Not so fast

I know better than to make a statement like I did in my last blog entry about being done with my injury.  Those kinds of things always come back to bite you.

Last Sunday, I had a 14-15 mile long run that included 60 minutes at marathon effort plus The Rock Circuit.  I took off into the wind at marathon effort determined to stick to my new rules about not stopping during the quality in my workouts (R-WYCH = run what you can hold).  I started out at 6:33 pace for the first 20 minutes or so with my HR in my marathon zone.  I picked it up for the next 30 minutes to 6:25 pace and then even more to 6:22 pace for the last 10 minutes.  I loved this workout!  I was so happy to finish strong at a pace that was close to my goal marathon pace AND without stopping.  The interesting thing too was that my HR only appeared to go up, on average, one BPM with each increase in effort.  It amazes me sometimes how little difference I see in my HR for the various efforts I run.

I started my recovery jog and noticed a familiar little pinch in my achilles.  I hadn't felt that in a while and it made me nervous.  I thought that it might go away as I continued to jog and get ready for The Rock.  Then, it started to absolutely dump buckets of rain on me.  I was 2 miles from home and thought, "What the hell?  Let's just get this damn thing over with."  So, I did The Rock in the pouring rain, knocking out my crunches and supermans while laying in the mud, flopping around.  It was kind of fun in a Private Benjamin sort of way.  Unfortunately, my achilles did not feel better after The Rock.  It was sore on my 2-mile soggy jog home as I finished off my 16 miles.

Looking at what I've been doing, this was not unexpected.  I got to that point in the injury cycle where I truly believed I was home free.  I had stopped doing all of my regular maintenance like icing my calf after each run, stretching, rolling out the calf, massage.  I wasn't doing any of it.  How soon we forget.

Monday morning, I ran with my girlies and my achilles was still sore.  I was definitely disappointed, but I had a feeling that it was temporary.  I chose to believe it was just my body's way of reminding me that my calf/achilles is still slightly undercooked.  I resorted to this full-on treatment regimen:

• icing my calf after running
• doing my 60 minute yoga for athletes video 3 x per week
• rolling my legs with the TP Massage system every day
• massaging the achilles
• massaging the calf

The good news is that it has worked.  I ran on land for 30 minutes Tuesday followed by 60 minutes of pool running and then only did yoga on Wednesday.  Thursday, I was expecting to jog an easy 6, but took a look at my scheduled workout before heading out the door just in case.  I'm glad I did because I was able to do the whole 9-mile workout without any pain.  I ran another easy 6 on Friday and felt some tightness in the achilles, but I was pretty sure it would pass.

This morning, I met some girlies who also had workouts that would be best done around a track.  That's right, I said TRACK!  I haven't done a track workout in an incredibly long time and was a little excited about it.  After a 5-mile warm up, I headed to the track to start my workout.  It was 5 x (1 mile repeats @ 10k effort with 1 minute rest, then 400m @ 5k effort with 3-5 minutes rest).  Here's how I did (pace for 1600m, pace for 400m):

1. 5:59, 5:38
2. 5:55, 5:32
3. 5:59, 5:37
4. 6:00, 5:41
5. 6:04, 5:39

This was a good workout and ended up being my longest (16.7 miles) since being injured.  I felt strong the whole way in fairly warm and exposed conditions.  I was pleased to average just under 6:00 pace for the 10k effort and under 5:40 for the 5k effort.  But, the best news of the day was that I felt nothing whatsoever in my achilles and still feel nothing right now as I type this.      

So, I will refrain from making predictions about how over this injury I am.  I promise to be good and take care of the regular maintenance it requires so I can continue ramping up my mileage and intensity.

I'm still working on a clever way to reveal my newest gadget.  I love the speculation from my blogging peeps: Alter G, altitude tent.  What could it be?  I promise I'll reveal it soon.
                    

My dirty little secret

I have finally reached the point where I no longer worry about re-injuring my calf/achilles. Last week I ran three hard workouts in seven days of running for a total of 60 miles. Over the last two days I have run up and down hills for just shy of 20 miles, abusing my quads and shins without a peep from my calf or achilles. I truly don't even think about my left calf (or was it the right?) any longer unless someone asks me about it.

Now that I can stop obsessing about that, I have turned to thinking about my decreased fitness level. I know how my fitness ebbs and flows around a marathon cycle--peaking for the event and then taking quite a while to return to a familiar level post marathon. But, the post-injury comeback is a new thing for me with plenty of opportunity to learn. While injured for six weeks, I had lots of time to think about my previous training regime. I've decided to try to change some of my "bad" training practices.

I think I've mentioned before that I tend to run my workouts on the hot side. As a result, I am embarrassed to admit, I have become accustomed to taking "water breaks" when necessary to maintain the intensity. I am quite aware that this is not right, but it's simply the way I've done things for the last 5 years. My measure of fitness has become less about how fast I'm going for how long and more about stringing together longer and longer workouts at a given pace without stopping for a break. These breaks are typically very short (10-20 seconds), but they give me a chance to catch my breath and get my heart rate down enough to sustain the higher intensity for the planned duration of the workout.

Acknowledging the wrongness of this approach, I have a hard time believing that it has had a major negative impact on my overall fitness level. I say this because, under this method, I have attained a level of fitness and run faster than I ever thought possible. Of course, one could question how much faster I might be running if I employed a break-free approach, but I don't find that kind of speculation very useful.

Where I think I have shortchanged myself is in the mental aspect of training and racing. When I get to the point in a training run where I'm pushing myself harder than I can sustain, I allow myself that 'out' to stop and walk. Granted, I haven't stopped to walk in a race in like three years, but I wonder how much better I'd be at handling the mid-to-late race urge to bail if I trained to complete my workouts without stopping.

I've decided to find out. In one of my first post-injury long runs a couple of weeks back, I had a 25-minute progression run that started at marathon effort and progressed down to 10k effort for the last few minutes. I ran this in 80-degree weather and into a headwind most of the way, but I didn't adjust my paces to compensate for the conditions (or my conditioning). I took about 4 short breaks during that progression run and progressed from 6:38 pace incrementally down to 6:03 pace. I would normally declare that I was improving if I did the workout at the same paces but stopped fewer times the next time I had it on my schedule.

I had a 30-minute progression run on my schedule a week later and decided I was not allowed to stop during the workout.  I started out at about 6:40 pace again in 80-degree weather but without a headwind. I stepped my pace down by about 5 seconds/mile every 5 minutes and resisted the urge to progress any faster than that.  I repeated the mantra "run what you can hold" throughout the run.  As I dropped from 6:20 down to 6:15 pace, I started feeling that urge to stop, but I fought it.  When my Garmin alerted me to change paces for the last 5 minutes, I thought I couldn't possibly go any faster. Somehow, I did and finished up at 6:08 pace.  I completed this 14.5 mile workout with an hour of The Rock Circuit including strides.

Even though my paces in that workout were pretty slow compared to where I was 2 months ago, I was so damned pleased with myself for resisting the urge to take a break and holding the paces I did the week before. That's the great thing about running. You can always find some new way to test yourself and improve.

My focus now is on gauging effort and building my mental strength. I think I'll need this more than ever in the shorter distance races. I am quite familiar with how I feel in a marathon and what I can ask of my body and mind. The shorter stuff is an entirely different animal with a new set of pain and suffering to adapt to.

In my next blog: I have a new toy and it is guaranteed to make me a faster runner! What could it be?

Where I left off

I am happy to report that I am back to regular running again.  Blog buddy Joe predicted a couple of weeks back that soon I would be running along and wouldn't be able to remember which leg had been injured.  I'm almost there.  My runs are all pain free, but I do feel a little tightness once in a while on the inside of my achilles following a hilly or harder workout.  This is easily remedied with a short stretching of the calf, and I don't feel a thing in my calf following the run.  What I have felt is soreness in my quads after harder workouts.   I know this pain as the type I get after a short race.  My legs are just getting used to that pounding again, but they are happy to be doing it.  It's a good kind of pain.

One of the perks of being an ecologist working for The Nature Conservancy is that you get to see big chunks of land that have amazing habitat, like the one pictured above, protected.  And, sometimes, when you're lucky, you get invited to camp out on them and run.  The picture above is the GPS track from a run I did on April 10th on a privately-owned ranch in Merced, CA.  We camped out there with a bunch of geeky scientists and had a great time.  The run was along a ranch road and was gorgeous.  If you look closely at the aerial photo, you'll see a network of what look like tiny pockmarks on the land.  Those little divots are actually seasonal wetlands called vernal pools that fill with water in the winter and dry out in the summer. I have spent the better part of 15 years studying the incredible little plants and critters that inhabit them.        

Back to running.  Here's what I've done the last couple of weeks:

The week of April 12th, I ran a total of  41.6 miles and exercised (not including strength training and core) a total of 10 hours.  I received my new training plan last week, which excited me to no end.  My coach prescribed mileage in the low 40s for the next few weeks run over 6 days with one day of rest or cross training.  She also gradually added in some speed work for those first few weeks. After 4 weeks, if my leg was completely healed, I would start into hill work again.

My workout last Saturday was a true test of my progress in healing, and to a lesser extent, my running fitness.  I ran a loop around beautiful Lake Natoma in Folsom and realized, just a mile or so after starting this run, that I was taking a big leap by doing this.  I was committed to running the entire 11.5 mile loop, the longest I'd run since being injured, and there was no turning back.  I was doing a lot of new things with this workout: running on hilly terrain, running longer, faster intervals and a faster overall pace.  If my leg held up through this, I knew I was golden.  And, it did.  I had a great run, easily managing 5:35 pace for my 1-minute intervals, running up hills with reckless abandon and clocking an overall 7:07 pace for the run.  I iced my calf after the run, and had no soreness in the days following the run.

I felt so good on that run, after 5 days straight of running, I proposed a slightly faster increase in my mileage over the next few weeks than my coach had planned.  She was thrilled that I was feeling so great and said she had been conservative with my mileage because it's risky to increase both intensity and volume of training simultaneously.  But, I think she trusts that I know my limits now and will back off if needed.  She told me to go for it.

I have had a great week of training so far with the return of The Rock Circuit on Tuesday and a great 8 mile run yesterday.  Last night, my run was to include 30 minutes at 6:45-7:00 pace and I was supposed to monitor my heart rate and report back to my coach.  Two miles into the run I started the pace work and couldn't quite keep the horses under control.  They dialed right in to 6:20-6:25 pace and wanted to stay there.  So, I thought it wouldn't hurt me to run a mile at that pace and record my HR.  My HR got up to the low 170s for that first mile, but averaged 162.  This was nice to see since the last time I monitored my HR at around that pace (6:15 and right before Twin Cities) it was in the 160s as well.

I tried throughout the run to slow down to the prescribed pace, and I eventually locked into a 6:30-6:35 pace that felt so natural and easy that I just went with the flow.  I averaged 6:30 for the 30 minutes and my HR averaged in the mid-160s, which is about 85% MAX.  This was a reassuring run for me and confirmed that I haven't lost a lot of fitness over the last couple of months of cross training.  My leg felt a little tight after the harder miles, but my magic calf stretch resolved that immediately.

This week, I plan to run 7 days and get my mileage up to 57 miles per week.  This is a goal that I don't mind dumping if I start to feel any "bad" pain in my calf or achilles.  I plan to keep my mileage around the 60-mile mark for another few weeks and continue to cross train a second workout on a couple of days to keep my volume of training around 10-11 hours total.  By mid-June, I should be rocking and rolling into higher mileage territory and on my merry way training for the Chicago Marathon in October.  After all is said and done, I do believe I will be a smarter, faster and stronger runner as a result of this injury.

MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY…MONEY!

I finally received my prize money from the Belgrade Marathon last week.  Thursday, I received an e-mail from the organizers asking for my bank account information.  I sent it to them expecting that I would either find an empty bank account the next day or have a balance increased by 2000 Euros (minus 18% Serbian tax).  I woke up the next morning to neither scenario.  Overnight, the Marathon had wired two transactions of 1650 Euros each to my account!  The transactions showed up as pending, so I assumed they would figure out the error and correct it themselves.  They didn't.  So, being the honest person that I am, I sent them a message this week explaining what had happened and asking how they wanted to resolve it.  I haven't heard back from them.  I was just happy to have actually gotten paid.  It just goes to show you that persistence literally pays off!

DEFICIENCIES

I went in for some routine blood work this last week and was forced to face my vitamin-taking laziness head on.  I have had problems with low ferritin levels (the first stage of iron deficiency) and have been taking liquid iron since I discovered this.  I hate taking the blasted stuff and started slacking off more and more over the last few months.  In December, I received a message from my coach introducing me to the subject of Vitamin D deficiency and how it affects performance.  After receiving that message, I just decided to start taking vitamin D supplements (4000 IU/day), but my vitamin D supplementation waned along with my iron intake.  It was no surprise when my test results documented my lowest ferritin level in 2 1/2 years (25 ng/ml) and low vitamin D levels (45 ng/ml; the goal is to be above 50 with an ideal of 70).  While the ferritin is probably not low enough to impact my performance (<20) it's dangerously close.  Low vitamin D levels affect your immune system and recovery, so I wonder what impact it had on both my becoming injured as well as the subsequent healing process.  Needless to say, I'm back on my meds with hopes of getting a better report card in 6 months.

While I may not quite be at the point in my recovery where I forget that I was injured, I am well on my way to running long and fast again.  That makes me very happy.

The 7-week itch

It is somewhat hard for me to believe that it has been 7 weeks since I was taken out of action by this calf/achilles injury.  I am happy to report that I have been making steady progress with my rehabilitation and have returned to regular, pain-free running.  Up until last week, I had been testing my leg by running consecutive days.  While I was keeping these runs short, by the third day of running, I was generally pretty sore and had to rest from running for a couple of days.  I finally started running slightly longer, every other day and found this to be sustainable.  Last week for instance, I got in two, 8-mile runs including strides and two, 6-mile runs.  With each day of running, my leg felt better and better.  This week, I'm working on running nearly every day in a long, short pattern for a total of 40 miles.  That is a big week.

My fitness world has been transformed from a fixation on running mileage to focus on how many total hours I work out (not including strength training and yoga) during the week.  However, I do like to convert that back to the equivalent amount of mileage I'd be running for that amount of time, since, I am after all a running geek at heart.  For instance, a 10-hour week would roughly equate to an 80-mile running week assuming an 8 mph average pace (a little on the slow side).


As I'm returning to running, I realize that all of the cross training has paid off.  I generally feel pretty fit, though I haven't started doing hard workouts yet.  Still, striding along at 5:30 pace feels good and doesn't require a ton of effort.  I've even thrown in a couple of 800m intervals at marathon pace (6:10) and those didn't feel too bad either.  Believe it or not, I think I'll miss some of the cross training activities, except the ellipti-devil, when I get back to higher running mileage. These past few weeks of biking and pool running have been fun.

Last week, I rediscovered a great yoga workout video featuring Rodney Yee called Yoga Conditioning for Athletes.  My coach had recommended it to me a couple of years ago, and I used it a lot for a while.  As with most other non-running activities, my yoga practice fell by the wayside after a few months.  I relied mostly on the TP massageball kit to work the kinks out of my legs thereafter.

I didn't realize how tight I had allowed myself to become until I did the video the other day and had trouble doing poses that I had easily mastered the last time I tried it.  While I've read conflicting reports on the importance of flexibility for runners, I know that I am tighter than I have ever been in my life and I have to assume that's not a good thing.  I don't suspect I will be a good yogi for long, but I want to believe I'll find the time to do this yoga routine now and then to keep a little Gumby in my body.

I'm still not out of the woods, but I am making good progress at this point.  This week will be a good test of my readiness to return to running workouts.  I hope to run 6 days this week for a total of 40 miles.  I will try an 11-mile 'long' run including some short intervals around a moderately hilly lake this weekend.  If all goes well, I will be trying on some harder running workouts next week and will hopefully start up my speed-demon training in preparation for a couple of short, focus races.  I can't wait to get out there and start tearing it up again!

P.S. Sprinkles I promised I wouldn't mention DiaB.  Proud of me?

Revisiting Belgrade

For my 100th blog post (can you believe I've written that many?), I wanted to post about a lingering issue from one of my very first posts about the Belgrade Marathon.  In fact, it was the story of my experiences in that marathon that inspired me to start this blog, so it seems fitting to post about it almost a year later.

I ran the Belgrade Marathon in 2009 as a member of the USA Military Marathon Team.  The Serbian Military hosted this International Military Competition in conjunction with the Belgrade Marathon, so we were competing not only for our national teams, but also as individuals eligible for a fairly sizable prize purse.

I came in 3rd in the military competition and 4th female overall.  Military awards were presented on the spot, but the monetary awards would be "sent directly to our bank accounts", according to race officials.  I won 2000 Euros for my 4th place overall finish.  That's $2700 and more money than all my lifetime race winnings combined.  Not only did I work my butt off in that race which was hot and miserable, but I also went through the full drug-testing protocol ordeal as detailed in my race blog.

I tried to get as much information about payment before I left the country and even gave the military contact that had the best command of the English language a voided check with my bank account information on it to expedite the payment process.  As you might have guessed, I still haven't seen a single Euro from my Serbian friends.

Over the course of the last year, I have attempted to make contact with the race organizers via e-mail about eight separate times.  I received two responses.  One e-mail from Dejan Nikolic (race director, I believe) came in over the summer after I contacted the head of the military competition organization (CISM) with my complaint.  The excuse:  they were waiting on the doping test results and payments from sponsors which would be coming in within the next week.

After several more months passed with no word, I checked out the 2010 Belgrade Marathon website.  It is still a go, however the tab that reveals "prizes" is not enabled for the 2010 marathon though it still shows up for the 2009 marathon.  While I have another source of income to support my running habit, there are professional athletes that won prize money that probably rely on it to live.  I was now on a mission for us all (assuming that they were also stiffed).

About two weeks ago, I sent an e-mail to the general contact address at the IAAF, since they show up as a sponsor of the 2010 Belgrade Marathon.  I wanted to inform them of this wrongdoing.  A week later, I see a series of unintelligible numbers flash on my cell phone, and I ignored the call.  The caller left a voicemail, and it was Dejan, the race director from the Belgrade Marathon, calling to apologize.  He even called me back later, and this time I answered.

Dejan explained that all of their sponsors reneged on their donations to the 2009 marathon and that they had no ability to pay the prize money.  He said that they were sorry for not keeping me informed, but they had been waiting to hear from their sponsors who were all devastated by the bad economy.  He did say that they have a plan to pay me and the rest of the athletes.  They will take this year's sponsorship money and pay last year's winners.  I'm okay with that as long as this year's winners aren't expecting the money.  He sounded quite sincere in his sorrow, saying it was hard to work on the event every day knowing that he had this cloud hanging over him from last year.

I fully expect to not get paid, but there was something satisfying about getting that call.  I really do feel sorry for the professional athletes who won 5000 Euros and probably do rely on that money to live.  Maybe, just maybe, we'll get a nice surprise after the 2010 sponsors pay up.     As they say in Serbia,  Srećno! 
          

Better. Stronger. Faster.

I was hooked on the Six Million Dollar Man television series growing up and often pretended I was the bionic woman, Jaime Sommers.  I'm sure, if someone had asked me back then whether or not bionics would be available for failing body parts by the year 2010, I would have believed they would be.  While humans have invented replacement body parts, they typically do not perform as well as the real thing (maybe excepting Oscar Pistorius' blades).  I have not yet found a bionic replacement achilles for sale even on the internet, though apparently the Bionic Beauty Salon was once available.  How did I miss that?

In my last post, I discussed my new plan to slowly ramp up my running mileage.  I had a nice 6 mile run on Friday where I actually decided to run over some rolling hills rather than walk up them,  and I hit 6 miles with no pain.  My achilles was slightly sore following this run, but a little massaging of the tendon relieved that almost instantly.  Saturday morning and afternoon got away from me with various errands and tasks, so I decided to just go ahead and do another "long" run that evening--discarding my short, long, short pattern.  This was a bad idea.  My achilles tightened up after the first 4 miles of 6 total.   I had to do some walk/jog intervals to get home in order to minimize the tightness and pain, which were both mild.  Again, massaging the achilles helped, but I was still sore.  I was really hoping that I would have one of those breakthrough runs where I was gamboling recklessly along the bike trail free of any tightness and pain.  Saturday's 6 miler made me realize that I may have a longer row to hoe than I thought.

This sequence of events led me to the realization that I needed to make a tough decision.  The easy part was deciding to throw in the towel on the Eugene Marathon, scheduled for May 2nd.  The tough decision was whether or not to bag the idea of running a spring marathon altogether.  I researched the hell out my options and came up short.  There are some potentially fast races out there, but most of them occur too close to Eugene for me to feel confident in being able to ramp up.  The reason I would try to run a marathon this spring would be to capitalize on the great fitness that I have (had?) before becoming injured.  I finally realized that leaving the possibility of running another marathon hanging out there was causing me to make decisions that are not helping me heal.        

Enter Plan B:

• take as long as it takes to get back to pain-free running, 
• maintain my mad cross training regime, 
• and start training for some speed!  

I first divulged this new plan to The Genius and felt instantly like a weight had been lifted.  No more worry about missing out on yet another week of long mileage and hard, long runs.  Instead, I can focus on staying fit, healing and look forward to incorporating quality speed work into my training.  As I have mentioned before, I have been solely focused on marathon training since I began running in 2004, and have spent nary a month focusing on short-distance speed.  This will be a change.

The prospect of training for a fast 5k and/or 10k race is exciting to me.  Aside from striving for PRs in these distances, I know that developing my speed will make me a faster marathoner.  Right now, I'm tentatively thinking about a 10k race over Memorial Day weekend (heel healing dependent) and running at least the 5k in the National Masters' Championship Track Meet here in Sacramento in July 2010.  I'd love to get my 10k time down into the low 36s and my 5k into the low 17s.  Of course, I have to be careful with my training not to injure some other random body part in the process, but I feel like a slightly wiser runner at this point.

I am fired up about this focus for my future training.  I assure you that I am cross training like an animal so that I can step back into my running, when my non-bionic tendon is ready and willing, with zeal and a renewed lust for this crazy sport of running.  We can rebuild her.

P.S.  My focus race for the fall will be Chicago.

"She's Actual Size...

But she seems much bigger to me."  For some reason, those lyrics to the classic They Might Be Giants song run through my head when I think about my achilles tendon.  I think anyone else looking at my ankle would think it looks the same as the good foot, but to me it seems ginormous.  I still find myself favoring my left foot here and there when phantom pain presents itself. However, for the last couple of days, I go for long stretches without even thinking about it.  Progress.

This is an improvement that makes me happy, of course, but I am being more careful about my rehabilitation.  I found it interesting when I looked at my training log that I have actually run 12 days since I was afflicted with this injury 28 days ago.  Most of those days were trial runs, between 1.5 to 6 miles, that showed promise until I pushed it a little too hard.  Over the last three days, I have run slow, short runs.  I have been paying close attention to any tightness or pain I feel during the run.  I have found that, if I feel tightness for more than a mile during the run, the calf/achilles will be sore later and usually the next day too.  My new threshold is no tightness and definitely no pain during the run.  If I feel it, I stop.  I am happy to say I’ve met that mark for the last three runs.

What came as an even bigger surprise to me was the concept that I should run during the rehab phase.  This first came from my Miracle Worker when I suggested I just take another week's rest from running. He shook his head and said, "No.  You need to keep running, just not as much."  His explanation was that without the stretching that occurs during running the scar tissue that inevitably forms with this type of injury would heal the tendon to a shorter length or at least create a tendon with less running specific flexibility.  This was my interpretation of what he said, anyway.  The second place I saw the suggestion to rehab with running was in this article about the achilles tendon that focuses a lot on the concept of "active loading".  The authors state:

A short period of rest from running during the initial acute painful phase followed by a specific loading programme is sensible. However, the tendon loading and coordinative challenge of running suggest that running should become a central component of your rehabilitation strategy and indeed there is scientific support for continuing to run during rehabilitation, as long as the pain does not exceed moderate intensity (26). Accepting a tolerable amount of running discomfort may also help avoid the negative tendon and muscle consequences of protracted rest. The margins are vague, however, and the line between acceptable discomfort and disabling pain is very individual.

This advice is definitely contrary to what I've read almost everywhere else, and that's probably why I like it.  I think the key is in making sure that the use of running in the rehabilitation phase does not cause further damage.  That's the fine line I walk these days.

While somedays I am frustrated with this injury, I have been enjoying my cross training.  Tonight, I tried out my alien swimmer outfit at the Y and made quite a splash (couldn't help myself with that pun).  I purchased these AQx aqua running shoes and was quite pleased with how they performed.  I also bought my own floatie belt. So, picture me walking next to the pool in my cornflower blue bikini, black swim cap, goggles with Michael Phelps tune case attached, shoes with fins and a bright red swim tube around my middle.  Dead sexy.

I also enjoy my bike rides on the bike trail where I do fun interval sessions.  The best part of these rides is passing people like they're standing still.  The other night, I was doing 3 minutes hard/1 minute easy repeats and had this dude come zipping past me while I was spinning before starting the workout.  He passed me decisively and I thought to myself, "I'll see you again soon enough Postal Service Bike Dude."  Once I started my intervals, I started gaining on him.  As I approached his bike, pushing about 23 mph, I could see him kick it into gear and speed up to keep me from passing.  He lasted about 30 seconds before dropping back as I pounded right on by.  Now, my heart rate zipped up into the 170s during that little frenzied episode, but I didn't see him again until I turned around at the 22.5 mile marker.  He gave me a big smile and a wave.  Love it!

Here's what I've been up to the last two weeks:

I'm looking forward to a little longer test run tomorrow morning and hope to report that it is pain free.  I have a super long and hard bike ride planned for Saturday and an even longer run planned for Sunday if all goes well.  The spin instructor at my gym (complete with calf-muscle triathlete branding) is trying to recruit me and Sprinkles to the dark side of triathlons.  While I might be competitive in an aqua-jogging-run-bike tri, I would totally lose it in the gang swim.  For now, I'll stick to running with a side of bike and aqua jogging as cross training.