Recovery Week Is Coming To An End

Every three weeks on our schedule we are afforded the luxury of a recovery week. This was such a week. What a nice break from the grueling schedule of 14 to 18 training hours per week. The recovery week is designed to give our bodies a chance to do just that, recover.

We only had one swim day this week. I did mine today. It was a 1,000 yard time trial swimming at race pace. This is designed to check our progress in the water. Are we actually getting faster? For Chris, I know he is getting faster. I see it every time we swim. Swimming is Chris' strength. He has also been doing all the swim workouts. So the big question is, how am I doing? Well, I was happy to see a 12 second improvement on my 1,000 yard swim from 4 weeks ago. Though that doesn't seem like much, it is over 1 1/2 minutes faster than when I started 11 weeks ago. So I am making some nice progress in the water.

We cut our running mileage back this week but did run the big hill course that always manages to take our heart rates up to max. Again, no sane reason why we do this to ourselves as the run course at Lake Placid is reported to be fairly flat.

Cycling through the week was reasonable, but this weekend, I will be riding from Glendora, CA up to Mt. Baldy. Any time there is a Mt. preceding the name of the place, it usually means you need to go up to get there. I did this ride last weekend. It is 22 miles of continuous climbing at grades from mild to "are you kidding me" severe. It took me 2 hours to climb to Mt. Baldy and 1 hour to get back down to my car. That should tell you something about the ride. This week Chris is out of town. Next week, we will ride this together for my third week in a row.

Thanks for keeping up with our journey.