The week of a long course triathlete: Thursday
You probably know the drill by know; Tuesday and Thursday are “quality days”, meaning that these days include higher intensity workouts compared to other days. Maximizing recovery between workouts can greatly help you to execute these workouts correctly, which requires another early morning workout.
16km run — 6:00am
Given the higher level of fatigue later in the week I expected this workout to be a little tougher than my Tuesday morning run. Runners and other triathletes often wonder why I incorporate little interval work into my run training, but I’ve found this really hard to combine at my training volume. Experimenting with interval training is something I’m going to try in the autumn and I might extend this workout by a few kilometers until then.
My intuition was a bit off on this one; my legs definitely felt a little tired compared to Tuesday, but I ended up running more or less the same pace at the same average heart rate. The perceived effort was definitely a little higher and the splits less consistent. Things started out really slow (averaging 5:00 km/min in the first 3k) and finished quite fast (averaging 4:20 km/min in the last 3k).
Executing a workout better than expected is great and gives you confidence in your training. When you’re not being coached it is important to analyze your workout execution and pick up on signals your body is giving you. Muscle soreness feels different than an upcoming injury. The best athletes are injury-free athletes.
Lunch and snacks
In earlier logs I hinted that nutrition is an often overlooked aspect amongst serious athletes. While I’m definitely not a health nut, I’ve made good progress in cleaning up my diet. This includes cutting back on soda, unhealthy snacks and red meat. Cutting back doesn’t mean eliminating these things altogether.
On an average weekday I consume three pieces of fruit between meals. My dentist prefers that I drink (green) tea rather than coffee, so I only have two, black espressos a day. My lunch includes a lot of carbs in the form of good quality (sometimes home-baked) bread. Peanut butter, tomato, cucumber and home-made spreads make it onto my sandwiches most often.
Sub-threshold bike intervals — 7:00pm
My quality bike workouts often alternate between intervals above FTP on one day, and just below on the other. The latter are typically longer with more recovery. Today called for 4 x 12 minute intervals ranging from 95% to 99% of FTP with 6 minutes of recovery. A long but manageable workout.
During the warmup I immediately noticed that it would be one of those workouts. On Tuesday I commented that my FTP was probably set too high, yet I failed to adjust my FTP setting. I wrapped up the initial interval a few watts below target. At this point I still attributed my lacking performance to not being properly warmed up.
Sadly the second interval wasn’t much better. I just wasn’t hitting my numbers. I was thinking about bagging the workout and call it a day. Sub-threshold workouts are about turning the pedals for longer durations at decent resistance; I could probably get away with a riding my intervals below target and still get a decent workout, so that’s what I did.
Tonight’s workout wasn’t pretty. I misjudged my current fitness level and failed to adjust my workout accordingly. I probably went out to hard this morning, compromising tonight’s workout. Another lesson learned.
Wrap up
Even though tonight’s workout did go as planned, I still managed to put in over 45 minutes of cycling at 95%+ of FTP. Most of my local competition didn’t even ride tonight due to the thunderstorms, so I’m still coming out ahead. Now it’s time to rest up, regroup and let my bruised ego heal. See you tomorrow!
