Longest trainer ride to date

[Day 73]

Watched a hockey game for the first time in forever while sitting down for a steady-ish 3 hour ride. Really had no plan, so sort of pushed on and off for the first hour or so and then settled into a pattern of building every 5 mile segment for the rest. Deets incoming!

Today's Workout: Trainer ride, "steady" 3 hour ride
Summary: 42.43 mi, 3:00:37, 14.1 mph, 90 rpm average
Speed splits by 5 mi: 13.9, 15.2, 15.4, 13.5, 14.0, 14.0, 14.2, 13.9, 12.0
Hit Rate: 77/85 (90.5%)

Shower, food, bedtime now.

Much love,
Jess

Hitting reset

[Day 49]

There's a long one coming. And it's pretty damn personal. Brace yourselves. Let me just get the boring half of the post out of the way:

Today's AM Workout: CSP Practice, sprint free day
Summary:

• WU: 400 swim, 250 swim (as written was 2 x 400 swim)
• Pre-set: 10 x 75 free @ 1:10, RB 6/4/2 (I did 6/4/3 because I can't breathe every 2...)
• Main Set: 
• 4 x 50 free @ 1:00 build to a sprint, no breathing last 12.5
• 8 x 25 free breakouts @ :30
• 50 MAX
• 6 x 100 kick w/ fins @ 1:30, 25 fly on back/75 choice
• 3 x (4 x 50 free @ :55 ascend 1-4), 100 easy between rounds
• WD: 400 swim easy as 100 back/300 choice 
• Total Distance: 3650 SCY

Hit Rate: 52/55 (94.5%)

Notes/thoughts:

• Kate is trying to get me to bike race. And ride with groups. Um both of those things make me uncomfortable but I guess I'm willing to try out either? (This thought is here because we talked about this on the car ride back, after she took me to a cafe to get delicious post-workout scones, mine was cheddar chive and it was so yummy.)
• There was a point where I was like, I just wanna go home. I'm so done with this. But Hap makes swims manageable, he always makes me laugh at some point and it brings me back to life a bit. 
• My underwaters/breakouts are terrible. Ugh where did my pool swimming skills go.

This afternoon's workout was interesting...I guess. I'll tell my story first and put the details at the end so they make sense. I was planning a redo of that one continuous effort ride that literally broke my spirit a few weeks back. I had Henry to see me through that one (I've actually had Henry around to see me through a lot of the rougher rides recently) and so I sort of saw today as an opportunity to see how I'd fare on my own. It didn't go well.

I think right from the get go the entire concept of that workout freaked me out. It's hard to look at a set that long and say "I can get through this" when you're hurting 10 minutes into a 75 minute set. I don't get beat by distance. You can tell me that I have an hour left of something and as long as the only requirement on me is that I keep going, I will keep going. But when you add a pace requirement to that all of a sudden it totally breaks me. I'm not great with the whole intensity business. There was a time in my life when I was and I'm not really sure what happened or how I lost it, but I find myself in the position of knowing that I really struggle with maintaining intensity. And that's tough for me to face because I feel like you have to have that kind of mental resilience to be good at this and I want to be good at this and I don't know how to be tougher other than by just doing it. Which I haven't been doing.

Anyways, the gist of what happened was that in the 5 x 5/5/5 progression, I broke in the last 3 minutes of the first round. The first round. I got to three rounds at my target gearing last time and took the last two rounds a gear down which was already kind of disappointing but at least I did something vaguely resembling the workout. This time I got 12 minutes into the main set and I just couldn't. And it was incredible because I was so active about evaluating how I was feeling and yes it was a rough pace and yes my legs burned but it wasn't an outrageous level of effort. Logically speaking I knew that I should be fine but my brain was panicking the whole time and it just felt like I couldn't and I couldn't and so I didn't. It was so incredibly disappointing to just quit on myself like that. And I wanted really badly to just unclip and go shower and put it behind me but I couldn't, so I brought the gearing down one and thought, okay, let's go at this effort level. I know for a fact that I can do this a gear down. But same thing, 12 minutes in, I just couldn't. My brain just couldn't handle it. 

It's weird, but I really do feel like the last time I did this it was just so hard and so incredibly painful that I really didn't gain any confidence from the workout. I remember just sort of being kept awake by it at night that day and the next few days and feeling like I could never do that again, I could never put myself through that again. No workout has ever really done that to me before, including like the terrors that were New Years Eve or New Years Day workouts from my age group swim club days. Usually getting through a tough workout gives you confidence but honestly that workout just broke me. And even now I really can't shake that feeling and I think that's a part of what's holding me back. 

The other part is that accumulated fatigue is a thing. I can feel it every time I run and every time I ride, it takes me normally 30 or 40 minutes to get into it and feel okay instead of the usually 15 or 20. Even on the trainer, I tend to feel best a few repeats into whatever set I'm doing because it just takes forever to get my legs to loosen out. So in a way I know that had I just gotten a little bit further through it it would have probably eased up a bit. But I just couldn't, even after I dropped down a gear, and I ended up feeling so stuck and frustrated and disappointed with myself. 

I ended up getting off the bike and taking a short run. I felt like I needed to run. The only time I ever ran in high school was when I was really upset. Sometimes I'd get into a fight with my parents or I would get really emotional over drama at school and I would just need to run. Need it like I needed air and nothing could stop me, I'd be out the door and I'd find myself x number of miles from home too tired to keep going and not really sure how I was gonna get back. The only time I ran during my first two years of college was after exams. I only ever ran when I had something to run from and today that feeling hit me full force while I was sitting on the bike. I just very literally had to run away from my problems.

The run did some good for me. I had a lot of negativity I needed to shrug off before I could really think about what was happening and getting outside and feeling like I could escape some of what was going on back in my apartment was good for me. And I had a long conversation with myself that basically went like this: So you're angry and frustrated and upset with yourself, what are you gonna do about it now? Quit? Never set foot on the trainer again? No. So what are you gonna do? Work harder. Well that's easy to say now seeing as you just ran away from the work you were supposed to be doing. That's not a good answer. Try again. Make a new plan. Okay what is this new plan. I don't know. Tell me why this isn't working for you. The set is daunting. I'm scared. How can we make it less daunting? It's sort of like goal setting. The end goal is always daunting, you have to break it up to make it manageable. Okay so how do we do that here? Well I obviously am not gonna hit the workout as written right now so why don't we make this set an ultimate end goal and work up to it. Great, more details. The number of repeats is scary. The fact that there's no rest is scary. Let's try and break the set up along those lines and work on building confidence with one of those things at a time before trying to put it together again as a big set. Okay that sounds good. Are you missing anything? Yes, I need more warm up time. I'm willing to sacrifice the sprinting at the end of this workout in order to make sure I hit this main set and can fit in solid warm up time. That all sounds good to me. Let's make it happen.

I was actually really amazed with where my brain took me on that run. That's not to say that I'm not still angry/upset/frustrated and that I'm not still sitting here berating myself for not just being tougher (I am, can't help it, it feels like I should be able to do this and the fact that I can't kills me), but I do know that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if I can't get this set done for fitness reasons or for mental reasons, it all amounts to the same thing: I'm not doing quality work, I need a plan to fix that. So the plan is this. I'm going to do three variations of this workout in the next three weeks and on week four, I'm going to try to hit the main set (the 5 x 5/5/5, no finishing sprints) as the main portion of a 100 minute trainer ride brick (tack on 3-4 miles of running to the end of that). That starts tomorrow, where I'm going to do just 3 x 5/5/5 with 2 minutes of rest between each round and one set of six 45 second sprints. I just need to prove to myself that I can get through those last 5 minutes on each repeat and the reward of rest will hopefully keep me going past 12 minutes and we will build from there. 

Is it sort of silly that I'm really hung up on this workout and am willing to build my entire trainer progression around it instead of working on other things? Yes. It's extremely silly. It makes very little sense in the grand scheme of training. But I also know myself and I know I need to get this monkey off my back if I want to continue enjoying what I'm doing. I can't let this beat me because so long as this hangs over my head, I'm going to feel like I don't have what it takes. I have to prove to myself that I can work through this, so I'm going to work through it, even if it comes at some sort of expense to whatever the ideal training plan is. And the crazy thing is, even at a very reasonable 3 x 5/5/5 with rest breaks, I'm still scared. It still scares me. But I'm gonna give it my best tomorrow and hopefully prove to myself that if I work at it, I will get there. Wish me luck. In the meantime, enjoy what happened today.

Today's PM Workout: An unexpected first brick of the year!

Summary:

• Trainer ride: 10.60 mi, 45:21, 14.0 mph average
• Outdoor run: 4.18 mi, 39:28, 9:27 pace

Hit Rate: 53/56 (94.6%)

I'm going to go shower now and continue to be disappointed with where today left me. It doesn't feel good to feel like I'm not moving in the right direction, but that's how these things go. It would be great if training and progress were linear but it never is. I did this a few weeks ago and today I couldn't do it, so now I have to look forwards and figure out how to get back to where I want to be. Gonna keep working for that breakthrough. Swim tomorrow morning, edited trainer ride re-do in the afternoon. Let's get it. (:

Much love,

Jess

"Sometimes I feel like I'm about to quit..."

[Day 40]

"...but it's about that time I get over it."

Thanks for the kick in the butt shuffle, I don't think I would've gotten on the bike trainer this afternoon if it weren't for that. Let's get to it!

I feel like I've been on a real hot streak recently with the swimming and I knew that it was going to end sooner or later but I didn't really dwell on it because I would have preferred later to sooner. Well today was the first roadblock I feel like I've hit in a while. It was a good run, but all good things must come to an end. I don't even know what it was, I guess I felt a little bit more tired than usual this morning and I really just couldn't get into it with the swimming. It went okay for the first half of the workout but then my lane mates all sort of left for one reason or another and the person who typically goes before me and pushes me the most in these workouts had some shoulder issues today so he just chilled it. Before you knew it, I was left finishing the set alone and whatever momentum I had been getting from just swimming around other people fizzled out pretty quickly. It sucks because I just couldn't focus on doing the best that I could do so in a lot of ways I feel let down by my tired brain more than I feel let down by my body, and I hate feeling like the limiting factor in my workouts is my brain. I feel like I should have a handle on that part of things by now, but it's hard to mentally on point every workout. Anyways, here's the summary:

Today's AM Workout: CSP practice, mid-distance free day
Summary:

• WU:
• 400 swim
• 4 x 75 kick/swim/kick @ ??? (sometimes I don't pay attention to the interval and I just swim...)
• 300 pull w/ paddles
• 4 x 50 free descend 1-4 @ :50
• Main Set: straight through unless otherwise indicated
• 3 x 200 free @ 3:00
• 2 x 150 free @ 2:20-2:25
• 100 free FAST (~1:20)
• (break)
• 3 x 150 free @ 2:15
• 2 x 125 free @ 1:50-1:55
• 100 free FAST (~1:25)
• (break)
• 3 x 125 free @ 1:50-1:55
• 2 x 100 free @ 1:30
• 75 free FAST (I didn't get a time on this one)
• WD:
• 2 x 100 kick choice w/ fins @ 10SR
• 2 x 75 swim choice w/ fins @ 10SR
• 100 easy
• Total Distance: 4100 SCY

Hit Rate: 42/44 (95.4%)

Another thing worth noting is that I haven't been feeling as recovered as I typically feel after a day off. This day off was pretty special too, because it was straddled by a morning workout and an afternoon workout so I actually got 48+ hours of rest when I usually try to limit myself to around 36 hours or less, so I was expecting to feel way more refreshed yesterday and today than I've been feeling. I guess this is the point at which things really start accumulating and that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's sort of the point of endurance training. I'll have some time early next week to sort of decompress and get a bit of that out of my system anyways, so I'll just have to be tough and get through this week feeling the way I do.

The day was a little bit stressful. I just feel like I have a lot going on at school and obligations keep popping up for the remainder of the week and it makes it tough to stay focused and motivated. I'm trying not to let all that get to me, but it really does. Also anticipating Henry coming soon really doesn't help me. I just want time to pass faster so he can be here, but I also don't because I have so much to do before he gets here, and all that's sort of stressful too. Anyways, my point is that it's the kind of situation that makes me super unmotivated when it comes to getting home and jumping on the trainer for two hours. It was honestly just the last thing I wanted to do. But Henry sent me a text telling me to remember why I'm asking my body to do this for me and that song (Invincible by Our Last Night) came on and I couldn't say no to that. 

Here's the fun thing about that song: it reminds me a lot of a mentality I really grew into back when I swam in high school. I knew all the girls from the other schools in our conference who were roughly my speed and roughly on my developmental trajectory as far as swimming goes. We were all a pretty tightly clustered bunch when it came to times and I was determined to come out on top every time. And the way I handled being tired and especially swimming hard practices when my body just felt awful was that I told myself that I didn't want to be able to beat these girls just on my best day, I wanted to be able to beat them every day. I wanted to be good enough that at my worst, I could beat them at their best. That's what I worked towards and it helped me hang on during the really hard days. That's sort of what that phase "I want to be invincible" meant to me, so when the song popped on, it was almost like a challenge. You're having a terrible day. What are you going to do to prove that you can come out on top even on the worst of days. Here's the summary:

Today's PM Workout: Trainer ride, 120 mins, endurance work with some speed thrown in

Summary:

• WU: 10 mins easy
• Pre-set:
• 8 x :40/:20 pick ups @ base/base/+1/+1/+2/+2/+1/+1
• 2 mins easy recovery 
• Main Set:
• 20 minute steady state effort, 90+ rpm @ base
• 5 mins easy
• Speed work: 6 x (6 min efforts, 2 min recovery) broken as 2 min base @ 100 rpm, 2 min base +1 @ 90+ rpm, 1 min base +2 @ 85+ rpm, 1 min base +2 @ MAX rpm
• So I didn't hit all the targets here, I was more or less hovering around the targets instead of staying above them, see the file if you're really interested
• 20 minute steady state effort, 90+ rpm @ base 
• WD: 7 mins easy
• Totals: 29.70 mi, 2:00:17, 14.8 mph average

Hit Rate: 43/45 (95.5%)

Notes/thoughts:

• I think I have a tendency of psyching myself out sometimes when it comes to what certain cadences at certain resistances should feel like and I actually do a lot better when I'm not staring at the numbers on my watch. For the 20 minute efforts today, I literally threw a towel over my watch and handlebars and didn't look at them the entire time and just let my body figure out what the right pace to be moving at was for that kind of steady effort. It hit it pretty bang on, which I was really impressed by. And what's even better about it was that it didn't necessarily feel hard, it felt like I was in exactly the right place, whereas sometimes I think when I'm looking at those numbers I psych myself out and it actually raises perceived effort when it really shouldn't. So that was an interesting experiment.
• The interval set in the middle was something I had pulled from a workout I did last year that was a shorter overall ride. I wanted to hit it again so I sandwiched it between two steady state efforts. The base +2 cadence target was 90+ rpm before and the MAX target was specified at 100+ rpm, but it was pretty obvious I wasn't going to hit those today so I made adjustments. I don't know if it's because I had that steady state interval beforehand or if it's because I'm using a different base gear (I used to ride mostly in my small ring in front and I've shifted back to starting mostly in my big ring in front but I normally have the back gear set such that what I define as base feels like a pretty comparable effort to me, so idk what the deal is) but either way, it was more of a struggle than I was expecting it to be. (Not that it was like easy by any means last time, but I think I made more of them, so that's saying something...)
• Today was a music day. Which was interesting, I hadn't had one of those in a while. I feel like I've done a lot of podcast days or silence days, but today I felt like I really needed music to help with the motivational lapse. It did work super well. There were so many amazing songs that came on that really pushed me through. A lot of it reminded me of my high school swimming days, especially the days at school that were just rough for whatever reason and ended in me jumping in the pool and just swimming my heart out because I didn't know what else to do. I really drew from that entire set of experiences, it was a reminder that I've gotten through a lot in life and if I could get through that I could get through this. I feel like sometimes when I'm pushing my absolute hardest, that's when I'm most brutally honest about who I am and what I love and I don't feel apologetic about it which is nice. I think normally, I'm worried about being too intense or specifically being judged by other people for being too intense, but like ADTR put it "cast your stones, cast your judgement, you don't make me who I am". (Not gonna lie, I cried a little bit in the middle of that last 20 minute segment when this line came on. It was partly the song, partly the workout, partly the rest of life. I want to cry during hard workouts pretty frequently, I don't typically do it, but music can tip me over that edge sometimes.)

I'm tired and I need to eat dinner and study for our microbes quiz tomorrow but honestly I think I'm going to fall asleep just like sitting here in this chair. So exhausted. Lift tomorrow morning (maybe a short treadmill run tacked on if my legs are feeling okay) and swim in the PM (either rec swim or tri team practice, TBD depending on how the rest of my day goes work-wise). Hope everyone had a great Tuesday!

Much love,

Jess

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsi6kCSTIFU

[Day 33]

The thing I love most about the song up above is that it's a quiet resolution kind of song. The story isn't necessarily something that everyone can relate to but I'm sure the themes will resonate with everyone. I'm going to share a much longer quote than I usually do, but these words hit really close to home this morning so I want to share them.

I don't want to float through life, I wanna drown in it
Break myself down, turn around in it
Take it until I've had enough and then build it back up
From the top to the ground again
So go ahead and say what you need to say
Cause those words might have hurt me yesterday
And dig deep in the cuts of my chest
Just to find out that you'll never get the best of me
So dear tragedy, have a seat
I don't give a fuck what you do to me
Cause yeah this light's going to burn out
But I can't fall, never learned how

That's all the commentary from me today. Here's the summary:

Today's Workout: AM trainer ride, 90 mins, big gear endurance work
Summary:

• WU: 10 mins easy spin 
• Spin ups: 5 x 30 up/30 recovery 
• Main Set: all big gear (base +3, 60-65 rpm, +10 or more on pick up minutes), easy spin recoveries at base
• 20 mins as 9/1/9/1 (base/pick up) 
• 3 mins easy spin 
• 16 mins as 7/1/7/1 
• 3 mins easy spin 
• 12 mins as 5/1/5/1 
• 3 mins easy spin 
• 8 mins as 3/1/3/1 
• WD: 10 mins easy 
• Totals: 20.88 mi, 1:30:22, 13.9 mph

Hit Rate: 35/36 (97.2%)

Notes/thoughts:

• So much for swimming today eh? The forecast actually got worse as time passed, it went from just rain to thunderstorms and the decision was sort of made that being safe on the roads was more important than making practice. I figured I could just move up a trainer workout and re-work the next few days, so I ended up sleeping in a half hour and doing a trainer ride this morning. I was sort of ticked off though because it definitely wasn't raining when I did wake up. It did start raining by probably around 6:30 am but it wasn't that bad and I felt sorta crappy about making what might have been the wrong call.
• Adjustments for the next few days: I was originally planning a dryland session tomorrow and some rowing and then a short easy run in place of the trainer ride I pulled up to today, but I thought about it and decided that since I'm skipping all my morning classes tomorrow anyways, I might as well hit up rec swim. So that's what I'm gonna do. It'll give me a chance to swim a test set and actually see where I am fitness wise. 
• It's sort of a bummer that I'm skipping the gym because I have been really enjoying doing more strength work this past week or two because of the light running load, but I do realize that my priorities have to be swim/bike/run and that strength work is just icing on the cake. One strength session a week doesn't feel like enough, but I'm always gonna want to do more and I know my schedule just doesn't allow for that, so I have to respect the fact that I'm probably only going to be hitting the gym up once this week (and every week from now on lol). 
• Actually in reference to the workout today: The last time I did a variant of this workout, it was shortened (no first 20 minute block) and I did it at base +4 gearing (I think?), which was why it was super brutal. Honestly I was planning on going base +4 today but a whole combination of factors (excuses?) made me reconsider once I was on the bike. My legs were burning at way lower workloads than they usually are (they're just tired), my legs were also weird/stiff (probably because it was morning and they're cold in the morning), and I was fasted, so between all those things I just went for the lower gear. I think it also made sense today because the point of the workout was to get at endurance zone big gear riding (not threshold or higher riding) and I definitely hit the right effort zone at this gearing. I will try this again a gear up at some point in the upcoming weeks, but it'll be planned as one of the hard sessions of the week as opposed to one of the more filler-esque workouts like it really was today. 
• I got to take a nice shake out run/walk with Helena in the afternoon. She's starting her 5k training which is super exciting! I came home and stretched afterwards and am generally surprised that my legs really don't feel great today, but whatever. They're doing the best they can I guess. That accumulated fatigue though...

Swim tomorrow will be the 5/4/3/2/1 x 100s set that Julia gave me way back when. I like to use this one to check in about where my aerobic free is, I feel like it's a good indicator of overall fitness. The goal will be 1:25s but honestly I haven't swum 100s on that pace time in a long time so there's a good chance it'll have to be 1:30s. I'm a little bit freaked out about even tackling the 1:25s, but I know I have to try, so I'm gonna give it all I have and see where it takes me. Time to study now!

Much love,

Jess

The short and the long

[Day 31]

Today was a weird day. Lots of ups and downs. Objectively speaking a pretty good day as far as everything goes, but somehow I'm still sort of disappointed. I don't really know how or why. Maybe I'm just tired. Here's the story.

So I think I woke up a little bit off. I didn't get the best sleep last night because I was out with friends and had some wine and did things like eat way too many cookies, all just generally stuff I try to avoid. Sometimes I'm really jealous that other people get to do these things, but it also doesn't feel quite right when I'm doing them either, so I dunno. It didn't feel like my best moment. I had a lot of fun and I know that's valuable, but I really struggle with not seeing that as some kind of failure on my part. I need to be a little less uptight about everything. It's hard though to stick to this kind of routine unless you're willing to be really harsh with yourself and that isn't something I can turn selectively on and off to allow for some laid back social time. Still figuring it out.

In any case, I got to run in the morning with one of my teammates which was a huge blessing. We went short and easy, another step on the ease back into running with my knee. The knee largely felt good, a little bit of aching somewhere in mile 3 but nothing bad and it resolved before we finished so I was okay with that. We had a great conversation during the run, just sort of got caught up since it'd been a while since we saw each other, and we had smoothies afterwards and stretched and it was super nice. I think that really brightened up my whole day. We're also making plans to ride outside next weekend if the weather is nice, so I'm excited about that too.

Today's AM Workout: Easy run, 4ish miles
Summary: 4.20 mi, 40:33, 9:39 pace
Pace splits by mile: 9:55, 9:45, 9:35, 9:21, 9:35

Hit Rate: 32/33 (96.9%)

Only other note/thought I have about the run is that the cadence issues I was having before seem to be a non-issue right now. 171 average today, I'm chill with that.

The PM workout was rough. It was planned that way so I knew what I was signing up for. Everything about it was tough though, I think just from a mental standpoint, I had a really hard time knowing that the intervals were long and I was going to be upping the speed in x number of minutes and there were no real recoveries in the long main set and it made it hard for me to just focus on what I was doing in that moment because the weight of the whole rest of the set was hanging over my head. I'm also just genuinely not good at dealing with pain. Like when things get difficult aerobically, I feel like I have some capacity to deal with that, but when my legs are collecting lactate it's so tough for me to stay on track and that's something I'm really working to try and be better at. You'd think that as a backstroker burn in the legs would be right up my alley, but outside of that one specific context I actually really struggle with this. Anyways, here are the deets:

Today's PM Workout: Trainer ride, 120 mins, endurance work + some sprints to finish

Summary:

• WU: 10 mins easy 
• Pre-set: 5 x :30/:30 spin ups 
• Main Set: 5 rounds, the goal was to get them all done at base +1 gearing but it ended up being 3 rounds at base +1 and 2 rounds at base (would rather have hit the right cadences than try to be a hero)
• 5 mins low 80s rpm 
• 5 mins high 80s rpm 
• 5 mins 95 rpm 
• (no real rests) 
• 4 mins easy 
• Sprints: 2 x (6 x :45/:45 MAX sprints at base +1 over 100 rpm, 2 mins recovery) 
• WD: 5-6 mins easy
• Totals: 29.07 mi, 2:00:39, 14.5 mph average

Hit Rate: 33/34 (97%)

Notes/thoughts:

• Henry was pretty key to this entire thing even happening. Got a lot of support, was not allowed to quit before I finished, nagged me about staying in the right position, I need this in my life for every trainer ride lol.
• My butt really hurt today. More so than is typical...not sure if it was just because I was on the trainer for longer or what, but that sort of sucks. Need a new saddle, but don't really want to invest in one and also really don't have the time to go figure that stuff out. Maybe over the summer or something...
• Didn't quite hit the entire thing at the resistance I wanted, so it'll be another set to back pocket and try again later on in the process. 

I'm really tired. Lift in the books for tomorrow morning with a short 20 minute easy run tagged onto the end. Again, hoping the knee will hold out after strength work, will see how they respond to running while tired. Enjoy what's left of the weekend! (:

Much love,

Jess

Living room workouts are turning out to be pretty clutch

[Day 22B]

I just ate a lot of BBQ. Very happy about that.

Today's PM Workout: Trainer ride, endurance work
Summary:

• WU: 10 mins easy 
• Pre-set: 5 x :30/:30 spin ups 
• Main set: 4 x 
• 4 mins @ 90-95 rpm base 
• 4 mins @ 60 rpm climb (base +4)
• 4 mins @ 90-95 rpm base 
• 3 mins @ 90-95 rpm pick up (base +1) 
• 3 mins easy 
• Technique work: 10 x :45/:15 single leg drill 
• WD: ~5 mins easy 
• Totals: 22.66 mi, 1:33:12, 14.6 mph average

Hit Rate: 22/23 (95.6%)

Notes/thoughts:

• The point of this workout was to learn to recover from the pick ups without dropping the base effort. Just building nice long steady endurance. 60 mins without a full recovery, it was good. (Last round was tough but all in all I'm willing to step it up the next time I do an iteration of this. Haven't decided if I wanna change pace/resistance/total time yet, so we'll see.)
• The best thing about workouts like this one is that they calm the rest of my life freak outs. I was sort of losing it over how much work I have to do and how behind I feel but I conquered this thing so it makes me feel like I can handle whatever else there is that life wants to throw at me. Reminders that we're deeper than we think. 
• My brain definitely went offline in the latter parts of that workout. If I didn't have my timer (get the Seconds app if you haven't already!) running with what each interval was supposed to be written down on it, I would have totally lost my place. All I could really focus on was keeping the pedals turning at the right speed. 
• Worth noting that I had some pretty bad wrist pain in the first 30 or so minutes of the ride (right side). I just adjusted my position a bunch of times and eventually found something that eased it up, and then later on it just seemed to go away...Dunno what the deal is. Will keep an eye on it though.
• Was listening to Swimcerely again (love it sooooo soooooo much) and was thinking about team dynamics in swimming and how we're all super competitive people but at the end of the day we're all rooting for each other and working to lift each other up. It's funny because I'm in medical school now and I feel like applicants are always asking things like whether or not it's competitive and never in my life had I associated competitiveness with sabotage or other negatively connoted actions before so it's been weird to try and address those things. Honestly I feel like medical school much closer resembles a swim team. We're all trying to do something that is, at the end of the day, honestly really difficult. We all work really hard, we're all doing our best, and we all want to be successful. But just because we want to be successful doesn't mean that we don't want our peers to be successful too. We do a lot to help lift each other up, because it's wonderful to help others and it's wonderful to be helped by others. I sort of dislike that people pit competitiveness and genuine niceness against each other because that's not how I think it works. I'm extremely competitive. But I also have a lot of love for my teammates and classmates and I want them to succeed just as much as I want to succeed. And beyond that, I want to play a part in supporting them and helping them succeed whenever it's possible, and I'm 100% sure that they feel the same way about me. I think we really need to lose this notion that competitive people are just out to get you and want you to fail so they can look good. I honestly don't think that's how it works, at least not in my experience. Okay end random Jess musings. Check out Spin's podcast though, it's fantastic. 

So random last minute decision: I'm going to swim practice tomorrow morning! Because...why not? It's 6-7 am, I'll have time to come home and eat some food and get a tiny bit of rest before I go lift with a classmate at 9 am. That'll be okay right? Right? Lol I'm an addict. Someone help me. Anyways, after that it's a pretty busy day. I've got a health screening to work in the afternoon and a take home exam I haven't looked at yet that I really need to start on. But I believe! Gonna go home (I'm in lab right now, but it turns out I couldn't do any lab work because I'm still short a few accesses, which is annoying because I've requested like 7 accesses already and apparently I need even more) and stretch and do some more studying and then hit the sack. 5:25ish alarm tomorrow morning so 9ish bedtime? (Wow so much sleeping in.) That'll be the goal. 9:30 wouldn't be the end of the world either. Alright, that's all from me! (:

Much love,

Jess