fast dreadmill run

Did the usual 30 mins this morning, but I upped the last 30 seconds of my longer intervals to 8 min/mile paces. I am feeling it now....oops! I think I went a bit too hard. Hopefully I will be recovered enough for the relay race this weekend.

the meaning of fatigue

Wow tonight was just nothing but pure torture and pain. I couldn't swim a single 50 yard straight without finishing completely out of breath. I even managed to get in 3 100's, and I thought I was gonna drown by the end of em.

I'm gonna contribute this to 2 things. #1 is that I am finally swimming a bit more correctly so that I am now using a fuller extent of my muscles, which are not as toned up because I am using them correctly, so I am using more energy to enable them. Or rather #2 (which this is more likely the case) I got my ass wooped so bad from this past monday's swim class that I am not recovered from it yet. So I am gonna go with 1/3 of #1, and 2/3's of #2.

spin class, with POWER

Did my second to last spin class tonight, but my first using my PowerTap. You can see below in the graph the different sets that we did over the hour long workout. The last set before the cool down were 3 30 second spinups, increasing cadence every 5 seconds. I peaked out at 565 watts! SWEET! I again came out at an average power of 245 watts, so since I have hit this number 3 different times, I guess I am gonna use this as my functional threshold (FT) wattage.

NO MORE SQUIGGLY ARM!!!!

Woo hoo! I didn't do the squiggly arm tonight! YES!

So I am pretty excited, and the entire class cheered for me! FINALLY! I broke the curse of the squiggly arm. But whats funny is that I developed an arm crossover on my left arm. Oops! Well thats nothing major compared to a bad squiggly arm. I'm gonna see if I can get the video to show a bad example of what I used to do, and what I did tonight.

But in the meantime, here is that MAP test that I tried to do last weekend:

back in the pool and a "normal" run

Got back into the pool yesterday for 30 mins working on drills and working on fixing my squiggly arm. I think its getting better, gotta wait for the underwater video tonight to see if its looking better. Besides a bad roll to my right, I think when my hand enters, I rotate my palm inwards, causing my to swoop my hand to make it straight again, this I "think" might be contributing to the squiggly arm. So to combat that, I am not rotating my palm inwards, cause there is no point to it, and by keeping it straight the entire time, there is no need to swoop it. Afterall, I don't rotate my left palm inwards, and that arm doesn't squiggle.

Then this morning I hopped onto the dreadmill for a 30 min zone 3 run. It hurt a bit, but it was good that I did this because it again showed that I still have that runner's edge. Our relay race for this saturday is gonna hurt, but at least I should be able to do it with some sort of speed.

first run in a long time and more wattage fun

I ran for a solid 15 mins on the treadmill this morning, my first run in 2 weeks. Surprisingly, it felt like I hadn't stopped running. I even did the usual 4 X (30 second on/90 second off) intervals to see how my speed work was doing, and again, it felt fine. After the 15 mins though, I did feel like my overall endurance was not the same, and that was confirmed when I got off the treadmill and I felt some inflamation in my quads. That went away quickly, which means that I haven't lost my running shape entirely, I just need to reclaim it and get back to doing a 10K and feeling fine afterwards.

Then I took a small break, ate some food, let it digest and hopped onto my new trainer, the Kirt Kinetic Road machine:

I did another test, this one is for finding your MAP, or maximum applied power. My coworker is a self proclaimed "wattage junkie", he gave me some rough instructions on how to conduct the test. Basically warm up for 15 mins, then get into a 90 RPM cadence starting at about 170 watts. Every three minutes increase your wattage by upping one gear in the back, while maintaining that 90 RPM. Stop when you can't hold 90 RPM any longer. It took me three iterations before I could no longer hold 90 RPM. I'll post the data when I get back. I think I got the same number as my previous test, since I haven't really had time to improve over a 2 day period. Still, a good test! I am gonna need to consult my coworker to see how to do the test better, as 3 interations was not enough data to clearly find the number I was looking for.

first powerTap test

Just did my first powerTap test yesterday. It was basically a 20 minute @ lactate threshold time trial to find my power threshold power level, in watts. Here is what it looks like:


I averaged 245 watts @ lactate threshold. This would put me at the bottom of being a CAT 3 cyclist, if I were a pure cycling racer.