This week was a recovery week so I didn't have a huge long ride scheduled for yesterday. I would have liked to sleep in, but Pete had to get up at 7 to get ready to go mountain biking with some work friends. I did get to spend the morning at home, relaxing, though. Well, kind of relaxing. Actually, I was cleaning my house like crazy all morning.
For the last few weeks I've put housework kind of on the back burner, and it has gotten really backed up. I did 5 loads of laundry earlier this week, and yesterday I did 4 or 5 more. It takes forever to get this much laundry done because I have to run the dryer 3 times to get a load completely dry. It's kind of sad because my dryer is called "Speed Queen." She must be past her prime. Pete says maybe my loads are too big, but I don't know if that's the problem or not.
I decided to just bring all the laundry downstairs and fold it all together while watching a movie. I always used to do this when I lived at my dad's house. That's the good thing about watching TV, you can get some other things done while you're doing it. You can't fold laundry while blogging or reading blogs, I've discovered.
We've had Northanger Abby from Netflix for a really long time because Pete never wants to watch that kind of movie, but he came down and watched with me/helped me fold laundry when he got home, and I think he enjoyed it as much as me. It was really well produced and had some really good actors for being a made-for-TV movie. This is the only Jane Austin book I haven't read, and I'm kind of kicking myself for watching the movie before reading it. How could I do such a thing? And I call myself a Jane Austin fan! Anyway, it was really good, and we got all the laundry folded!
When it got over, I realized that it was 3:00, and that I needed to get my workout going so I could be done in time for dinner. This was scheduled for yesterday:
S: 60min continuous, using wetsuit if you will be doing in race. Also do swim in morning if possible. Note nutrition habits/needs as well as details like morning toilet routines anticipated.And this was scheduled for today:
R: 90 minutes. Remember when 90 minutes was the hard long run?!Since I rest on Sundays, I decided to do them both Saturday. I thought it would work out perfectly for me to run to the pool because I looked it up and it's 9.4 miles away. Then I could just do my swim. I know this isn't exactly what I was supposed to do. I didn't do it in the morning, and I didn't wear my wet suit because a) I wouldn't be able to carry it with me on my run, and b) I thought it would be too hot to wear a wetsuit in the pool. It's not like I've never worn it before, and I'll get to wear it in 2 weeks when I do the Battle at Midway so I figured it would be ok.
Optional race.
I wore my old tri outfit that I don't care as much about since I didn't know how it would react to the chlorine. I filled up my fuel belt, and put my swim cap and goggles in the back pocket of my tri shirt.
I started running, and I went the way I normally do when I ride my bike up to Bountiful, but it has me go the wrong direction for a while first. I hadn't looked at the map very closely when I looked up the distance, I just thought this was the route they were talking about. When I got to the 30 minute mark, though, I thought, "There's no way I'm 1/3 of the way there!" The whole run started to seem really daunting to me then. I reassured myself that I ran for 3 hours last week so I would be ok if it took me a little longer than 90 minutes.
I made it to Bountiful by the time I got to an hour and a half, but I was still a long ways away. I seriously considered hitchhiking a few miles for a second. Of course this never was really an option. I knew I could do it. I felt good, and just tried not to worry about the fact that I was running longer than scheduled during my recovery week.
It took me 2 hours to get to the gym. Now that I go back and look at the map, it had me going a different way that I didn't know existed to make it 9.4 miles. The way I went was 10.4 miles. Silly me! It was ok, though.
I did the swim, and just took it nice and easy. I swam for an hour, and didn't count my laps so I don't know how far I went. Probably 2800 or 2900 meters. Something like that. My heart-rate was around 140 for most of the time, and I tried to practice sighting. It's weird, because just doing this little thing where I look forward every other time I breath really helped simulate the feeling you have when you're out in the lake. I mean, it wasn't exactly like it of course, but it was easy to imagine that the little orange cone at the end of my lane was really a huge faraway orange buoy that I'm trying to get to. That's really what I think about when I'm out there swimming, "Don't die, don't die, don't die. Just get to that buoy, you can get to that buoy." Maybe not even that complex.
Maybe it's more like, "One, two, three, breath, four, five, six, orange? That way. One, two, three, breath. . ."
Whatever it is that goes through my mind when I'm swimming in open water, I was trying to simulate that just a little bit during that swim. Sometimes I would forget to sight when I breathed on my right side, and I would have this little mini panic. Nothing bad, but just like, "Ahh, I forgot to look, should I sight on my left side and throw off my rhythm?" But then it would all get sorted out and it would be fine. I liked being able to prat ice this. I did several races where I would veer way off course for awhile before I really learned how to sight. It could have saved me valuable time. Of course, at the time I just thought, "Wow, I must be going really fast to be ahead of everyone else!"
Pete brought me things to take a shower and get dressed, and he even threw in a protein shake for me which was very thoughtful! We went home and had dinner.
I decided not to write about this last night because it just takes too much time, and I just don't get to see Pete enough. He didn't sign up for this Ironman with me because we knew it would be too hard for both of us to be training, and that we'd never get to see each other. Then the triathlon season started, and I can't blame him for wanting to get started on something. I'm glad he's started training again, but it does make it hard to find time for each other. Pretty much every night, when he gets home from work at least one of us needs to get out and do some training. It was nice to be able to just spend the evening with him last night. If it weren't for him I wouldn't be doing any of this, and he's just been so supportive and great about the whole thing. Thank you, Pete, I love you.
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