Last week’s workouts
Mon: Rest
Tue: Shut down – no
activity (see below)
Wed: Run 6 miles (easy pace)
Thu: No swim (see below); Bike 50 minutes
Fri: Run 5 miles (speed
work)
Sat: Run 10 miles
Sun: Bike 60 miles
Total miles: 94.22
Last week marked the half-way point in training for Ironman
Louisville. Ten weeks of fun and
excitement down, ten more to go! To
date, I’ve logged 826 training miles - just over the distance between St. Louis and Denver (24 swim, 556 bike, and 246 run).
My workouts last week varied from the schedule due to injury, but I
still logged 94 miles?!? Sheesh. I’ve
mentioned the numbness in my left arm after cycling over the past few weeks,
and it got to the point where I was concerned that I would end up doing
permanent damage to the ulnar nerve. Instead
of pushing through, I shut down my workouts and sought medical advice –
something more formal than a Google search.
In a nutshell, the issue seems to be compression of the ulnar nerve
either in the wrist or the neck. The
exact diagnosis isn’t known, but I was cleared to continue training. If symptoms don’t improve, I will do a nerve
study. The good news today is that after 60 miles this weekend, my arm feels normal - no more numbness.
Since I was reasonably confident that my nerve issues were related to
the bike, I went back to Big Shark to have them evaluate my fit and make some
adjustments to possibly alleviate some of the issues causing my problem. We ended up changing the seat position and we moved my aero bar arm pads out and raised them up a bit. I’ll ride with this new configuration for a
few weeks and see where we go from there.
On the swimming front – uh, there was no swimming front. I didn’t swim at all last week. I skipped the first 2 workouts because I was
figuring out my arm problems, and I missed my long swim over the weekend
because I was traveling and just couldn’t squeeze it in. So it goes.
I’ll be back in the pool bright and early tomorrow morning.
Speaking of traveling, I was “home” (Chicago suburbs) this weekend, so
I did my 10 mile run in Schererville and Munster, IN – the area where I spent
the last 2 years of high school before going away to college. It was evident with this run that my training
in St. Louis has been paying dividends.
The air was cool and dry, and the course was seriously flat – like 75
feet of total elevation gain flat. This
is compared to St. Louis where the humidity is so high that you can hardly
breathe, the temps are significantly higher, and I can get more than 75 feet of
elevation gain on my own street! Given
the change in conditions, this run was a piece of cake. Maybe it doesn’t help me get ready for the
conditions in Louisville, but every now and then it’s nice to have a run that
doesn’t feel like a death march and doesn’t require stuffing your shoes with newspaper.
Found a great trail, but it was only about 1.5 miles long
Found this small river and thought it looked nice. However this is Northwest Indiana, so I had to crop the dumped tire out of the picture.
After the run I went to my niece’s high school graduation party in Mt.
Prospect. On the drive up, I noticed
that the GPS said 48 miles. I’m now
putting all of these distances into training/Ironman terms in my head. My thought was – meh, I’ll be riding more
than that tomorrow. I had a similar
thought on the drive up on Friday. I was
in Bloomington/Normal, IL, and I had 140 miles to go to get to Schererville. THAT made the lunacy of Ironman seem real.
We left the party at 7PM to drive home to St. Louis, arriving at
12:30AM. When the clock struck midnight,
I thought about all the things I had done over the previous 17 hours (the
Ironman time limit): I woke up at 7, ran
10 miles, ran an errand, went to lunch, drove to the party, attended said
party, and drove almost all the way to St. Louis. Remind me again why I thought this was a good
idea?
For last weekend’s long bike, I met up with two friends on Sunday
morning for a planned 60 mile bike ride and 15-minute brick run (the latter of
which didn’t happen). These two are
training for Ironman 70.3 Muncie – it is nice to connect with them for a ride
here and there, but 60 is their max (unless they accidentally get lost). If I see them after this, it will just be for
part of a ride as my distances work their way up to 100 miles.
We rode a route on the MCT trails where I’ve been many times before –
so nothing extraordinary about the route other than a 10 minute window of
rain. A few minutes after the rain
stopped, my season almost ended. Taking
a turn (maybe 12-15mph), my back tire fishtailed, but I managed to hold
on. I’m pretty sure my season would have
been over had I gone down. The old adage
“the bigger they are the harder they fall” is certainly true, so I don’t know
that I would have come out of this with “just” some road rash, bumps, and
bruises. I’m a big guy – if/when I go
down, it is going to be spectacular and will likely require medical assistance,
horse tranquilizers, and a crane.
Post ride chocolate chip cookies stuffed with mini Reeses cups. Thanks Elyse!
As for the run brick – I had been on my bike battling wind for 2 hours. And it was Father’s Day, so I bagged it in
favor of getting a mustache pretzel from Pretzel Boys in Des Peres with my kids
and maximizing my time at home. Despite
having nothing but support from my crew at home, I am having some serious
husband/daddy guilt right now, because I’ve been gone most of the day the past
few Sundays. I feel guilty for the time
I’m missing with them, the projects at home that aren’t getting done, and I
know the next 10 weeks are going to be just as hard on them as they are on me.
Changing gears, someone asked me last week if I was ready for the
Ironman. Um, no. Not even close physically or mentally. I don’t have the endurance that I know I
need, but I know I will develop it over the coming weeks. Physically I feel okay outside of my left arm. My arm is settling down, and I just have a
few random aches and pains that come and go.
The big problem for me right now is confidence – the more I think about
this race, the more I doubt my ability to finish, let alone finish it in the
heat. And I’m generally not a person who
thinks like this, especially as someone who has gone through processes like
this as I’ve worked up from the couch to 8 marathon finishes. I just know how disappointed I will be if I
take a DNF on August 24th. I
really feel like this is a one-time shot.
Either I finish it or I don’t. I
don’t plan on trying this again.
I know, I know - one day at a time.
68 days to race day. Back to the pool in the morning.
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