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August 17, 2008
a name that does not start with a number
The two Olympic events I was most interested in - swimming and the women's marathon - are over, and I am sort of glad. We were on the point of starting a drinking game based on Dara Torres (every time she's referred to as 41-year-old Dara Torres, take a drink) except I'd sworn off hard liquor until after Akron. Well, watching Paula Radcliffe's race last night changed all that. She has a stress fracture; she xtrained like a demon; she emerged from her 9-hour pool and antigravity-treadmill sessions to toe the line in Beijing. And for what? From the look on her face as she limped that last 400m, I'll wager her leg's pretty badly fucked up. She won't be called a quitter this time, but she's bought herself another stretch of time in the pool. Anyway, if the best runner in the world can't pull off a marathon purely on xtraining, a midpacker like 44-year-old joe positive sure as hell can't, either. Somebody buy me drink over here.
On the other hand, this blog is all about me, so here is my xtraining week:
M: 52min pool running, easy
T: AM mtb 45min (10.34mi), PM 55min pool running, easy
W: AM pool running track workout: warmup, 4x400, 1200, 3x400, 800,
mile, cooldown, ~8mi total. PM mtb 1hr (12.4mi)
R: mtb 1hr (14.72mi)
F: AM 43min pool running ladder workout: wu, 1/1 --> 5/1 --> 1/1
(hard/easy), cd, ~5mi total
Sa: AM 2:05:00 pool running: 34min easy, 29 hard, 10 easy, 15 harder,
30 kinda hard, 5 cd, I'm calling it 16 miles. PM: mtb 55min (15.1mi)
Su: mtb 61min (15mi)
total: 40.5mi pool running, 66.5mi mtb
Much thanks to my friend Ray for letting me come over just after dawn Saturday morning to spend 2 hours thrashing around in his pool.
Continuing the theme of my last entry: I still don't know what I'm doing, though I'm a little more sure I'm not actually training for an imminent marathon. My leg is still sore even after a week off (land) running, and though it feels better, I can make it worse just by staying on my feet 5-10 hours at a time (i.e., a typical workday). While it's healing, I can either sit on my ass or do a lot of xtraining, so I might as well try to stay aerobically fit. In this article about pool running Pfitzinger explains that steady pool running just doesn't equal steady road running, and he recommends doing a lot of interval stuff in the pool to get the heart rate up (and keep from going nuts too). So I've started going a bit harder in the pool, and on the bike too. We'll see if this helps. It certainly can't hurt.
Posted by joe positive at August 17, 2008 5:40 PM
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