Roller coaster. not the fun kind.

What a total roller coaster. One day I'm waking up feeling great the next I can hardly take in a deep breath. I've been managing to stay relatively on schedule, with the running being the most difficult, discomfort wise. I'd been kind of testing it all last week and decided to save it for my long run yesterday. I was able to get in some decent swims but had to modify some intensity as the deeper repetetive breaths wear on me. Cycling has been solid. I've been getting in all the workouts as prescribed and am definitely feeling stronger from focusing on that aspect of my game. That has been the only thing to keep me going mentally. Quick recap of the workouts:

Sunday. long run.

I wasn't sure how this would go. I really wanted to run as I hadn't gone out in two weeks! I had 110 minutes planned and I felt that was pretty stacked. My legs felt good and ribs were okay until about 10 minutes into the run when my breathing got a little harder. Finally some searing pain both in the front and back of the cage. I stopped turned around and walked. I started running again when I started to feel better. pain again in 2 minutes. I started modifying my breathing going deeper in the belly. some relief. hmmm. I ran right back by my house and refused to go back to the barn, I was feeling better. I stretched this one out to 90 minutes cutting it short due to building pain levels. It ended up being a pretty decent 60 min unstructured fartlek as I would feel good for a while then have to dial it back. It felt good just to run.

Saturday.

I had a tough bike workout. 2 hours 30 minutes including sprint intervals. These hurt. 3x20 second sprints all out followed by 5 mins to HR 5b. Three intervals total. I averaged about 800 watts on the sprints, max 960W. Average wattage for each 5 min interval was:


301

276

256 HR Max 172 on all three.


No doubt fatigue was setting in along with the lactic cement that filled my legs during the sprints. It felt good to be finished with this workout. I was done.


Friday.


Trainer workout. Custom one hour focusing on single leg and some turnover drills. These are hard especially trying to get lower on the SLD's. Not quite in the aero position but low on the horns. I don't know if I could do more than one set in the aero...yet. I was supposed to get in an open water swim here too, but I wanted to give the ribs a chance to heal to see if I'd feel better.


Thursday.


1:30 bike. Rode SDIT course working hard on uphills trying to get a sense of what kind of wattage I can sustain without gettin out of hand. I threw in 3x tidepools hill at zone 4. I proved to be a lot stronger than last year at this point, but throw in that swim and it's a different story.
The rest of the time was spent at Z1-2.

60 minute swim one hour following the ride. 2000m total. I was swimming through a bit of discomfort the majority of this swim. It never got too intense but I also didn't do anything too close to threshold. I switched the swim and bike around because I knew from Wed. that I'd be a little sore from the swim to comfortably get on the bike.

Wednesday.

First day back to swimming since Xterra. I had a big swim planned and knew after the warm-up that all I was going to be able to do is aerobic swimming trying to breathe easily. I got in 1700 m
with 400m of kicking. It felt good to get in the water but I was a little disappointed that I had not come as far as I thought in the healing department. I was in some tolerable pain in the later parts of this swim but still not good enough to hit the run planned for the afternoon. It hurt to breath deeply and/or jog when I got back to the car so I called it off. Cruise intervals were not happening that day.

Today is a much appreciated day off. My legs are a little sore from the run from two weeks off but unfortunately so are my ribs. damn. I'm trying to keep it all in perspective. Getting a lot of work done.