Misc

Fatigue: This is recovery week, and I've been trying to take it easy and recover but my legs feel really sluggish. Tomorrow is a rest day, so I'm hoping that will help and then next week is a week of base training so I think I'm going to keep the intensity down and see if that helps. It's a little frustrating because workouts that wouldn't normally make me sore are making my legs really tired and sore. I'm a little overtrained right now so I think I need to step back the intensity for a little bit.

Rockin the Rockport: Tuesday night Cheri and I swam at Rockport pool again and finally met the Wimmers, which was great. I stumbled onto their blogs a while ago and Cheri and I have been following their training and they've been doing a lot of the same events we are but we never run into them. Finally, we ran into them...it was bound to happen. Rockport is a great place to get in a good swim workout. It's kind of fun swimming in an outdoor pool, and being an Olympic size pool makes it a little tougher. I didn't realize how much of a difference that second of rest every 25 yards makes until I had to swim 50 meters before getting a breather. Good workout.

Swimfast: I'm still working with Mark at Swimfast and I can tell I'm making some progress. It gets frustrating sometimes because swimming is so much about technique and it takes a while to develop that. But Mark has been giving me a ton of great tips and I can tell that I'm starting to make progress. My left arm is mainly where I screw up my form so I need to do a lot of work on that...a lot of one-arm drills. He had me drop in on one of his open water classes so he could help me with my open water swimming, and he noticed that I tend to swing my arms out too much in open water and I'm wasting a ton of energy so he gave me some drills to work on to improve that. He's an incredible coach and I can tell he's going to help me take my swimming to the next level, and I think I might be able to hang with the lead pack one of these days. I just need some time to get the technique down.

Gun Show: Today at lunch I rode the gun show, which is part of the reason I'm so tired right now. Jordan rode with us today, and with him being one of the best cyclists in Wisconsin, the pace gets pretty fast. I was doing everything I could to hang on and stay with the group. Jordan works for Saris and they have several very fast riders, and they all work together better than we do so they can be tough to hang with. But I got in a good ride and hit my max heart rate, which I haven't done in a while. That hurt.

Aquathon: After work I ran the aquathon (swim/run). My goal was to improve on my swim, even if that meant I would have a bad run. I'm happy with my swim time, but I'm a little disappointed that I didn't do a good job getting into a group so I could get a good draft. I swam the whole thing alone. I started to the side of the main pack, and when people started to settle into a comfortable pace I ended up in a gap behind the lead pack and in front of the middle pack. The lead pack was too fast for me, so I just pushed as hard as I could and tried to make sure I held a good line so I didn't add unnecessary distance. My swim time was 14:38, almost 30 seconds faster than last time. It's an improvement, but I thought I could take more time off since I struggled a bit last time with the cold water. The run was brutal. My heartrate was really high from the swim and my legs were tired. I ran faster than I expected, but it was a struggle. My run time was 20:54, about 30 seconds slower than last time. My final time was 36:04 for 13th overall. I don't care about the run, but I really want to get my swim times down. I'm shooting for a sub 14 minute swim next time. Cheri came out and watched and took pictures. I'll post them later, although most of the pictures she took were of a puppy. I can't compete with the puppies.

Cheri's Knee: Cheri has been having a lot of knee pain when running lately, and one of the sponsors of the aquathon is a physical therapist so Cheri talked with him for a while. It turns out he's in Janesville twice a week so she's going to make an appointment and see if he can help her get over the pain so she can focus on her running again. I'm really glad she came out to watch because I've been trying to help her with her knee pain, and I have no clue what I'm doing. And I learned with my knee injury that self-diagnosis doesn't work.