Monday, February 16, 2009

Flipper: King of the Sea

"But I knew him as James, the [expletive deleted] dolphin..."

I just got back from the National Aquarium in Baltimore, which I haven't visited since I was a kid. It was pretty sweet, and the dolphin show was a cool way to end the day. Except for the chick that made out with the dolphin. That was just weird.

Last week turned out to be my highest volume week in a long time at 21.5 hours, and as I look back on it, it seems pretty meager. We lucked out with 60+ degree temperatures midweek, which baited me into believing I could rock a 30 hour week with 350 miles on the bike. Here's how that turned out:

Monday: Easy 6 mile run, Fed Hill Runners. In college I used to only swim on Mondays as a recovery day, but now I've got to be at Runners so I try and make it pretty easy.

Tuesday: 50 mile ride, my Loch Raven loop. Warm temps, felt pretty decent.

Wednesday: 60 mile ride, my Hunt Valley loop. Even warmer, a little bit windier, and I was already pretty tired. Then I met up with the guys for our Wednesday evening 12 mile run, so it was a big day.

Thursday: Biggest day of the week. It was quasi warm but SUPER windy, and I knew a road ride was going to be challenging. I opted instead to ride in the confines of Patterson Park. I have a good 2 mile figure-8 that I do, and planned on doing it 15 times before going inside and riding 2 more hours on the rollers. Well, the wind was so strong that I was riding dog-slow, and then a few times the crosswinds blew me into the grass and almost into some trees. I headed back in after 14 laps and then rode the rollers for 95 minutes. My taint could take anymore of it. I then ran an easy 4 mile brick after the ride, and earlier in the day had swam 4500m - my longest workout of the year. It was a seriously long day and I was wrecked.

Friday: Plan was to ride LONG, but when I woke up and it was cold and windy at 8am, I scrapped that idea. Instead I opted to do nothing. Actually I ran at Patapsco in the afternoon for the slowest 12 mile run I've done in a long time. I stopped a few times to contemplate why I was continuing to run, only starting again when I remembered it was getting colder and darker, and I was still a few miles from the car.

Saturday: I met up with Ben, Brennan and Arjun at the NCR Trail for a medium long run of 13 miles (they were all doing more + some kind of workout). I hate running there and whatever, I got through it.

Sunday: After about 4 hours of sleep I woke up at 7 to go out to Frederick to ride. Frederick is tough because it doesn't care what kind of shape you're in, it's going to beat you somehow. We are rarely treated to fair weather when we're out there, and while the temperature wasn't freezing and it was sunny, the wind was nuts. I was riding pretty well up the hills, but the first two are brutal and really take a lot out of you. My back was very tight and my legs were tightening in preparatory anxiety of the climbs. I finally hit my stride on the back half, when I managed to climb South Mountain the big ring. That was pretty sweet. We made it back and were pleased with our effort out there for the day.

So the week wound up looking like this:

Swim - 4500m
Bike - 230 miles
Run - 47 miles

Certainly not a great swim week, but I only had so much energy. I can't believe last Memorial Day I knocked out 260 miles in 3 consecutive days. I've got a long way to go before I'll be in that shape, but this was a good week to get ready for down the road.

No comments: