24 weeks away

I made it to the "rest" and test week. Woohoo!! Okay, so it's not really a rest week compared to the weeks leading up to it so far. This is, after all, just the prep block. The hours I'm logging this week are really similar to those I've been investing each of the last three weeks, but with one difference: This week I'll do lactate threshold testing on the bike and the treadmill. The swim one is optional; it's a 1000-meter timed swim. The idea is my times will come down month after month doing that one. Okay, the LT tests: These are 30-minute efforts as hard as I can go. The last 20 minutes of each effort will give me an average heart rate that I understand will be a pretty good estimate of my LT, and I'll use that number to make sure I'm in zone two when I do the majority of my training in the base phases.

I feel a little green saying this, but this whole experience so far has really been a learning one—everything from the early morning routine to the new healthy diet to the training volume expected in the preparatory phase of a program like this. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but I like to think of myself as someone to whom all this stuff shouldn’t be so foreign and new. In high school I ran cross country, and I excelled in the sport. In college I raced road bikes, and I quickly upgraded from category five to four and then three. I have no swimming background, but that shouldn’t be a big deal. If I had to pinpoint one major difference, I don’t think it would be the combination of three sports; I think a schedule so structured and purposeful, like this one Joe Friel has outlined for me, is what’s making this whole experience new and fun and engaging. My workouts are pretty boring so far—at least on paper. I’m having fun, though! I look forward to every single workout knowing that 24 weeks isn’t that far away, and there’s so much to do! I even feel like I really shouldn’t miss a workout because I’ll miss out on this benefit or that, and as fast as weeks fly by these days, it’ll be August in no time, and I don’t want a “what if?” scenario.

I’ve been tracking my calories for a few weeks now using an application called Lose It. I’m not specifically doing this to lose weight, but in order to have a log I can learn from and use to make sure I’m getting enough calories when the training volume ramps up. I’ve been training for about five weeks, if you count the work I did to prepare for the prep block. In those five weeks I’ve lost 25 pounds. That was expected because my lifestyle with regard to health was atrocious. Still, I maintain that I’m logging calorie intake to make sure I get enough. Twice now I have bonked in the middle of morning workouts—actually, this happened twice in six days. With my log handy, I was able to identify what I ate leading up to the bonk workouts and identify what was missing or different from normal. On these two occasions I took my don’t-eat-within-three-hours-of-bedtime rule a little too far. I happened to have smaller evening meals those days due to work issues, and I wasn’t willing to snack in my three-hour window to make sure I had enough glycogen for the next day. Performance suffered, I reviewed my log data to find out why and I learned from it. In a potentially less glamorous example, if I have gastrointestinal distress in any of my training sessions, I’m able to review what I ate leading up to the workout to learn what foods I need to avoid next time so I don’t have GI issues. Like most endurance athletes’ bodies, mine has become my own experiment in fueling.

All in all, this week should be relatively easy, and I intend to enjoy the idea that this is a rest week. Next Monday marks the beginning of base one, and I'm really quite excited to see how I'm able to manage the schedule challenge and how my body responds to the training. Lois is backing me up, so I expect nothing but success. Bring it on.