Back To Work Wednesday

I showed up at the pool at ~6:50 this morning and thought it was pretty cool to see a bunch of Honu finishers there waiting to swim. Lectie and Marcy both had super races on Saturday, Nalani had a good day relative to her training going in, and Kendra and I finished feeling like we didn't have the race we expected. But regardless of how the race went, we were all there this morning ready to get back to training and that just struck me as pretty damn cool. Mark was there too, and he was giddy as a kid on Christmas because he missed us all this last week I had a new pair of Roka R1 goggles for him. He was all smiles like I can see! I can see! To be fair, Mark tends to use crappy goggles he finds on the ocean floor and then he whines and moans all the time b/c his goggle suck. I fixed it for him so we won't have to wait around for him during swims while he fusses with his goggles!

Only got in an 800 w/u, mostly bc a couple of us sat on the deck chit chatting while Mark and Lectie started racing the warm up... so I was a bit late getting in and just cut it at 800 b/c Mark and Lectie were done and waiting. As is typical for a Wednesday, I decided before I went that I was going to swim well today, and sure enough... Main set was 15x200's @3:15, all strong/even pacing. That's a monster set and I feel like while we've done some good ones the last few months, we hadn't really done one like this. My goal wasn't just to get in 3k main set of strong swimming, but to start training my brain to operate my body like a machine. No descending, no pacing games, just strong swimming holding the fastest pace I could throughout the set. First 7 I was holding 2:58-3:00. I slowed through the middle to 3:00-3:01 then the last few I could feel myself starting to fall apart but managed to hang on to 3:03s. Not bad though given that was my first (recent) crack at a set like that. Mostly I was happy about how my brain operated - I managed to maintain really good focus for the nearly 49min that took.

Later I headed out on my bike for a short one... just ~75min mostly relaxed riding. No data so I don't know any hard facts about the ride, but I felt better than I expected and felt like HR was likely pretty low throughout, even when I was climbing. 10x30" quick strides off the bike, because I am in love with doing those these days. I saw pictures of myself running at Honu and clearly all those hip/glute exercises I did so diligently the last few months didn't make a difference in my run form at all... Just about every photo shows me sinking/collapsing into the ground, knees deeply bent so my quads clearly had to do a ton of extra work... like I was running through quicksand. Doesn't this just look hard? (sorry for stealing the pic but let's be honest, I'm not going to frame this one! Just trying to make a point.)

I'll still do some of those glute exercises b/c I think they help keep me running without pain (and they make for a great warm up prior to a key run), but I feel like I want to work on economy and efficiency as well b/c that's probably the thing that will make the biggest difference in my running. Short repeats of strides and hill reps are supposed to help with improving economy and efficiency so I'm going to put an emphasis on that the next 6 weeks or so and see if I can make a change.