End of Week Five

Well I already posted about the changes I'm making so there's not a lot more to say about this week. My workouts yesterday went great - I really like Saturdays. I went for a careful run in the morning, a long swim at noon, and a medium but easy trainer ride in the late afternoon.

Run - I woke up with sore calves from the teensy bit of running I did at the orthoped on Thursday. I massaged them a bit, put the heating pad on them a bit, stretched a bit, then went out for my run. I kinda of felt like once I started the kinks would work themselves out and I was right. I walked for a full 4 minutes before starting to run then I did 1:00 minute intervals for a bit, then 1:30, then one 2:00 just to see how it felt. All that time I had minimal or no calf pain. Often I felt like I could just keep running but again, I resisted the urge. That is a big challenge for me. I ended it with 4 minutes of walking and did a 30 minute total time out there with about 12-13 minutes of running. Sunday morning, I'm felling good.

Swim - I made sure I was at the pool right at 12 so I could get a full hour in. Managed about 55 minutes by the time the kids were out of the pool. I downloaded a slightly harder swim workout that was 1400m in total and I did the whole thing as closely as I could. I find the drills kind of hard to do as far as technique is concerned so I worry a bit that I'm practicing bad habits, but I really do feel my freestyle stroke is coming along well and I felt really good swimming yesterday. I was easily able to do the 100m sets with :30 breaks and the 16X25m with :10 breaks. I will check out the schedule and see when I can fit in 1-2 sessions with a private instructor again. I don't care what it costs.

Bike - It was late and I was a little tired and lazy. Couldn't bring myself to do a hard ride today so will have to do it Sunday. I just sat there and spun for 52 minutes, zone 1.5 most of the time avg HR 125.


Orthoped Appt Recap

I guess I should talk a bit about my visit with Kirstin, my orthoped on Friday. She had me run again and we watched the videotape together. She said I was still pronating (is that a verb??) a little on the right foot but not enough to cause the pain I'm having so she referred me to Roy Gillespie, the PT at Pinnacle. It'll take me 10 days to get my appt and then I'll go back to see Kirstin again in case anything needs adjustment. I told her about the irritation I'm now feeling on the top of my left foot but we decided not to deal with that until I've seen Roy. So she faxed off my info and I made an appt for Feb. 19th. Looking forward to it. I must admit I still have some discomfort when I wake up (because of my sleep position I guess) and I do still have to 'click' my lower back into place 3-4 times a day, so that is all connected.

Here's the plan for the coming week.

Sun - hard trainer (I hope) and gym
Mon - run and swim
Tue - gym (and volleyball)
Wed - run and swim
Thu - gym (bike in evening??)
Fri - REST DAY!
Sat - run, swim, bike


Can I bitch about the doing squats for a moment?

I am somewhat confused about my inability to do squats without pain. When I started at the gym, I was pretty out of shape in that regard with the exception of my legs which are pretty strong given all the biking I've been doing for the past 3 summers.

I have been trying to follow Joe Friel's Triathlon training plan as closely as I can, taking into consideration what he says about beginners, and women, and people my age. He suggests that I may choose to stick with the AA stage of the strength program the first year because I'm new to multi-sport. That makes lots of sense so I figured I would. However, I did think that I may be able to venture into the MS and MT stages for the legs portion because I am relatively strong in that area and definitely not a newbie when it comes to cycling. Well amazingly enough, it is that specific area where I seem to have the most trouble. I have had to cut back my reps/sets/weight for my squats several times. Some days I do the workout and feel fine and other days, my quads are hurting for a day or two after. According to the schedule, I am to do 3-5 sets of 20 reps with 40-60% of my 1 rep max. I calculated my 1RM to be about 75 lbs when I started. The bar a,one weighs 45lbs and I just didn't find I was able to handle it comfortably and it was always busy so I switched over to hand weights instead. I tried 2X15 and that was too hard to went down to 2X10. That's quite a bit less than the 45lb bar but maybe holding hand weights is different from holding a bar on your shoulders?? I dunno. After a couple weeks, when I bumped everything up to 4 sets, I found I was unable to keep that up with the squats. And then I when my legs were tired, I dropped down to 15 reps instead of 20. I seem to be going backwards. And what's really amazing is that in the MT and MS stage, I'm supposed to be able to do 3-6 squats with 1.3 times my body weight!!! That's about 150+lbs. Bwwwahahaaaha. I don't think so.

Anyway, I'm going to keep slogging along with whatever seems comfortable, but it sure seems like an anomaly and I'd love someone to explain it to me...