Well, I'm about half way there. IMAZ is three and a half months away. Now it's getting a little more serious.
Up until now I've been in what's called "base" training. Base training is completely about increasing your aerobic abilities. You're trying to get your body to be able to move blood and oxygen around as effeciently as possible. For you biology majors out there, you're trying to do three principle things:
1) Train your body to use fat as a fuel source. Low intensity/high volume training causes increases in the enzymes that do this
2) Stimulate mitochondiral development in your cells. Your mitochondria are the little dudes in your cells that actually produce the energy your cells need to function. That puts the "mighty" in "mitochondria".
3) Stimulate capillary development in your muscles. This helps get more blood to the cells that are moving your tired ass around.
You're also trying to toughen up your joints, ligements, brain, and schedule to handle more and more volume. So you turn the dial up fairly slowly, which is what I've been doing. And you're very careful about using any of your new found fitness. You don't want to be making withdrawls yet, just deposits.
Training for most endurance sports involves "periodization", which is breaking your training into phases where you train specific energy systems. The first one is that aerobic system. The trip to Bend was at a good time, as it was the pivot between the "base" phase and what I'm now entering, which is "build". Build is pretty much what it sounds like, and it's where the real work happens. I had my first Build Week this week. Good times.
One thing that I noticed is that, like most gradual things, it's easy to not notice the changes. Most of the time I don't feel like I'm getting much fitter. Partly because I'm tired all the time (more on that later). But then you do something kind of big - like do a 2.5 hour focused session on the bike, then run for an hour - and you're fine in an hour or so and not sore that day or the next. That's fitness. Or you realize how you're now doing things that were massive new challenges just a month or two ago. It's easy to miss.
For example, not to long ago my "long" swim for the week was 2,000 yards. It wasn't too bad but I could feel it. At that same time my 'long' run was 50 minutes or so. Boy have things changed. On Tuesday I swam 4,200y then ran 6.5 miles. Friday was a kind of a breakthrough day: a 5,000y swim. If you did it all at once that's one-hundred-laps in the pool. Here's another way of looking at it. You know those 5K fun-runs they have all the time? Yeah, I basically swam one of those on Friday morning (and don't start with the yards-versus-meters thing either, that's why I said 'basically'). Nutty.
The weather has been, for the most part, atrocious. I thought yesterday was going to be a long day riding in the freezing cold and rain but we got lucky. It was just plain cold. Stayed dry today. But there have been plenty of 8pm runs in the dark and the pouring rain; really they're not that bad. In fact, I went out and did an hour run on the morning of Christmas Eve in just awful weather. I kind of liked it. Running in crappy weather is kind of fun. Riding in crappy weather mostly just sucks. Oh, and you should check out all the run-geek stuff I've accumulated. Reflective vest. Flashing lights. Oh yeah baby. I need to get a headlamp too...there are spots between street lights that are pitch-black and I'll end up on my face one of these days, especially with all the limbs and branches and stuff due to all the wind storms. But that aside, the weather hasn't really bothered me that much, so I think Arizona was the right choice.
I've mentioned it before but I really underestimated what the scheduling impact would be. This week, for example, I had a about 3 hours to do on Wed, Thurs, and Friday of this week. Tuesday was light with only 2.5 hours (ha). Having to rally to get into work after that (or in between) really makes for a rough day and almost no free time. So this week ended up a bit over 19 hours including a New Year's Rest Day on Monday. So it's a big committment. But it's also a lot of fun...
| Week 14 Totals |
| Type |
Distance |
Duration |
| Weights |
|
01:00 |
| Bike |
146.0 mi |
08:44 |
| Run |
29.9 mi |
04:21 |
| Swim |
14200.0 yd |
05:00 |
| Total Duration: |
19:05 | |
| Totals for Weeks (10/02/2006) - 1(01/07/2007) |
| Type |
Distance |
Duration |
| Bike |
1172.1 mi |
74:17 |
| Weights |
|
14:45 |
| Run |
271.6 mi |
41:15 |
| Stretch |
|
02:55 |
| Swim |
98693.4 yd |
34:40 |
| Rest |
|
|
| Core |
|
00:45 |
| Total Duration: |
168:37 | |