Not what you'd expect

If you've been following this blog for a while, you might have a pretty good feel for the pattern of my workouts. I follow a 16/5 day schedule, and had the rest week last week. So this was supposed to be the start of a new block, which was to be the last cycling VO2max block. But that's not what I did tonight.

After the weekend, even this morning, my legs just feel wooden. It required a lot more effort even on the commute to work, so during the afternoon, I pulled out a calendar and saw what would happen if I made some changes. I've been going hard on my planned schedule for a long time now, and maybe things have caught up to me a little. And before it gets to be too big a hole to climb out of, I rewrote this week as an extra recovery week. This still leaves me time for three 3-week blocks, with a peak and race week before Muskoka. As an added bonus, this new schedule gives me mini-taper weeks leading up to the Niagara Sprint and the Oakville half-mary. So, this may work out.

The other change is that I'm not doing the last block of bike focus. If I look at my race splits, my bike is by far my best leg, so I don't need to build it up too much. Any increase in VO2max makes it easier to build my FTP, but this is the type of thing I need to build in the off-season. I feel like I can still tickle my FTP up a little more in the next 2+ months, but more importantly, extend my endurance and ability to hold sub-threshold efforts. This is the specificity of training. Instead of bike focus, the next nine weeks will be about rebuilding my run. It's not recommended that a runner tries to build both speed and endurance at the same time, but that's what I'll be doing. Again, not so much the high-end, but longer mod-hard efforts, and extending long runs. I'll also be picking up the pace a little, and running a bit further, on my easy days. Nothing too taxing, but every little bit helps. This will hopefully give me the edge I need to run down a bunch of people in Muskoka. If I'm going to give away the better part of ten minutes in the swim, and run close to even on the bike, I need to be able to gobble up the competition out of T2. The Oakville half will be a great test to see where I am (which should be "near the front").

Run: 4 miles @ 7.5 mph + 4 strides