Well, it took me a few days but I’m pretty much fully recovered from Space Coast now. Monday was pretty rough and I had taken the entire day to rest. There was not going to be even an attempt at physical activity since just walking and climbing stairs was difficult. I live in a very runner unfriendly house since its three floors. Tuesday wasn’t much better but I wanted to do something to stretch my legs so I went for a very easy run. My plan was to do whatever felt good. I figured around 2 miles. Well, I managed 1.5 and walking was involved with even that. That ended up being pretty helpful I think though since I didn’t push myself to do anything stupid but I got my legs stretched out.
With the end of my marathon focused training that meant a move back into triathlon mode. I still have a lot of racing left to do in the winter & spring but its all at half-marathon distance so I don’t feel like I need to do anything very focused on that. My standard 25 – 30 miles a week will be more than enough for being able to run any half. So on Wednesday, I went to my first swim lesson which went for about an hour or so. I may do this once or twice a month for a while. My swimming is atrocious and I need a lot of guidance. It felt good to get back into the pool.
Thursday was the big day of going for a real run. I still wasn’t going to do anything that pushed myself so Melanie and I went out for a quick morning run. The run ended up being 3 miles at a comfortable 9:30 pace. It really felt wonderful and aside from some slight soreness in various parts of my legs, it was an easy run. I’ll do a 6 miler this weekend and then probably do 25 miles or so next week. My general weekly plan is to do 20 miles during the week and then a 10 – 13 miler on the weekend. That way I can do a half at any time and ramping up for bigger distance is pretty easy. Once a week I’ll definitely be doing some speed work as well. I hit the half marathon mark of my marathon at about exactly 2 hours so I’m pretty sure I can crush that barrier in January.
Finally today at lunch I got my bike back on the trainer and road for 45 minutes. That felt really nice too since I haven’t been on a bike since TriRock back on Nov 10th. I wanted to ride longer but I had to get back to work and I also wanted to keep it short for my first session in a month. I have a 40+ mile ride planned for Sunday and I didn’t want my butt to be overly sore. Unfortunately, due to a bug introduced in my TomTom Multisport (which I need to finish my review of), I have no idea how far I rode though I seem to average around 20mph on the trainer. The watch supports BTLE devices and I had purchased a Topeak Speed & Cadence sensor for it. The sensor is great but my watch just tells me my instant speed which is useful but doesn’t leave me with any metrics. Fortunately I discovered (after the ride of course) that Topeak has an app that my phone is compatible with since the 4.3 update over Thanksgiving. So I’ll have better data for myself after my next ride on the trainer.
That’s about it. I’m still tracking my runs through Runkeeper but I’m going to try to also start using Training Peaks. I have a one week trial and I’ll use that for a bit to see if I like it at all. Its a bit more advanced than Runkeeper but it also has just a terrible UI.