Well... February is over and I have enjoyed the training ramp up for my Ironman race. We have had a bad winter, by Cincinnati standards, so most of my training has been indoor on the treadmill and bike trainer. I've been aiming for 6-8 hours of training each week this month. I have been following the Fleet Feet intermediate Flying Pig full marathon training schedule very closely, and supplementing it with bike rides and pool swims. To hit my weekly hour goal, I have been doing 2-a-days about 4 or 5 days a week.
Here is my weekly volume for February so far:
Week 1 - 1/27 to 2/2 - 5:58:50 with 33.05 miles run
Week 2 - 2/3 to 2/9 - 7:09:14 with 26.34 miles run
Week 3 - 2/10 to 2/16 - 7:55:05 with 27.68 miles run
Week 4 - 2/17 to 2/23 - 7:51:31 with 33.40 miles run
Week 5 - 2/24 to 3/2 - 4:37:03 with 19.00 miles run (as of 2/27)
So, the volume is steady. As it warms up, I will be able to cover more ground outside. The indoor training gets pretty boring after a while. It's 100x more enjoyable to run and bike outside.
My average run paces are in the mid 9's, which is great progress from last year. I was in the 10's then. I ran 119.4 miles this month, and 92.5 miles in January. So the training for the Pig is going well. I did pull my left calf during the Fleet Feet Tuesday night run on the 25th. Running 6.9 miles on the 26th wasn't too bad, but my calf hurt on all hills. So, I'll be taking a few days off as March starts.
Some of the triathlon guys I know through Facebook (some I've trained with) are organizing a 50 mile loop bike ride around Caesar Creek in April. There will be people doing 1-4 loops, and my wife and I are going to shoot for 50 to 100 miles. That should be a great time.
I've been swimming 2-3x per week over my lunch hour. This frequency has seemed to helped improve my technique, as my 100yd time is 1:30 doing 2 strokes per breath. This is awesome for me, but to put it in perspective the Olympic guys swim this in 46-50 seconds and good high school swimmers do it in 55-60 seconds. But for a guy with only one year of swimming under his belt, I'm pretty happy with it.
My last trip to the pool, I worked on doing 3 strokes per breath. This will definitely take a while to get used to, but my first 100yd time was 1:28. So, this is promising. Maybe a year from now I'll be in the 1:15 to 1:20 range.
Not really much else going on. Just trying to ramp up the training. Once the Pig is over, I'll be biking a lot and running maybe 1-2x per week just to keep a feel for it. I will need to get the swim up, but I can do the 2.4 mile swim now in probably 1:30:00. I swam 1.2 miles in 45 minutes at my "all day" pace, so 90 minutes should be fine there.
Hopefully something interesting happens in March so I have something other to write besides, "I have been running more. Yay."
