Four Letter Word Month

For the past few months, training has been going really well.  I've gotten in workout that I planned, ate healthy, and had plenty of energy to finish, until now.  I made two mistakes this week that ended up with me having to cut short my long run and tweak my running distances. 

I've been doing indoor bike training 3x/week (on my road bike, not a spinning bike) since the end of October. It's been hard at times, but doable.  Now we've transitioned to lactate threshold training, affectionately called '4-letter word' month.  I'll let you figure out some of those 4-letter words yourself.

Tuesday was out time trial, 2 8-min segments to determine max speed and distance.  I managed my fastest speed and distance ever in the four years I've been doing indoor cycling.  Thursday morning was sprinting, sprinting and more sprinting.

For the past 4 months, I've been swimming 1x/week for about 1 hour, just to 'get it in'.  For the past two weeks, I've committed myself to swimming 2x/week and started using my nifty swim workout for Triathletes book I bought years ago.  So each swim is averaging 2500+ meters and over an hour.

While all this was going on, I was also increasing my run distance by 1.5 km each week since the boxing day 10 miler.  As my distance was increasing, my pace was also getting quicker (but it didn't feel like that).

So what were my two mistakes?  My intensity & total workouts increased and I didn't increase my calorie intake.  And I  kept increasing my run distance without a 'recovery' or down period.

The result was running out of energy early on in my run and leaving me tired and cranky.  So Friday morning, as I struggled to make it back to my car, I decided to change my strategy on the fly. 

I've signed up for the Chilly 1/2 marathon on March 6th. My focus has always been distance, not speed, so I'm shortening my run for next week and then building up to include Chilly as another weekly run, not a targeted event.  I'm planning to use this same strategy for Around the Bay in April.

Luckily for me, there's several weeks between Chilly and ATB to change course, depending on how the next few weeks pan out.