Eat More

I just finished my biggest week (16 hours 7 minutes) which consisted of 4.5 miles swimming, 168 miles biking, and 17 miles running and today I feel GREAT!

I worked Monday through Thursday last week since it was my standard Friday off. Perhaps this made it a little easier to get all my training in, but with sunset coming so much earlier, it’s getting more challenging to get time on the bike. This week I rode 1.5 hours on Tuesday, half of which had to be done on the trainer because it was dark. Wednesday I rode 2 hours after work before it got dark but didn’t get the full 2 hours 15 minutes my coach had scheduled for me. Friday morning though made up for that, more in a minute, but first…

I had a long swim on Thursday evening. A 4500 yard easy swim in the pool with 1000 warm-up of free, pulls, kicks, and drills. The main set which consisted of 12x150 pulls with 20s rest and 12x100 as 50 skull, 50 free with 15s rest. A cool down of 10x50 choice. It took me quite a while to do this work out since skulling takes forever! It’s good, don’t get me wrong. It’s helped me tremendously in developing a good feel for the water and keep high elbows. 600 yards of it though takes almost 20 minutes. Anyway, after getting out of the pool at 8:40pm and eating dinner I was off to bed so I could get up early for my long bike ride.

My long ride was up the coast. I had 4 hours 15 minutes scheduled followed by a 30 minute run. I started off feeling really good. I kept a comfortable pace and around 1:30 in, I inserted my first of two 15 minute intervals at the power my coach wanted. It felt a little harder than I had expected, but sometimes it just takes a little to settle in. I finished, and felt ok, but not really strong like I had wanted and am used to. I recovered for about 10 minutes and then set into my second 15 minute interval. It was also ok, but during my recovery from it, I wasn’t feeling recovered. I thought I just needed to add in some extra spin time and I would be fine. It was now about 2 hours 45 minutes in and I just wasn’t recovering. My stomach ached and overall my body just felt off. I was still almost 2 hours away from my start point. I was starting to think about who I could call to come pick me up. I was supposed to do 3 intervals, but skipped the third one for obvious reasons and just took it easy all the way back to my car. My 4 hr 15 min ride turned into 4 hour 30 minutes.

I thought for sure I would just collapse on the grass when I got back to the car, but it was time to run. I had stopped to pee sometime on the way back and was feeling a bit better, thankfully. So I set off for a 30 minute run. It went well! Much better than last week when I had ridden too hard and couldn’t run for even 15 minutes.

I pondered throughout the day on what went wrong. Why had my ride fallen apart so suddenly after 2.5 hours. What I finally realized was I just needed more food. After a long swim like the one the previous night, I need lots of calories to recover from that effort and move on to a long effort like a 4+ hour ride. It was yet another learning experience for me.