Working on my power output

Wow, I did not accomplish nearly enough tonight.  I had meant to fix the flat tire on the front of my bike (the first time the front has flatted in the 14+ months that I have owned it).  I probably also really needed to finish up the laundry I started yesterday.  Instead I got home on the later side of things, got sucked into Jon & Kate (I know, I know…terrible, I’m sorry), and fell asleep during the rose ceremony of The Bachelorette.  Anyhow, time to catch up, right?

Last week was my final big week of workouts before Great White North, and Sunday’s workouts started off with a bang and finished with a whimper.  My long run was accomplished on Thursday, so that left me with one last good quality run and swim to finish out the week.

I had a run with 10 x 2:00 hard intervals.  We are talking zone 4, all out effort, "these should hurt really bad" intervals.  The day after riding 120K.  No problem!  I started off with a nice and easy warm up for 10 min, then did 4 x 0:20 accelerations followed by :40 of easy running.  Then it was time for the work to begin!
I tried to not look at my watch the entire time, but I’m really happy that my intervals were so consistent for pace.  They ranged from 7:51/mi to 8:23/mi.  I did a cool down jog for 10 min afterwards and finished up feeling really good about my run.

Afterwards I headed into the Y downtown to knock out my swim workout.  It was a 2000m race distance swim, followed by 4-6 x 100m sprints and a 200m cool down.  There was no warm up, just start right in on the 2000m.  To keep things a bit easier I broke the swim up into 500m chunks and timed each segment.  Holy smokes, was I swimming slowly…  I finished up the 2000m in a whopping 51:43.  Ridiculous.  It was more than 5 minutes slower than I think I should have been.  I really wasn’t feeling the sprints after that and I called it a day.

My motivation has really been flagging when it comes to the swim lately.  And as luck would have it, I had another swim on the schedule today.  My swim classes are over for the summer and I’d like to try swimming downtown more often, so Monday and Wednesday afternoons seem to work best for that.  I was headed to the Y and I passed a couple of pubs and thought that those sounded like much more fun than going to swim.  But I was good and bypassed those and got my behind to the pool!

I had an interesting workout on the schedule.  It was an endurance set with ascending effort and it was written in terms I could totally understand:
– 300m at a steady effort (75%)
– 200m at a harder effort (85%)
– 100m HARD! (95%)
Put things in terms of mathematical percentages and all of a sudden things make sense in the water.  I realized as I finished up my warm up and tried to dial into my 75% effort that yesterday I swam my entire 2000m at a warm up pace.  I never worked up the motivation to go faster.  I had it in me, I just didn’t tap into it.  When I tried to increase the effort today I made sure to keep good form in mind so that I was still feeling efficient in the water, I was just working harder and I succeeded.  I ran through the set twice, and including warm up and cool down I knocked out 2000m.  When I went home and worked out the numbers I successfully increased my pace as my effort increased, and I successfully repeated those same paces during both intervals.  Nice!  Sometimes I guess I just need to see things from a more mathematical perspective!