Week 2

After the freezing run on Saturday, Sunday turned out to be pretty pleasant and in the mid-50s by the afternoon. I'm guessing the opportunities for long rides in comfortable weather will be pretty rare in January and February, so Steph and I went out for about an hour along the Beach Drive section of Rock Creek Park that is closed to traffic on the weekends. In order to avoid the bumpy section of trail that we took to get to Beach Drive we decided to head up to Conn Ave and back down past the zoo for the ride home. That meant riding up the hill on Tilden. Ouch. Carrying extra weight + not having strong riding legs yet + double chainring on my new bike = painful hill. Hey, at least I now have a good benchmark to track my training progress on the bike now!

Tuesday brought our second Tuesday swim clinic, and, lo and behold, the pool was opened on time. Sort of. We again arrived at 5:25 to find a bunch of folks waiting outside locked doors, but after a couple of minutes of waiting there was a literal screeching of tires as the lifeguard peeled into the lot. A few minutes later and we were in the pool. There are 6 lanes in the pool and many more swimmers than that, so we were told to divide ourselves according to speed. That was kind of a hard task since we hadn't seem each other swim before! I punted and picked lane 4 (1 was supposed to be slowest, 6 fastest). It turned out to be an OK spot for me, probably a bit too fast, but that was good. With 4 people in the lane circle swimming I had to push myself to keep pace. I'm not really liking the crowded lane thing, but hopefully as we go on the coaches will be able to give us some instruction on our strokes. This week we just swam the drills. I can't blame Mel to spending most of her time with the folks who weren't as comfortable in the water.

Since we were building up to the 5 miler on Saturday I decided to rest the run legs a bit and got into the gym for some spinning on Wednesday. After a quick run I hopped on for 20 minutes then immediately out the door to run home. We aren't doing any real brick work until January at least, but I wanted to feel what it was like to try and get your "run legs" after being on the bike. I guess 20 minutes isn't enough because it wasn't that bad.

Thursday brought another morning swim (6:30 for UDC days). It felt good with some more structure to the workouts and the drills felt a little easier. With warm-up I went for about 1900 yards (the swim at the race will be 1650 yards). That felt good. At the end during cool-down I decided to try a couple laps with no kicking at all, just working on my stroke and body position. I was faster on that lap than on my "faster" laps with a kick. So kicking seems to actually be slowing me down. Hmm. It is really is all about technique after all. Not kicking at all doesn't seem to be a good option, so hopefully one of the coaches will have some advice on a kick I could use.