Another brick in the wall…
This weekend I placed another brick in the wall of my training for Ironman Coeur d’Alene, which for those keeping track is in 26 days. Wait, what?!? 26 days? As in barely 3 more weeks? Holy crap. In the back of my mind I have been thinking I still have at least 40 days. And in 40 days you can get a lot accomplished, think of all the flooding and fasting that have taken place in 40 days. But 26 days, that’s not very many is it? I need to schedule some massages now.
Friday night we had a going away party for some friends who are moving to Alpharetta Georgia (So of course you know we will be visiting them next March to run the Snicker’s Marathon in Alpharetta.) which meant that Christopher was spending the night at the Grandparent’s house. I knew I needed to ride the bike and ideally get in the pool again so my wife and I brokered a deal where she would go to her parents house and go swimming and then bring Christopher home and I would go ride my bike in the 97 degree heat. Seemed like a great deal for me, or for her, I can’t remember, but I know one of us got the better end of that deal.
They have been doing resurfacing on 620, which is a road I like to ride on in the rare occurrence that I actually ride my bike, and so I went to see if they were done, they weren’t. I turned around and then just wandered around on any road that had bike lanes. I wound up near my old office and realized that I could now actually ride my bike to work with the additional bike lanes that have been added in the last 12 months. Hmmmmmm.
I rode 32 miles at a pedestrian 16.1 mph and as I was turning into my neighborhood I told myself I really needed to do a running workout in addition to the biking. I made a deal that if my family was back I’d stay home and lounge around and if not I’d throw on my shoes and grab a quick 3 mile run.
I arrived home and (luckily?) they hadn’t gotten home so I laced up the shoes and headed outside again. Did I mention that it was 97 degrees outside? Oh and very humid. I had been wearing a long sleeved white dri-fit shirt to avoid getting roasted on the bike an decided to leave it on so get “extra” heat acclimation. As if I needed any more heat, but when you exercise in the heat your mind tends to not come up with the best decisions all the time.
I wound up running a 3 mile loop with 7:15/M pace. I have no idea how I ran that fast but perhaps my body was motivated to get it over with and get back to the AC.
As I started up the hill by my house the first half mile reminded me of why Bike/Run workouts are called bricks. My legs felt like bricks and I felt like I was sort of hopping from foot to foot. It took me almost a mile before I felt “normal”. The last two miles were fairly uneventful other than the copious amount of sweat just pouring out of me.
As soon as I got home I slammed and ice-cold Slimfast knockoff and had a glass of ice water. While on the bike I had had two full water bottles of Gatorade. I weighed myself because I was curious as to how much weight I had sweated off. Even drinking the water bottles, slim fast and extra glass of water I was still down 4.5 pounds.
Over the next few hours I would hydrate back up, but I realized I will need to drink a lot more on the bike when in Idaho to keep my weight up so that I don’t fall apart on the run.
Then I went online to wunderground.com and checked out the forecast for Idaho. I was quite pleased to see that it was 30 degrees, yes 30 degrees, cooler in Coeur d’Alene than it was in Austin, TX. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
Next week in the pool at least once!
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On the hydration issue, maybe you should bike/run/swim (the swimming would be particularly good) with one of those hats that has a straw and a cup holder for two beers.
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