Week 2 Recap

I hope everyone had a nice, long Thanksgiving break this past weekend. I know I did. It was a relaxing, albeit lazy week since I skipped a few workouts. That's to be expected though, right? After eating some turkey, eight rolls, a pound of mashed potatoes, and drinking a liter of Coke, who wants to do a tempo run? Not me.

From Thursday on out was not a complete loss. On Saturday I took part in a friendly game of tackle football. Sure I'm 30 years old and probably shouldn't be playing but I couldn't resist. After a few plays it was quite evident I was in much better shape than any of the 20-something guys I was playing with. I've found its difficult to be modest about being a triathlete when you're schooling people with fitness alone. I won't even get into my other grand football abilities.

Sunday was a day of rest to recuperate from the football game. I was tight from all the sprinting to say the least. I broke out the heating pads for a few sore spots and stretched them out good. If you've been following along, this meant I was missing the important 11-mile run I was scheduled for. Given that Week 3 is an easy week I opted to replace the first easy day with the long run. I finished that last night and felt great the whole way, which was a huge difference from Week 1's 10-miler. Some might find this odd but I'm looking forward to Week 4's 13-mile run.

Week 2's volume was up slightly to 5 1/2 hours due to my introduction of swimming. I swam 3500 yards and ran 22.5 miles (including Monday's run). You might have noticed I didn't do any of the planned biking. I've decided to wait until I purchase a time trial bike, which could be this coming weekend.

Its Official

I'm going to Europe the day after Christmas! Sure I'm excited about crossing the big pond for the first time but I can't help but wonder how this is going to effect my training. Is it just me or is this how all triathletes think?

There is no doubt in my mind the vacation will seriously limit my swim and bike efforts. Even though I'm absurdly dedicated to my training here at home I don't think I can bring myself to waste part of a European vacation sitting on the hotel's stationary bike for two-plus hours. And there is no way I will attempt to swim 300 laps in a hotel pool slightly larger than a bathtub. The only discipline I can easily keep up with overseas will be running.

Weeks 7 and 8 of my plan are very important to the running mileage build-up and contains long runs of 16 and 17 miles respectively. If I want to keep the three 20-mile efforts planned in weeks 11, 13, and 15 I need to fit in these long runs. Otherwise I'm not sure I'll find time to do additional mileage build-up once the tri season begins. Missing those weeks would ultimately put a damper on my plans for doing the inaugural Beach2Battleship Ironman-distance triathlon in Wilmington, NC next November.

Now that I've convinced myself I need to run while touring Germany and France I'll need to do some research on where to run near my hotel. I don't feel like being mugged because I ran down the wrong street. Paris must have something like a Central Park I could enjoy. Stay tuned.