Getting Close...

Hello Everyone,

Just under 2 days left until race day! Kinda tired today, as I was out late last night at the Brave's game (watching them lose of course). Here is how this week has shaped up so far;

MONDAY
(NONE)

TUESDAY
BIKE
20.37 miles in 1hr 15 min 34 sec
Average 16.1 mph
Sandy Springs Ride (my hilly ride) minus about 5 miles. Did not want to blow up my legs for Saturday. Even though the pavement was wet from rain earlier in afternoon, the group was still blazing as always up hills. I also did double duty on the hills, since I left late, and I doubled back to meet up with them on the first half of the ride. That sucked for me. I got left. Oh well, what else is new. Met two new guys (Woody and Grant(?)). Both triathletes, had some good conversation while I was still with them. They are both doing some local races next month before the end of the season.

WEDNESDAY
SWIM
You would be sooo proud of me (mostly due to motivation for doing both workout and Braves game in same day), I went swimming at 5:30am. Do you guys get up extra early and drink coffee, snack, read paper, etc... before you do your morning workout. I got up and went straight to the pool, and kinda felt like crap. However, if I get up to do a morning routine before my workout, then I will have to get up even EARLIER!!! Oh wait, what was that, you have not been at 5:00am in months and you wonder why you feel like crap??? OK OK. Anyways, I think that either I just kicked butt, or my chronograph on my NICE (nice for me is fossil) watch is off!!! I think it is the latter. My main goal for my workout was my 1st 400M after my warmup, I was treating it as my race. This is what my watch said; 6min 14 sec.....?!?!?!?! Now I was out of breath more than normal (I am attributing that to the time of day that I was swimming, not the effort I put in, even though I tried), but I know that the fastest time I have posted yet was 7:35. So to be fair to myself, I erred on the side of broken watch and added a minute to my time. Hey, I still beat my best time by 21 seconds!!! Anything under a target time of 7:45 for my swim on Saturday is gravy.

50M sides
250M warmup
400M main @ race pace 7min 14sec, new time!
4 x 50M cooldown

Today will be my last workout, running. I am either going to Chastain Park for my usual loop, or I am going to go to the Chattahooche. They even have the trails marked off with quarter mile markers. Boy I wish I had a stopwatch/HRM with lap timers so that the markers would actually be useful.

I will probably do 2 x 5K and negative split and that's it. I am going tonight even if there is rain, I do not care. I have been better with my workouts during my taper than during my regular training time. I wonder if there is any psychological reasoning behind that?

Also I was waiting for friends last night before we met up so I went next door from work to Borders Bookstore, and they had the original(or first?) Total Immersion book there, so I sat down and literally tore through 30-40 pages before they got there. I found it fascinating. I also found it promising, that since I am kind of training myself with respect to swimming, that most (but not all), of the changes I have made to my swim have been improvements after reading some of those pages. I think I am going to actually buy the book, seems like a good investment.

I am off for now, be looking to see my next post be a race report, or at least my times followed up by race report. I might post something later that I was going to talk about last week, but postponed.

Murtha...