For 90 minutes or so he regaled me with his hard-earned 35 years of weightlifting/training tips. He's a great guy and runs a great gym...understandably, he bases his clients' programs around Olympic-style weightlifting drills--and then supersets in ab work and more isolation-type drills (he would consider a bench press or a pulldown an isolation exercise! Hardcore...). He checked my form on squats, deadlifts, clean and jerk, and snatch, and gave me some useful pointers. Hadn't lifted for 7 months or so, but still felt strong. Missed it a bit, I have to say. The hardcoreness of it all.Nevertheless, upon returning home I jumped back into tri training, though my next event is at least 8 weeks away: a hard swim workout on Friday the 17th; (2300 meters--actually got a pump out of it!--based on drills of 150 meters. Tried always to keep my time under 2:30, and succeeded all the way through. Can't remember my fastest time--2:10 or so?). On Saturday I got out the Specialized and put in a fairly easy 25 miles, though I included 4 one-minute uphill sprints at Griffith. Finally capped things off yesterday with my 6.4 mile neighborhood run, which I did in a personal record time of 49:30. I wanted to break 50 minutes and I just baaaarely made it.
This week I suppose I'll get back to a few bricky workouts: back to the ocean swim + run with the LA club on Wednesday--I'll make it a speed version of both events, leaving me to do a Fast Bike / Recovery Run tomorrow (Tuesday) and a Recovery Swim and Bike on Thursday.
I don't know if I'll continue the 9 workouts/week system all the way up through Arrowhead...I DO like the ONE DISCIPLINE/DAY for three days a week so I can focus it on three days of the week, where I can really put in the mileage or meters, but that leaves me with too much to do on the other two days of the week, assuming I keep the 5 days/week sked up. I COULD do SPEED day of ALL disciplines and then RECOVERY day of ALL disciplines?? Might be a little insane, eh? But with plenty of time to go for my next race maybe I'll do that, then do another ramp-up for September.
I'm thinking of tacking on a final race in NOVEMBER: the Catalina Island Tri: .5 miles S/12 M B/3 M R. Doable, and a nice excuse to go to Catalina Island, which we've never done.
That would make 5 races this season...a lot for my first season, but they're fun! Then I'd probably ease off for November and December and possibly January...maybe focus more on 1-2 disciplines for those months, do some lifting and yoga before resuming real training in February or March.
Of course, I have to ask myself, to what end? The Ironman distance events beckon, and though I swore I wouldn't try them, Eric Skelley, bless his heart, is seriously gunning for them, and it makes me wonder. Of course, he has no family--I think I'd really have to think hard about it before I plunged in--that's a part time job to prep for that race: something in the order of 20 hours/week of training. Wow...that would even test my freakyness. Right now I'm doing nine at most.
When it comes down to it, I'm not going to make MONEY doing this--I'm just going to have fun and get an ego boost or kick when I place high or low in the races. So I have to find the right place for this stuff in my life. Right now it's bordering on obsession.
Another alternative to pushing for longer distances is to push to WIN at the sprint level! Keep working on my shorter distance running, biking and swimming and see if I can get a top-five overall finish! Or maybe WIN one. Tough proposition.
I sure prefer this type of competing over boxing/martial arts which I did for so long, where there's a clear WINNER and a clear LOSER. And the loser is usually bruised at the least, bodily and psychically. That's why I always had cold feet about competing in those events. In triathlon, it doesn't matter! You can place 19th and still feel great.
Anyway--enough blogging for now. More later...
A
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