Race Fitness

My body usually takes a while to reach 'race fitness' each season. I usually end up doing events in early March that turn out being reality checks for me.

This season has been particularly bad in regards to reaching race fitness. It is important to distinguish fit from race fit - and know I am fit, for many recent individual sessions tell me so.

However, putting it all together from a number of sessions into one successful event is more difficult. As an example: recently, I did a workout that consisted of a bike warm up, a steady aerobic session, then 15 x 1k running, on the road. I use a 1k, not flat, stretch of road inside my neighborhood. do a km out, then a km back. It starts right from my house, goes downhill a little, turns right, slight uphill, turn right, uphill slightly, then downhill slightly, left turn, then flat the remainder of the 500m. the average rest was 30 seconds, and each k was just under 3:30 average. Nothing earth shattering, but an ok pace for a half ironman.

The first race of the season should happen shortly though, so I can see where the fitness currently stands putting all 3 sports together.

Spring is here

The past few days have been nothing short of gorgeous. Flowers are blooming, birds are chirping, the sun is shining. But every year around the same time I get taken over by the pollen in the air. I am terribly allergic and suffer with the amount of these particles in the air. I am sneezy, my eyes and nose itch, and I feel a bit lethargic.

But I will take the warm weathr over the cold anytime, so I am very much looking forward to training in the heat - I do far better in warmer races, even hot ones, than the ones where the temps dip below 50F. I guess being Brazilian my body is just more used to hot, humid, more tropical conditions.

Long time no update!

I know it has been quite some time since I last updated. I am usually good about posting, but life has been so hectic that I've been stretched thin since the beggining of the year amd the end of my first training camp of the year.

Everything is going quite well. I am only a few short weeks from being done with my 1L year at Alabama Law. I antecipate the next 2 years being far less difficult and time consuming, which means I will once again be able to devote a reasonable amount of hours of my week to training.

Because of this change, I have adapted my training to take less time. As such, I had to up the intensity quite a bit, and it has been rough to recover from many of the sessions. As an example, on Thurday I went out for a 8 x 3 min hard/2min spin, followed immediately by ( running) 2 min hard/ 30 sec. walk. Afterwards, I rode home. I just did the repeats on a flat, out and back section of road 10 miles from my apartment in Tuscaloosa ( where I spend my week days), and did the run intervals on the dirt roads nearby. It really reminded me of my long gone ITU days - I just put my running flats on my Hydrotail and off I was. This is definitely a session I will be doing weekly.

This Saturday ( Mar 14) I will race my first event of the season - the Camp Partlow Duathlon. I have only done a few Duathlons in my life - they hurt a lot! - and am quietly looking forward to pushing myself over a run/bike/run event once again.

I will update soon about it. Don't want this first post back to get too long!

FB