Double workout? Of the multi sport variety

So two a days for me are nothing new, I mean I've done them in running, I've done them in cycling, I haven't done them in swimming nor would I really want to, let's be honest here.  But what I haven't done however is two a days that consist of back to back workouts in different disciplines.  This morning I figured it probably was as good a day as any other to get off my ass and go do a bike run workout.  It's been tough trying to juggle the single discipline races (Velocity SR, Mothers Day 10K, possibly something in the Calgary marathon weekend, Tour de Bow) as well as the big one (IMC) and I'll be quite honest, I've been piss poor at juggling my responsibilities.  To the point where I would almost say I'm not juggling them at all but rather just kinda tackling each one and hoping it will all come together.  Unfortunately that's really an awful way of going about it, so I started actually kinda following a plan for these two weeks to see how it would go.  Yesterday's swim was longer than originally scheduled by the plan, but Lisa thought up of a brilliant workout which will probably do me good.  Today's ride was supposed to be aerobic followed by another aerobic run

Sorry for the blurry picture but the workout was 2 sets of 20 repeats 30 seconds on 30 seconds rest at 120% of FTP power.  In a simple way that's essentially how many watts you can push for an hour.  So finished this, probably could've pushed a little bit harder but hey it was a good way to see how the legs would feel after a ride going into a run.

The run was then just a nice easy jog at around a 8'30 pace for 3 miles.  The cool thing was I was done both of these slightly after 7:30 in the morning.  What did you get up to this morning. 

I think I'm going to make a post about some foods that have started to become staples in my training, and the cool thing is this isn't even something that is only for those that are doing athletic pursuits, for example Muesli is a super easy breakfast that you can make and just chuck in the fridge and eat as necessary.

~Cheers

Finals Seasons? More like slacking season

Day 1:
Of finals season and its already not going great, I mean today it was a case of it being up and down.  The goal of these next two weeks is to hopefully do well on finals, but also set myself up for a couple solid weeks of training to springboard into race season.  I'll be posting a little bit more about that later. This morning I thought hey I have time to go do a swim so I should probably do a long swim right.  I always seem to find myself with my back against the wall with a giant swim plan staring down at me. Today's was a nice 3000 meter swim

1000m general warmup (500 swim, 300 kick, 200 pull)
It's kinda interesting because I still remember when I first started swimming and even something as short as 50m left me completely destroyed, but hey now I've managed to drag out the amount I can do before I feel absolutely spent.

This was followed by a kick pyramid that was meant to help improve my kick in my swim. Now the ironic thing is that coming from a cycling and running background, my kick should be really strong, but the weird thing is that my kick in my swim is probably not as strong as it should be given that I have relatively strong legs.  However doing 10x50's on a pyramid (1:10, 1:05, 1:00, 0:55, 0:50, 0:50, 0:55, 1:00, 1:05 and 1:10) left my legs completely done.  Like the 50's were bordering on me going full out for 50 seconds and just barely making it back to the wall and sometimes not even making it.  So this drill will probably become a staple of my workouts in the coming months to make sure that I'm keeping up the powerful kick.

The kick pyramid was followed by a set of pull intervals because I want to see if I can pull more water because I think the technique needs a little bit of work, but it should come with time.  I'm pretty sure if anyone saw me swim when I first started they would be appalled with how poorly I swam.  The intervals were done on 1:40 and that was pretty much pushing me to the limit, sometimes past it and it's definitely going to be a goal to hit the 1:40 times, but hey nobody ever said this was going to be easy right?

500m cool down..... that's all nothing more nothing less.

I have a lot of respect for pros in any type of sports, be it running, cycling, swimming etc, there's just something smooth about the way they go about stuff.  Like if you watch Kenyans run, they're just unbelievably good at what they do, and the same is for swimming.  I remember studying for an exam and just being horrendously distracted looking at swimmers because they just kinda glide through the water, one can aspire to be like them.

Hopefully I will get back to blogging again about how training is going, and update our race schedule, I think most of Jess' and I sched has been finalized so that should be going up soon.  I really should get back to studying.

~Cheers

Thoughts on cycling

Everyone has probably heard somewhere or someone talk about the benefits of cycling, what it does for your body, the environment, but there are some pretty compelling statistics health and environment aside why you should ride your bike more. 

If you have a chance, check out this TedX talk from Dr. Allen Lim who is actually one of the people that I really look up, just the thought process behind why he does stuff is amazing, and I'd be honored to have him as a coach, not even from a personal performance perspective, but just the way he goes about stuff.

But let's look at some crazy things. You bike as a kid, everyone bikes as a kit you lean on a trike, get a bike with training wheels and then some day you get them taken off and chances are you'll probably fall/crash.  You'll do that again when you get a road bike. 

Rant about parking

So here is a completely non-athletic related post, and I'll keep it short.  In Calgary we have that new Park Plus system that replaced the meters and now there are just zones and they're said to add about 20% of space I think is what the City claims.  The only problem is that people don't know how to park in these zones.  If you are the car at the front of the zone, please pull as far as forward as you can, if you're the last one, please park so that your car's tail is at the rear post.  This lets people park in the zone and have the number of cars it was meant to accommodate.  This morning I came upon a car that was parked smack dab in the middle of a two car zone..... and lo and behold you can't park there.  Sure it doesn't help that I drive a long truck, but common guys, learn how to park Calgary...... end rant.

I get the age old adage of function over form....

But I mean if the function is right on track, the form really shouldn't lag behind a whole lot but that doesn't seem to always be the case, I mean companies like Garmin have made some pretty big strides. For example their first triathlon watch was HUGE

I mean common, look at that thing..... it's MASSIVE.  So Garmin went away and came out with an improved version the next go around

But let's be honest here, this thing looks more or less the same, they did improve functionality as well as battery life.  The third time around their engineers actually go the message and they started to slim it down

The new one is on the left so you can see that it's definitely better.  So they're getting better at making a watch people will actually want to wear, because it doesn't really how great a product you have, if it looks like shite no one is going to wear it/use it.  The last go around, they've slimmed it down as much as they can and it actually looks pretty good, much like all of their current generation watches

Old, Newer, Newest.  So Garmin has done a really good job of making something that needs to be big at least reasonable, and the ones that don't need to big (the straight up running ones)

A big thanks to Ray over at DCrainmaker, who I'm pretty sure all of these pictures belong to him, at some point and time probably before someone tampered with the watermarking.

However Polar has just released a new watch this morning and holy crapola it looks AMAZING

Common Garmin why can't you make something with a little bit more red, or even blue if it doesn't fit with your color scheme.  I love black, and I lover silver, but would it kill you guys to put a bit more color into your produce, like make the Garmin lettering blue..... or something. Alright there's my rant, it's done, happy weekend guys.

~Cheers