The Hills are Mean, In Week Fourteen

The IM training road this week was just a roller coaster in so many senses of the word. I had a couple of really great experiences, and some big-time lows as well. Coming off Dam to Dam, my recovery was great! I really experienced no after-effects of the race on Sunday. Sparkle was not as lucky, so she bailed on doing my Sunday long ride with me. My Canadian friend, Kevin, who rode with us the previous week was ready to ride though. Kevin and I headed north then west towards Pilot Mound. Iowa is not totally flat, but there aren't any really big hills very close to Ames. Pilot Mound is known by central Iowa cyclists as one site of a couple of big hills, and since the IM Wisconsin course is riddled with big ones, I decided Sunday would be a great day to go tackle them... and since Sparkle is NOT a big fan of hills (especially big ones), this would be a perfect opportunity to check them out. The wind was out of the SE, so it basically pushed us along at a pretty good clip.

As it turns out, there are only 2 hills at Pilot Mound - one down into the river valley and one back out. But they are pretty hefty! I sent Kevin down the hill first. He's a man, and you know men... they think first with their ego and second with their head. He got aero and just went for it. I took the more cautious approach (since I could see that there was a turn at the bottom of the hill and a bridge and I had no idea what condition either of these were in) and rode the brakes most of the way down. When I caught Kevin at the bottom, his first words were, "THAT was scary!!" He said he hit 76 km/hour (he's Canadian, remember??) on the downhill. After I kicked his butt up the other side, we settled back into our ride with the wind. I think the uphill really took a lot out of Kevin, because it soon became clear that we were not going to ride back to Ames into the wind. We forged ahead until I thought Kevin was gonna fall off his bike from fatigue. So, for the second week in a row, we sagged in from a 3 hour ride. This time Kevin's friend (also a Canadian) came to pick us up. The funniest part of that ride home was when his friend made fun of Kevin for saying, "Eh?" all the time.

For the first time in 16 weeks, I missed a swim workout. That's not to say that I've swum every yard of each assigned workout up until now, but I was really doing well with the frequency of the workouts, if not the duration. But, I'm okay with missing one workout. Life goes on...

My running has never sucked more than it did this week. As you can see from the Weekly Wrap-Up below, I managed about 7.5 miles of running, and even that might be pushing things a bit. Part of the low mileage is due to the long bikes on Sunday and Saturday, but the other reason is because I just couldn't run. That's all there was to it. It has happened before, but for some reason this had a profound mental effect on me. Especially the run on Thusday.

I was pretty wiped out on Thursday, but I knew it wasn't due to any tough workouts in the previous 4 days, so I headed out for my 7.5 miler. I made it about 1 mile before my heart rate was through the roof. That was just fine with me acutally, because I didn't want to keep running anyway. I walked-ran for another mile before I just decided I was going to do a 5 mile walk, rather than run another step. A day like that can affect your psyche quite a bit. Here I am, 14 weeks from racing in an Ironman and I can't run more than a mile without dying. It's not a very comforting thought. Plus I knew I was heading to Madison for the weekend with a bunch of great athletes and I wasn't in good enough shape to even start a workout, much less complete some grueling, breakthrough workouts with them. Basically, I decided to forget my Friday workout (there wouldn't be time for it anyways) and just rest instead.

Weekly Round-Up (Sunday thru Saturday):
Swim: 4900 yards
Bike: 9 hours, 50 minutes (including a 6-hour workout in Madison)
Run: 7.5 miles
Cross-Training: about 30 minutes of core work.