Thursday's solo triathlon

Originally I had a loooooong bike ride planned for Thursday morning.  Unfortunately, my usual training partner, The Captain, fell a bit under the weather.  I did a pretty tough mountain bike ride on Wednesday, so I wasn't to bummed when the thought of changing my training for Thursday came into my head.  With The Captain out, a 5 hour bike ride sounded pretty lonely.  So, I decided to do a little brick session.

Thursday's brick session was initially going to be a swim/bike brick.  One of the things that I know I suck at is doing the bike after I swim.  I've been getting decent at doing all of the sport individually, but typically during an Ironman I am pretty beat up after the swim, which effects my biking negatively.  I looked at my training plan for the week and decided to do a little rearranging.   I decided to go ahead and just do a little triathlon on Thursday morning instead of the long bike ride.

I woke up at 5:37 a.m. and headed downstairs to get myself ready.  My plan was to be out the door by 6:15 a.m.  Today's solo triathlon would be a little different in that I had to first ride my bike a little over 11 miles to get to the pool.  Once I was at the pool I would be able to actually start the triathlon.  

The pool I was swimming in is a glorious outdoor pool.  Here's a couple shots of it:

I'm going to apologize right now because I didn't take any other pictures to share with you.  The next time that I do this I'll take some pictures of my little transition areas and whatnot.

After I biked over to the pool, at a pretty easy pace (since this wasn't part of the triathlon yet!), I took about 5 minutes to get set up and get in the water.  I ended up swimming 30 laps (1500 meters) before exiting the pool.  I should explain that my goal for the day was not to do anything representing the Ironman distances.  My goal was more to do something that represented an Olympic distance triathlon.

I exited the pool and took about 4 minutes to get back into my biking attire and on the road.  I road around the neighborhood where the pool is located and then back toward my house.  All together, I road 28 miles after swimming (plus 11 before swimming makes for a 39 mile biking day!).  By the time I finished the bike, it was just after 9:00 a.m., and it was already getting pretty hot.

I quickly changing into my running gear, chugged down some Ironman Perform and headed out for my run.  I was planning on doing around 7 miles for the run, but I knew as soon as I was done with my first mile that I would have a tough time finishing three miles.  I ended up with 4.59 miles, and they were pretty sloppy miles.  My first two miles were good (sub 8:00/mile) and my last two miles were not so good.  I would like to assume that it was due to the heat (it was already over 95 degrees by the time I started the run!), but chances are that it was because I really haven't done a ton of brick work up until this point.

Taken from my Garmin calendar

What I learned from today was: I can't expect myself to hold the paces I want to hold when it's this hot out, and I need to do some more brick work!  I'm going to figure out a way to get in some sort of brick work each week now.  I've been meaning to do it from the beginning, but somehow the brick portion just got lost in the shuffle that is my busy schedule.  It's very hard to find time for a long run, a long bike, and another long workout (a brick workout) all in one week.  But, it has to be done!

Thanks for reading!