Grip It & Rip It!

Yesterday morning I woke up sad. Mostly b/c Thursday night I was obsessed with Twitter following #dallas just eyes wide open in disbelief. I try not to be political on this blog but GAH the hate and tension in our country is palpable and it's scary. I didn't swim in the morning as usual but instead took my dog for a walk in the woods. It was so nice and peaceful back there and I had the thought that if everyone had a dog and took daily walks in the woods, I think there would be a lot less hate in this world.

Anyway. I did swim on Friday, but did it later in the day and had about zero motivation. It was just a flop recovery type swim but even then I only made it through 1500 very easy/slow meters and called it enough. I don't think physically I was actually that tired but our brains play such a giant role in how we physically feel, that physically I felt tired even though really it was my brain. I gave myself a pass on it and prepped my brain to be ready to go hard today.

This morning I was up early and drive up to the North Shore for swim race #3. As has been my routine this summer, I jogged a super easy 5 miles first. Capped HR at 145 and after ~3 miles had to run stupidly slow to keep it low (~10:30 pace). It's so frustrating to think I'm 'not fit' because I can't run with my HR low... I still lean toward thinking that my body just gets hot and that's a stress that it doesn't deal well with? Maybe I'm reaching with that. I don't know. 145 is pretty low HR for me, but still.

I was worried that maybe I'd have a crap swim today too since that run was kinda crap. But I found my friends and we got bused to the start and made our way out to the start line. This swim is historically quite hard... It's a one way 1.6ish mile swim, typically against the current and also against the wind chop. For a second I let myself dread the effort it was going to take to swim well, but then on the start line I reminded myself that I thrive in these conditions... I mean really, relatively I handle them better than most/many so I decided that I was going to love it.

And indeed, it was a battle for every stroke out there this morning! I started hard on the front line and found myself side by side with a couple of teenage girls (could tell by their Aulea team swim caps)... I was working very hard and we were stroke for stroke so after a few minutes of that I eased off the gas a bit and got on one gal's feet. She had a strong 6 beat kick so for the next 30min or so that's all I saw- just white water from her kick. We had a single file train going for a while b/c I could feel a gal touching my feet repeatedly over and over and over and over but eventually she dropped off and I didn't feel her touching my feet anymore. I really liked the effort I had to put out to stay with my 6 beat kicker friend, but I couldn't help but think we were too far out/wide... I prefer to stay closer inside and we were def out way further than I would have wanted... but I liked the effort enough that I opted to just go with the outside line and stay with my kicker gal. At least I stayed with her until we got to the rocks...

Coming into Waimea Bay we have to navigate these big rocks (pictured above)... it gets sort of shallow on the inside with big rocks right underneath you, but if you're brave enough to swim right over them, it's faster to stay inside (far left on the picture above). I opted to leave my lead out gal and went after it solo for the last ~800 meters. I could see a few folks up ahead of me and little by little I bridged some gaps and felt supremely happy with my effort. It was good that I navigated that last part solo- I put a full minute on my 6 beat kicker friend just coming in from the rocks so she was definitely taking it out too far. Funny though afterward as I was checking results I was trying to figure out whose feet I was on... Turns out she was just 13!!! Ha! Love it. Pretty impressive swim from a 13year old and I'd say she gets a pass for not (yet) being awesome with her navigational skills. I ended up winning my age group again and was 13th female/37th OA. Really happy with that!

You can tell by the results that the head current and chop seriously separate the really strong swimmers from the simply 'decent' swimmers (even more-so from weak swimmers). A bunch of wind chop and a head current make for some legit separations in the ocean. I was thinking about what makes someone better in those conditions and I came up with a few things:

~You have to genuinely embrace the conditions. I think the only way to learn to truly like them is to be confident in your abilities in them, which means you need to expose yourself to them so you can practice and get better. When I first moved here I despised wind chop and got my ass kicked a lot when it was choppy. I hated that! But the friends I swam with told me in no uncertain terms to quit bitching and get over myself and once I did, I learned to like the chop. If you can't practice in the chop a lot, well, fake it til you make it I guess. But if you live in a place where you have access to choppy open water, put yourself in it as often as you can.

~Keep a positive mindset. I can say today I didn't have a single negative thought about how the ocean was beating me up today. Not one. Not even when I was being smacked in the face/mouth with salt water and missing my breaths... Instead I focused on the feet in front of me and staying on them. That's it. No other thoughts in my brain.

~Technique-wise it's most effective to keep a high turnover, don't try to reach and glide. My mantra in chop is Grip it and Rip it! Meaning, just get my hand up front as fast as I can every stroke cycle and make sure each pull is as strong and effective underwater as it can be.

~This might come as a bit of a surprise or be a bit controversial, but I would suggest sighting less often vs more often when its super choppy. Especially in a straightforward one-way ocean swim like this one. First off, you're not going to really be able to see anything anyway unless you just stop and really look. It *really* helps to swim around other people as much as you can and just follow them. With the initial group of 4-5 I was with I swear I never once looked up to sight and yet I ran smack into the first orange buoy along the course. It actually scared me because I hit it with my hand/shoulder before I saw it! To just swim without looking up takes some confidence I guess in those around you (that hopefully they know where they're going!) but also just trusting that you're generally swimming in the right direction... So when I was breathing to the side I could see the shore and could tell how far away we were from it (which is why I thought we were too far out) but I didn't spend much time with my head up looking around. It just slows you down a ton to do that. I guess I should mention as well here that I use the Roka R1 goggles and the field of vision you get with those is awesome. Plus, the water was pretty crystal clear today. So, take this advice with a grain of (sea) salt.

I didn't run immediately after the race like I have the last 2 races. It was just so hot and I just didn't think that suffering out there slogging along at 10:30 pace while dehydrating myself was going to be beneficial. Instead I came home and waited until late afternoon when it had clouded over here at home. Ran in the Botanical Gardens so got in a solid hilly effort. Negative split 45:48/42:27 and felt strong enough. You know you're Ironman training when your husband asks if you're going for a long run and you say No just an hour and a half or so... ;)

The 'Mama Special' Hip Hop...

I woke up this morning and was pretty grumpy. A sign I'm near the edge and ready for a recovery day or two... But then as is pretty standard, I went riding and after ~30min felt good. I was outside in the sun and unplugged from any data just riding as I felt... and I felt happy! It was windy but that was fine. It was so pretty I even felt compelled to stop and take a picture(!). Maybe all that indoor riding has helped me truly appreciate how great it is to ride outside. ;)

So I rode for 4 hours today and felt strong. Off the bike ran hill reps in my neighborhood... 6x1min up/6x1min down... But alternated those so it was 1' up, recover, 1' down, recover, repeat repeat repeat. The hill between my house and the pool is absolutely perfect for this session. I felt so spunky after this that I ended up totally embarrassing Moana when I went to pick her up from her day camp thing... They were playing some funky music for the kids so I started dancing my very own (Mama Special!) version of hip hop... Moana was grabbing my leg and begging me to stop but I couldn't help myself... They were playing great music and is there anything better than embarrassing your 7yo by attempting mom style hip hop in front of all her friends??? Ha! Don't worry she talked me into taking her to frozen yogurt on the way home so I have been forgiven.

I'll take a recovery day tomorrow. I promise. Easy swim only. It's super hard for me to 'rest' when I feel as good as I did today but I'm trying to not be an idiot. I reprimanded a couple of my athletes recently for going too hard on their easy days so I should probably listen to my own advice at some point!

Work It Wednesday

I keep waiting to wake up one day and feel like crap but hasn't happened yet. Solid swim this morning with Mark and Nalani. 1000w/u neg split 8:11/7:56. The warm up set we did could be repeated multiple times and called a solid speed session. We just went through 2x though today:

2x50's @:55 as 25 sprint/25 easy
2x50's @:50 sprint!
100 easy @2:00

Main set I sort of adopted based off the bike session we did yesterday. We did the 100's off 1:40 and the longer swims off 1:35 base. I used paddles for the whole set which turned it into a strength endurance set. All the swims were pretty much done at fastest sustainable pace, and we were able to sustain a pretty fast pace bc the send-offs gave plenty of rest- like at least 15" after every swim.

4x100's/400
3x100's/300
2x100's/200
100 easy rest extra 30"
500 TT

I pretty much held 1:24's for all the 100's and then 1:27 down to 1:25 pace for the longer swims. 7:09 for the 500 which is ~1:26 pace. Pretty happy with that as it was a solid amount of work done at a pretty hard effort and I felt like a machine.

Led another group session at the Computrainer studio tonight. We did the same main set as I did on Sunday... 3x15min as alternating 4min @90% with 1min @105%. It's the 3rd time in the last 7 days I've done a set like that. I bumped my FTP up to 210 so my watts% were based off that tonight. Def carrying some fatigue b/c that felt pretty damn hard, but my HR was high and responsive, not depressed as I normally would expect when carrying a bunch of fatigue. So that was interesting.

Factoid of the night... I suck at picking out playlists for these ride sessions. Ben has a bunch of Spotify playlists to choose from but I don't really know what any of them are so I sort of choose randomly. The first one I picked was too mellow and Marcy was like Michelle you need to fix this... But then we ended up with a very angry one with some guy screaming DIE MOTHER FUCKER DIE, which apparently Marcy preferred over the mellow music but I can't stand that angry screaming that tries to pass as 'music'... then we ended up with some weird random one. I spent my 3min breaks between 15min hard pieces at the computer trying to find something decent to listen to. Clearly I need to work on this going forward!

If you happen to be local and reading this and want to come to HTC and suffer with me for 2 hours on Sunday morning (7-9a) shoot me a message. We can make that happen.

The Tuesday Thrashing

Seems like Tuesday is a day that Ben likes to try to kill his athletes. I've sort of stumbled my way into their sessions the last 2 weeks, and today could be considered one of the hardest efforts I've put out in a long time. Not that top end power numbers were that big, but there was just a lot of total work done today. It was a 2 hour session with a 90min main set that looked like this...

All those spikes were heavy gear efforts where the CT was set to give us 4% grade and we just stayed in a big gear and grinded it out as strong as we could. The longer 7min pieces (at the end of each round) were done at a higher cadence. I've done this set before on the road but had never attempted to go through it twice. I had to laugh a bit though- my normalized power for the middle 90min was 205w. My tested FTP (3 weeks ago) was 206w. I think by definition of FTP (and an IF above 1!) it's fair to say that based on today's ride, my FTP has gone up!

I don't think I'll bother to actually re-test it anytime soon. I don't get totally wrapped up in FTP numbers. But with the way some of these CT sessions are done, it's important to have it fairly close so when it's giving you a goal % that you're in the ballpark and consequently doing the right work.

My plan was to run OTB but, um, I was thrashed (that session was a lot harder than I was planning!) so I thought it better to come home and work for a few hours and run later. I did get out the door for a 6 mile progression run before I had to go get Moana. I ran from home so it was hilly. Neg split avg 9:27 first 3 miles (avg HR143) then avg 8:53 coming home (avg HR 153) and that felt solid. I really had to hold myself back in the beginning b/c my inclination was to hammer it out.

At some point I'm going to need to take a recovery day, but it doesn't feel like I need one quite yet. Maybe I'll take one on Thursday? When I'm on a roll like this I find it hard to pull back the reigns on myself. This is where an experienced coach would come in handy. It can be hard to be objective with yourself.

Outside on the 4th

It was a nice day to go riding today and I actually got outside for a change! :) Took my road bike out for ~4 hours no garmin just as I felt. I was prepared to go quite easy but I felt a lot stronger than I thought I would so parts of the ride today were fairly strong effort. ~45min into it I came up on a big group of riders so joined with them for maybe 1/2 hour and that was pretty fun, though it's been a while since I've done a big group ride and I felt anxious with the company. They were riding shorter though so at the top of one climb they turned around and I continued on my own.

3+ hours in I opted to ride in the Maunawili neighborhood which is a bunch of pretty steep hills. Legs held up just fine which was confidence building. I don't feel like I need wattage numbers to tell me when I'm riding strong.

4 hours doesn't seem like it's long enough to be considered a long ride when Ironman training, but it's the 4th of July and I didn't want to spend the whole day away from my family riding my bike. I guess in good news, it didn't feel long. Like- my brain didn't process 4 hours as a long time to be on a bike- so that seems like a good place to be mentally.

I've done so much indoor riding in the last few weeks I was sort of curious how it would go outside. It was fine. I think that as long as you have really good skills and confidence on the road, then you can do a lot of quality riding inside and it will transfer over to the road. If you don't have a deep background in riding outside, then the strength you gain from indoor riding can be lost in translation when you take it outside (due to excessive nerves or lack of skills or confidence or whatever). I see this in some of the athletes I work with- GREAT power numbers inside but then they go outside and it just doesn't translate... In those cases, I urge the riders to get on the road more often.

Off the bike 10x30" strides and those felt good. Hip is pretty much fine. Its not 100%... I still need to manage it as if it's truly hurt but it's def good enough to run on.

I didn't slow down enough on my ride today to take any pictures (so does it even count?) Happy 4th!

20 Miles (Take Two)

Hip held up and let me run long. Woot! I got out sort of early Saturday morning (~7AM) and ran 2x loops ~10 miles each with my car at one end and a 7/11 at the other. Setting it up so I had access to ice every ~5 miles was key (miles 5/15 at the 7/11 were all about stuffing my bra full of ice!). It was also good to know that I had a reasonable bail out point in case my hip didn't wasn't cooperating. I started out super easy/slow and cautious b/c I wasn't confident in my hip at all. I was hoping I'd be able to get 20 miles in but promised myself that I would only do it if I felt like I wasn't hurting myself.

I guess overall it went better than last week. My body didn't seize up cramping afterward and my brain did a better job managing the distance. It was slower than last time, but the route I chose today was hillier so maybe the avg pace is neither here nor there. I negative split it by ~5min, but given how slow I started that wasn't hard to do! For whatever reason, I felt like my limiter today was heart rate vs muscular/legs. After all the aerobic training I do it seems downright silly that my heart rate would be out of control... Ok it wasn't really out of control but it was higher than it's been which just meant I had to run slower than normal to keep it <150. While I was running I had the thought that I feel like my body doesn't regulate itself in heat very well, which again seems silly because I should be used to it, but I do wonder if maybe after ~11 years of training so much in it if my body has actually gotten worse at dealing with it? I don't even know if that's even a thing, but when the sun was beating down on me ~14 miles in this morning I was wishing for air conditioning, and wondering what it might be like to run in 60 degrees??

Anyway, the bigger story might be how I managed to make my hip happy enough to allow me to run so long today... Couple of things:

~My hip thing isn't really an 'injury'. Nothing is truly injured- it's just muscles that are tight and pissed off and not functioning correctly, which causes pain. I probably could turn this into a legit injury if I were to not actively go about fixing it and yet run hard on it when it hurts, but I think shutting down that run last weekend when I started to feel real pain (and then not running for several days while actively trying to fix it) was key into it not escalating into anything bigger.

~I went to chiro to get my pelvis straightened out. If I'm out of skeletal alignment then muscles will absolutely have to work in weird ways. I have an appointment every week now so won't be skipping that for a while!

~I didn't just focus on the muscle that was hurting- I went after all the muscles in the surrounding area and worked them all out. I have found that spending 5min 3x day rolling is better than doing one long major rolling session. But I didn't just work on TFL and glute medius... I worked out lots of tight spots all through my glutes (there were many!) and upper quad as well. I think upper quad played a bigger part in that TFL pain than I originally gave it credit for b/c getting that area loose reduced a bunch of pain straight away.

~I loaded the ice and ibuprofen for ~2 days. Again, I've read the evidence against using those modalities, but when what makes sense in theory doesn't match up with what works in practice, you have to wonder. In practice, ice and ibuprofen take the pain away which allows me to run without limping. I haven't taken ibuprofen since I ran today but I have put an ice pack on it a few times already and that def makes it feel better so... I'm going with what I'm finding works.

~I did a few short sessions focusing on hip strength and mobility this week (not just rolling/massage). Exercises I like are hip hikes, standing stork hold, crossover lunges, step-ups, and pistol squats. I'm sure there are others that are good but when I do all those, my hips feel solid and strong and functional. Couch stretch and lunge pose are my 2 favorite hip opener/mobility stretches.

Anyway, so that's my hip management routine. It's working! I'm not sure if I'll attempt another 20 miler before Vineman? Maybe? I still have time I think... I could do one again next weekend b/c that's still 3 weeks out. We'll see. If not I suspect I'll do a 20 mile day but split up into 2x runs vs one long one. Physically I think those double run days are quite good. But I think the straight 20 miler is better brain training.

Today (Sunday) Moana started triathlon 'training' wth the kids group at HTC. I wasn't sure she was ready but she wanted to do it and Ben said sure let's try so I took her and her bike/helmet/cap/goggles/run shoes and let her join the group. She had a blast! I had ~2 hours on my own in the Computrainer Studio while the kiddos were out doing their thing. Can you tell what workout I did?

Main set 3x 15min as 3x(4/1) at 185/215w. My legs felt pretty fatigued when I woke up this morning so I wasn't sure I'd have any power to actually ride but once I was on the bike I felt quite strong so this wasn't crazy hard. Pretty stoked about that! Also stoked that my hip feels almost completely fine? I expected it to hurt at least a little this morning but it really doesn't. Phew!

Long Swim

I felt like I wanted to challenge myself in a new way this morning in the pool. It's been quite standard recently to swim ~4k with a long main set that involves a bunch of strong swimming. That's great, but I feel like I've adapted to that pretty well and would likely benefit from switching things up a bit. In this scenario I felt like I could switch it up by going shorter/faster OR by going longer/easier. With an Ironman 4 weeks away it seems like opting for the longer option made the most sense. So given that, my goal was to accumulate some fatigue in the water today without going hard but by going long. I didn't think 5k would be enough... But thought 6k would do it. So that was my thinking getting in the water this morning.

Did a 2k warm up and it was relaxed/easy. I timed it but not because I was trying to see how fast I could go, but more so I could zone out and lose count but be able to figure out where I was by looking at my watch. Turned out it was easy to figure out bc I was dead on 1:40 pace the whole time (15min at the 900 and 33:20 at the finish). During the w/u I came up with the main set... had several possible versions in my head but this is what I settled on and the reasoning for choosing this one was that it made the math really easy (each 1200m round would take exactly 20min). Basically I did it all off 1:40/100 base send-offs. I used paddles for the longer swims and swam the shorter ones no pads. No extra rest between rounds.

600/2x300's
600/3x200's
600/4x150's

Got to the end of that and wasn't feeling the fatigue I wanted so went one more round 600/6x100s which made the main set 4800m. 200 c/d gave me 7k total for the morning. I left the pool feeling satisfied like cool... consistent 4k strong effort swims allows me to pop off a 7k whenever I want without really feeling bad at all. I think if I had a gel I could have gone another 2-3k no issues so that felt good! I'm not going to start swimming 7k every session or anything but once in a while challenging myself with something bigger like this makes sense to me.

Day off for the legs- no bike or run today. My hip actually feels pretty solid which makes me happy and bodes well because this is what's on my schedule for tomorrow...