Deep freeze

The thing about signing up for triathlon training in the winter months that I was definitely not looking forward to is the cold. The bitter, bitter cold. Saturday was the first of our scheduled brick workouts, 70' bike, 10' run. Forecast for that morning around 8:00: low 20s, winds 20-25 MPH with 40-45 MPH gusts. Wind chill well into the single digits. The workout was in Sterling, roughly 40 minutes away on a good day. So that would mean that between getting the rack and bikes on the car, driving out and back, and generally getting organized and suited up we would be spending 2 hours travel time for a little over an hour of actual workout in freezing temperatures and heavy winds. There's hardcore and then there's just plain not smart. No thanks. I did just fine indoors on the new trainer with a 10' run outside afterwards.

Sunday was another 30' swim. We saw one of the other coaches at the pool and heard that they didn't even do the run after the bike on Saturday (so glad we didn't go!). I concentrated on my stroke mostly, trying to lengthen myself in the pool. I've read that to get faster in the water it's best to minimize the number of strokes you take to swim a length. Makes sense: the more efficient your stroke is the fewer strokes you'll need to take and the faster you will be. The problem is that as I get winded I have to breathe more often. More breathing makes it harder to maintain a good, smooth rhythm since you are essentially interrupting that nice streamlined form every time you turn to take a breath. Well, at least I am. On my best laps I took 17 strokes to get down the pool breathing every 5 strokes. I can't really hold that for more than a lap though. Settling into a breath every 3 strokes gets me into the 19-20 strokes range, but I can sustain that for longer. I mentally split my 30 minutes into 200 yard intervals with the first 25 yards of every interval swimming breaststroke to recover and get my heartrate down a bit. I figured I would be slightly slower than the week before when I did 1400 yards in 30 minutes on straight freestyle, but actually came in at 1450. Point driven home yet again: swimming is all about form.

This week is the heaviest week in our latest build cycle before a "rest" week. We've been promised about 2100 yards in the pool tomorrow morning. As long as it's not tons of catch-up drills and straight kicking I'm OK with that ...