Tuesday 3/13/2012
Some days you sleep through your alarm and barely have time
to eat breakfast, much less swim. Some
days you’re in lab for 12 hours doing experiments. Some days, those are the same day, and on
those days, training just doesn’t happen.
Wednesday 3/14/2012
Thanks to all of yesterday’s hard work in lab I was able to
sleep in and still swim and do part of a run in before heading to class (which
for some reason we still had even though it’s technically Spring Break). I was planning on doing weights and finishing
my run at the gym in the evening, but by the time I got out of lab it was
closed (due to it being Spring Break). I
guess unplanned disruptions like this are why morning workouts are emphasized
so much in my training book. I’m okay
with it though, I feel like my body wants a Spring Break as much as my mind
does.
Thursday 3/15/2012
Well, I made it through another Ides of March without
breaking my nose; I broke it on this date in the second grade and I swear it
has psychically warned me of impending injuries ever since. I’ve never been hurt on March 15th
since 1997, but I still take extra caution on that day. So, no injuries, but I did feel really weak
and undernourished in the pool this morning.
I could only complete 1200 yards of straight swimming, and even then I
could barely pull myself out of the pool.
I’m not sure what happened, I had my usual gel before starting and had
eaten plenty the night before. I started
swimming at 8:30 instead of 5:30, so maybe my body didn’t have enough energy reserves
left by that point? Who knows, whatever
it was, it wasn’t fun. In the afternoon
I headed to Moab, UT and Arches National Park with some friends with
school. We went on a pretty easy hike
when we got there and then watched Gonzaga kick some West Virginia ass while
having dinner at the Moab Brewery.
Friday 3/16/2012
An awesome day in and around Arches! I rode for 2.5 hours on a flat road along the
Colorado River. It was beautiful but I
had a hard time enjoying the view since I was aero 95% of the time and focusing
on the road in front of me. After that I
rode towards Arches National Park to meet up with my friends. The entrance to the park is a pretty long
hill; I’m sure it would be nothing to anyone who routinely rides the canyons
around Salt Lake, but it looked really intimidating to me from the bottom. Regardless of how it looked, I did it! No
problem! It was kind of fun actually,
especially when cars with bikes on the roof would drive by me. I felt pretty bad ass to be doing it under my
own power. So a nice little ego boost to
end the ride.
My friends picked me a couple miles later (by that point I
felt okay being someone riding in a car with a bike on the roof) and we headed
off on a 7 mile hike (don’t worry, I had a couple Clif bars and a giant bottle
of Gatorade first). It was really
beautiful (see the selection of pictures below) and a lot of fun hanging out
with some great girlfriends that I don’t get to spend a ton of time with.
I realized that a big part of training is convincing
yourself that you’re capable of doing various things. For example, during this ride I proved that I
could do the following: remove my water bottle from its holder, drink and put
it back (while aero), remove Clif ShotBloks from the back of my jersey, eat a
couple, and put them back (while aero), snot rocket (while aero and without
getting any on myself! Sorry if that was
TMI…) and ride up a long hill, all without tipping over or otherwise
crashing. A pretty successful day if you
ask me.
Saturday 3/17/2012
We headed back to Salt Lake right after breakfast and I was
able to ride my trainer while watching Gonzaga play an awesome game against the
2-seeded Ohio State. We lost by 6
points, but watching them put so much effort in to the game helped me put in a
good, hard 2 hour ride even though I was pretty tired. I did a transition to a 30 minute run and
once again felt really weak and like I was going to pass out. I only had a small Gatorade (110
calories-worth) and a few Honey Stinger chews while biking but it seemed like
enough since I’d had a big breakfast and had been snacking on pretzels in the
car the whole ride home. Maybe I was
just still depleted from the 6+ hours of activity yesterday. Maybe beer doesn’t replenish your glycogen
stores as well as I thought…
Sunday 3/18/2012
I forced myself to slog through a 1.5 hour run. I was really tired (gee, why?) so went pretty
slowly but I ran the whole thing and didn’t give up and today, that was enough
for me. Now, getting a head start on
homework!
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| Hiking in Devil's Garden |
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| After I got picked up in the park |
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| Partition Arch |
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| Some pretty rocks! |
Sounds like an awesome week! xo
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