Week in review Oct. 14-20: Steady rides and a race

Exactly half cycling — I'm not sure I've ever done that before!

Last week was pretty fun. I was able to buckle down and do some decent trainer rides and decent runs during the week, and even ran a fun 5K on Saturday. I took a full rest day and one easy morning, and still logged about 8 hours of training.

I knew that I would be running the 5K on Saturday so I was strict with a bike-run-bike-run schedule Monday through Thursday. I took Thursday afternoon off work for a random other reason, but used some of that extra time to do a speed run, which ended up as four descending miles, ending with a speedy-for-me 8:16 pace before another mile cooldown. By Friday I was feeling sniffly and not great, so I decided not to squeeze in anything else and instead to go bed at a decent hour. I already wrote about Saturday’s 5K here. I wasn’t feeling very motivated Sunday but I was able to tough love myself into two steady hours on the trainer, which is my max right now. I can tell you though, that couch was TEMPTING.

Bike and run are right where I want them to be right now, I did some but not enough weight training and PT, and I didn’t do any yoga or swimming. So, there is plenty of room for improvement. Swimming has been on the back burner for a while, but I would like to do another birthday “triathlon” next month, so I should probably get in the pool a couple of times before then, right?

A non-training victory recently has been healthy eating. Minus a few weak moments where I put away a medically inadvisable amount of potato chips, the only dining out my husband and I have been doing is our regular Saturday morning brunches. I had to go back in my Google calendar to Oct. 5 to see the last time we went out to dinner! Wow! I am the house chef so this is no small feat. Yeah, there have been many potato chips, chocolate chips, and glasses of wine, but I am reassured that even if I am not doing heavy training, at least I am eating plenty of veg and (mostly) healthy meats.

Anyway, last week’s training shook out to be:

Bike: Three times, all on the trainer, for 62.5 fake trainer miles in about 4 hours, 4 minutes. Nothing out of the ordinary here; this worked out to be two hour-ish-long interval rides, and one longer steady-state ride on Sunday. I usually ride long on Saturday but I switched things up with the 5K and didn’t feel like trying to squeeze it in later that day.

Run: Three times, all on the road, for 14.18 miles (I ended on an odd number because of the 5K) in about 2 hours, 29 minutes. Nothing spectacular here as I didn’t end up doing a “long” run, but it was nice to shake it up with the fun race on a beautiful day.

Weights: Just one video this week, after a run so I skipped the warmup. But I did some pull-up and chin-up work afterward so let’s say this was an hour.

PT: Sadly, just once this week, about 35 minutes of my latest batch of exercises and some rolling out of the quads and calves afterward.

Total: 8 sessions in about 8 hours, 9 minutes. Even with a day off, that’s pretty good, so I can’t be too mad.

Motivation was in pretty short supply yesterday and I am tired on this gloomy, rainy, Monday, so getting into a groove this week is probably not going to be easy. But even if I am not killing it training-wise, consistency, healthy eating and sleep will help. Hopefully.

Here's to great weeks for us all.