn't that just a dead fly in the soup bowl?

The rest of the week's training:

Weights/core - 0 minutes!
Swim - 4 swims, 9900m (Doh!)
Bike - 2 rides, 255 minutes - took it a little easy this week (read on)
Run - 150min - one easy eight-miler, and....

The Chilly Half!

Today was the first "A" race of the season, the half-marry in Burlington. Weather was perfect (for March) - sunny, no hint of wind and a start time temperature of -5 deg. C. The goal going in was to hit 1:30:00, which would have been a PB by over 5 minutes. For that reason, I thought it was a little unrealistic - I had been putting in a good whack of base miles, but not enough speed or hillwork, and there were two separate times in the log where I had to back off for 3-4 days - once to avoid an achilles problem, and once for the flu strike, no doubt caused by overtraining early in December/January.
I lined up at the start with Darren, who told me to stick on his hip. Yeah, right. Dude can smoke my chicken on the run - there was no way I was going to keep up with him. I had mentally settled with myself that something more realistic for me would have been around 1:32 - 1:33.
We line up within "spitting distance" of the starting gate - misleading of course, because we're packed in like sardines and there wouldn't have been any room to let one fly.

The starting horn (gun? don't remember) goes off, and it's pandemonium. I managed to keep Darren in sight for about the first kilometre - then he was dust. The first pace marker I saw was at one mile. On my watch - 6:00. Oh crap, I'm thinking, I'm on pace for a 1:18:36. In other words, I'm going out too fast. I'm going to blow up, and it's going to be ugly. I backed off and started checking my times at 2K intervals. I needed to be hitting 8:30 intervals every 2K to make the (unrealistic) first goal time.

At about 8K, my heart rate monitor had slid down to become a belly-button rate monitor, basically useless. We had laughed about that before the start, how much of an inconvenience it was for men to constantly be adjusting the "bra strap". Reading from there, my belly button went up and down from a rate of 116 to 230 - for the belly button, I don't know if that's in beats per minute, or what the units are.

If you've read this far here are the 2K splits:
2K - 7.45
4K - 8.06 (15.51)
6K - 8.20 (24.11)
8K - 8.16 (32.27)
10K - 8.15 (40.42)
12K - 8.34 (49.16) - starting to fight it here
14K - 8.41 (57.58)
16K - 9.02 (1.07.00) - stopped to drink at the 15K water station
18K - 8.46 (1.15.46)
20K - 8.53 (1.24.39)
21.1K - 4.43 (1.29.16 chip time)

1.29:16! Way better than I expected. Definitely means I've been sand-bagging in the past :). I won't expect to be knocking five minutes off that time in the future. I don't know what that would translate into for a marathon time - probably something in the 3:20 - 3:25 range, which would have me miss my "Boston time" by ten minutes (3:15). It'd be tough to replicate that time in a full marry - I was definitely "redlining" this morning, after about 6K.

So the year's off to a decent start. One more big thanks to Sally, the Awesome Support Crew - babysat my backpack through the race, and put up with the smelly two of us in the car back to the shuttle parking lot - I know it stalled her "IKEA time". Time for more bike more bike more bike for the rest of the spring. Also time (after a celebratory BEvERage) to put on my flippers - I'm going to fill the bathtub up really deep and go paddle around for half an hour or so - gotta find that last 100m swim.

Peace.