anti-social media guru

Swim: 4h 27m - 13,460 (-1:03 and -4,416)
Bike: 14h 34m - 302 (+10:39 and +243 km)
Weight: 155 (no change)

A bit late with this month's summary, but here goes.

Swim
July has been another off month with swimming. Most of the distance I put on was near the end of the month, with the 2k Kempenfest race and a bunch of swimming afterward. Almost all my distance has been open water though, which has been a lot of fun. 

Bike
Biking has been working out amazingly. I was able to get out a lot, started riding a (very flat) training loop by the beach during the week, and on weekends I've been bumping up the distances a lot. The last weekend ride I was able to do this month was about 90k, and I felt absolutely great afterward. 

Run
Nothing.

Strength
Nothing.

Weight
I've decided to take some time off from trying to drop the last five. But with all the cycling that I've been doing, I'm not exactly going to make an effort to replenesh every calorie either. If I can hit my goal by Muskoka fine, but it's not going to be something that I'm going to actively pursue. 

My injury
The injury got a big aggravation from running barefoot to the ferry in Gravenhurst, and it hasn't completely subsided yet. Riding has been making it slightly sore, but even though my distances are increasing a lot, the pain isn't. I'm thinking it has more to do not being used to the huge amount of correction the orthotics in my bike shoes have. Still I can't wait to get more solid info from the MRI.

Next month's plan
For August I'm starting a quick build cycle for Muskoka. I'll only be able to get one in with tapering, but it should be a pretty solid one. I already have a fairly decent base, so I'm hoping to make sure I'm going to be able to handle it well. We'll see how it goes.

Swim: 5h 30m - 17,877 m (-4:02 and -12,928 m)
Bike: 3h 55m - 59.04 km (+3:55 and +59.04 km)
Run (water): 0 (-3:00)
Strength: 0 (no change)
Weight: 155 (+1)

This hasn't been my most inspired month of training to say the least. 

Swim
In the pool I felt like I hit a plateau, which was a little disappointing after all the gains I've been making over the past couple months. I had a couple benchmarks I was hoping to overcome, but there was nothing new to report. I did manage to get very close to a few other ones, so at least I wasn't losing. Also halfway through the month our sessions with Ayesha finished up, so it seemed like it was a good time for a break. 

On the upside, I've been able to get a lot more open water swimming in. I've been a bit of a lake slut—really getting around. So far I've managed to swim in Scugog, Manitouwabing, Gulliver's, Musselman, Kelso, and Wilcox. Still haven't hit Ontario or Simcoe yet. I managed to put two feet (barely) in Ontario before bailing. It was way to freaking cold. 

Bike
I went on a bike ride and it didn't hurt too much. I was wearing one of the braces I picked up for water running and didn't push very hard, but it didn't hurt. At the same time I haven't been swimming. This is starting to worry me that swimming might be part of the reason why my injury hasn't been healing with the rest I've been giving it. But more on that later. The point is I'm going to start riding again, just not so much.

Run
I had to drop this last month.

Strength
Nothing.

Weight
I've been eating without putting any thought into it. I haven't weighed myself properly for the past couple weeks, but I've been hovering around the 155 mark whenever I have. It's nice to take a break, even though I took one last month. And the month before.

My injury
I saw the shockwave therapist. It turned out he's actually a surgeon, who only does shockwave if he thinks it could work. Good thing, that's expensive. So now I'm booked for an MRI. We'll see how that goes. Since this is Canada and I'm not out of work because of my injury (and I don't work for the government), I've got to wait until maybe August. It could be worse. He seems to think I'll likely be requiring surgery. Still, it could be worse. I just want it fixed.

The strange thing is since I haven't been swimming, I've actually been having less pain. It actually feels like it's finally starting to subside. It's a good thing, but wouldn't it be ironic if the one activity I've been doing to keep myself going is the one that's been extending my pain?

One thing I noticed is this weird spasming my calf makes any time I go swimming. Not even just in the pool where I'm kicking off the wall, but even in open water. After Gulliver's Lake I had a huge cramp in my injury area, and then all the way home my calf was making these strange pulsing movements. So really I don't know. This is starting to make sense. So it looks like it might actually be a good idea for me to stop swimming. ARGH.

Tomorrow I'm going for a 2-3 hour bike ride, then on Saturday I will be swimming open water again. I'll make a conscious effort to not kick, and hopefully I'll be able to avoid the cramp. I'm pretty sure these odd inner-calf cramps (or spasms) are directly responsible for this, and every time I get one it sets me back. At least that's my current theory. I'm going to test it out this weekend, and hopefully I'll know more.

Next month's plan
This is dependent on how my ride and swim go this weekend. It may turn out that I'm going to spend the next six weeks (or more) as a cyclist. Or maybe I'll be able to swim and bike. In which case I'm going to have fun with. Regardless I'm going to do the Gravenhurst olympic-distance swim/bike, and just retire before the run. I'm sure I'll be able to handle one 1500m swim followed by a bike. If I get cramping I'll just quit the ride. It's not like I'm going for a PB or anything.

So there's not much of a solid plan, but at least there IS a bit of a plan. 

Swim: 9h 32m - 30,805 m (OVER 30 kilometers!?!) (+2:22 and +7,155 m)
Bike: 0 (-5:49 and -125.86 km)
Run (water): 3h (- 0:40)
Strength: 0 (no change)
Weight: 154 (-2)

"Your season is over." Not exactly what I wanted to hear from the chiropodist, but that's the story for this month. It looks like my tibialis posterior is particularly resistant to repairing its self this month. Even water running is done now. Walking is even getting difficult. This is pretty frustrating at this point, so now I'm going to be stepping up the rehab.

Next step is to get some shockwave therapy done. From what I understand it hurts like hell and it reaggravates the injury to allow it to heal again. That'll take about three weeks to get done. Then there's another six weeks of total rest. Total rest. Like not even swimming. This is going to be brutal, but I suppose there are worse things. If I don't do this now then I could potentially be facing surgery or a lifetime of issues. Like this isn't even sport-related anymore, this is total quality of life.

Brutal.

Swim
Anyway, this month I've made some great gains in the swim department. As you can see in the chart below, my Chronic Training Load (the blue line) has gone from a 25 to a 35.

What does that mean? It means that I've still been making awesome gains in the swimming department.

0:37 50m on 4/27/2011 and 5/30/2011 (1:14/100m) (no change)
1:32 100m on 4/14/2011 (1:32/100m) (no change)
3:25 200m on 5/16/2011 (1:42/100m) -3s (1.4% improvement)
6:52 400m on 5/30/2011 (1:43/100m) -15s (3.5% improvement)
18:21 1000m on 4/16/2011 (1:50/100m) (no change)
42:11 2000m on 2/16/2011 (2:07/100m) (no change)

Not a huge jump for all of them like last month. The gains have been much smaller. I've been kicking and pushing off the wall a lot less this month. Although this month I didn't do a 100, 200, 1000 or 2000 m benchmark at all. I'm sure if I had done those I would have seen some gains too.

The biggest indicator of my fitness this month was the last 50 and 400 m benchmark. Every other time I've had a best 50 or 400 it's been on separate days. I've either sacrificed my 50 to get a good 400 or the other way around. On the 30th I tied my fastest 50 and then went on to do my fastest 400. I'm pretty happy about how that's worked out.

Bike
Nothing to report. This sucks.

Run
Had to stop water running. That sucks. It was getting fun.

Strength
I was too busy swimming to get much strength training in. I think that's a pretty good tradeoff though.

Weight
This month has been a bit crazy for me, so I wasn't really able to concentrate on getting this under control and getting through to the last point. That said I was still able to get almost halfway there for the month, so it wasn't a complete loss (no pun intended).

Next month's plan
It's hard to know exactly what the next month is going to look like for me until I visit the doctor who will do the shockwave therapy. I might have to completely stop everything, which would be pretty brutal. I picked up a set of SwimBandz, which should hopefully prevent me from losing too much swim fitness.

If all I can do next month is rehab and upper body stuff, I'll probably end up doing some paddling, and I'll get back to the P90X (or similar), and maybe spend the next six weeks building core strength, working on my glutes, hips and hamstrings, and hopefully getting me primed to get right back into things in a better place than I was when I left off. I'll get rid of the last of my stubborn gut, and just concentrate on completing the rebuild process.

It should be a good month. I hope.

Swim: 7h 11m - 23,650 m (-0:08 and + 350 m)
Bike (mostly outdoor): 5h 49m - 125.86 (+3:08 and 59.78 km)
Run (water): 3h 40m (+3:40)
Strength: 0 (-5:45)
Weight: 156 (+0.6) 

This month was both totally awesome and really disappointing. I basically spent it eating and swimming, eating and swimming. I made small gains in the weight department and huge gains with swim fitness. Water running became a constant, and cycling has stopped.

Swim

Totally breakout month for me in the swim department. Thanks to stepping it up to three solid swim workouts a week, greatly increasing my nutrition, and applying a much better turn at the end of each lap, I've beaten my own benchmark at every distance I tried.

0:37 50m on 4/27/2011 (1:14/100m) -1s (2.6% improvement)
1:32 100m on 4/14/2011 (1:32/100m) -10s (9.8% improvement)
3:25 200m on 4/30/2011 (1:43/100m) -12s (5.5% improvement)
7:07 400m on 4/20/2011 (1:47/100m) -28s (6.2% improvement)
18:21 1000m on 4/16/2011 (1:50/100m) (new)
42:11 2000m on 2/16/2011 (2:07/100m) (no change)

Not bad for one month. Total distance and time swam this month was actually almost identical to last month. I swam slightly further, and swam slightly less time. But my pace times have dropped considerably, and now I have a proper threshold time. Also my consistency has gone way up, so now I can actually base workouts around my threshold time and get the proper workout. Or at least on Saturdays when I make my own (or work off the one that TrainingPeaks' virtual coach has given me).

I'm probably the most excited about the improvement in the 50m time, even though it's the smallest improvement percentage-wise. I suspected that when I had the 38 second time that it might have been a slight miscount. I had that time back in November, and despite dropping all my other benchmark times regularly, that one stood. Plus even if it was off by one second, that's a huge margin in such a small distance. The entire day of the benchmark I was focussing on that one goal. Even though I had a 400m benchmark right after, all my attention, planning and warming up went toward that 50. I got exactly the time I was planning/hoping for. It was awesome to get it, just barely, right on. Perfect.

There aren't really many benchmarks in the list that really stand out as being performances I can absolutely directly improve on. But I'm fairly confident I can do a sub-7 minute 400m if I properly focus, and if I'm in a pool warmer than a bathtub (with a little less traffic), then I'm sure I could shave my 200m down a bit too. For that matter, my 100 would likely go sub-1:30 too with a little focus.

Here's my performance management chart for the month. The red section is April. Huge improvements overall. But you can definitely see what happens when you go six days without training. Although on the other hand, that break may have really helped me get rested enough to push harder when I got back on. That wasn't intended to be my recovery week, but I think it worked well as one anyway.

Cycling

This sucked. I went with the mid-foot cleat, it worked well, or so I thought, then everything sucked. I'm off the bike now. It was nice to get those few rides in while I could. In all seriousness though, I'm going to get something like an air cast and screw a cleat onto the bottom of it. Seriously. More on the injury further down.

Running

This month I've been set with water running weekly. It's actually been a lot more fun than I expected. We've got some bomb tunes, and some great company to commiserate with over our injuries. In some ways it's actually more fun than the real thing. It's nice to be able to "run" for an hour straight, since that's something I rarely do in real life (even before my injury). I'm a little concerned about my injury possibly being aggravated by it, but...

Strength

Okay, so P90X went the way of the dodo this month. I wanted to keep up with the core at least, but I haven't been feeling it much. It just reminds me that I'm not able to do any of the cooler/better/harder workouts in the program.

Weight

Okay, so I'm up. It's actually been a pretty brutal month. I've been eating a bit more than what I would consider normal for me. During the week has been working out well. I've been timing my nutrient intake better, and I've never gone to the pool without more than enough calories to get me through it. It's helped so much to keep my energy and enthusiasm levels up. That's something I haven't had before. The problem this month was that I've been binging on weekends. The graph illustrates that perfectly. Ouch.

I had an appointment with my chiropodist, and he gave me six weeks. If I'm not pain free by that point, I'm getting put in an air cast for another six weeks. If that doesn't work... well he didn't want to say anything for sure, but it might need to be sliced open and reattached. EFFFFFF! I immediately stopped riding. I'm going to try to strap my foot in place a little better with water running, and I'm actually secretly fairly convinced that swimming isn't helping either. My new awesome turns that helped me drop all that time are probably responsible.

I'm thinking about picking up an air cast and using it for all my workouts. Swim, bike, water running. It's lame, but it might just be the tradeoff I need. I obviously won't be able to ride much, since that'll definitely do some weird shit with my knee, but at least I might be able to get my heart rate up and fire up my quads a bit.

This kinda really sucks.

Next month

For May I'm going to concentrate on resting my foot and eating properly so I can drop five pounds of fat, while maintaining my newfound swim fitness and not losing any muscle. I'm going to properly time when I eat, so instead of just making sure I'm getting the right amount of calories, I'm going to get them at the right times so I don't get tired, even though I'll be running with a substantial calorie deficit. I'm also going to up my protein intake considerably.

On workout days I'm going to start off with a substantial breakfast (Timmy Turkey Bacon Clubs @ 380 calories FTW), a decent lunch ~600 calories of whatever (Teriyaki, Sub, same stuff I eat every other day), a snack or two of some type (300 calories of fruit, maybe a latte or iced coffee), straight-up carbs an hour before the workout (another 200 calories worth), and then a bowl of cereal and milk post-workout (awesome protein/carb ratio and maybe 350 calories).

Non-workout days I'll pretty much just drop one of the snacks and pre-workout carbs. Maybe replace a snack or something with more chicken breast.

Hopefully after May I can build on a solid nutritional foundation and just up my intake while keeping it healthy. That's the plan at least. 

Swim: 7h 19m - 22,300 m (+17:16 and 15,900 m)
Bike (mostly on trainer): 2h 41m  - 66.08 km (- 2:58 and 164.94 km)
Run (water and elliptical): 3h 40m (+3:40)
Strength: 5h 45m (+5:45)
Weight: 155.4 (-1.4) 

This month has worked out pretty well for training. I planned on doing less biking (which I did) and more strength training (which I also did). Halfway through the month I also started swimming an extra day a week, and I've been trying to fit in water running to try to get myself a bit better prepared for when my injury is fully healed.

There's a really cool chart that Training Peaks makes that shows you how much progress you're making. It's not exactly supposed to represent your speed or endurance, it's more like a cumulative training load. So if you have a higher training load, you should have better speed or endurance if you've been training for it. If that makes any sense. Basically the yellow line is how rested you are. The pink line is how hard you've just worked. The blue line is the main one that shows how awesome you're doing. Something like that. I think. Either way it's going up and I'm getting faster and more consistent in the pool.

Swim
The chart below is for swim over the past few months. The yellow highlight is for this month, and the green in the middle was March break, which kinda levelled things off a bit because of the missed swim session(s). You can see how swimming once a week (during most of February) wasn't even enough to maintain my level of fitness. Twice a week brought it up a bit, but three times a week has supercharged it. Also if you could see more of December in there you'd know how much fitness is lost when you take a break for the holidays.

Right now I'm in a recovery cycle, which is where you take a week going shorter, less intense distances, but I'm having a bit of trouble letting myself do it. My yellow line shoud be going up right now to prepare for another cycle of building. 

I've also complied my fastest swim times at various distances. I still need to do a proper 1000m benchmark, but for now, based on the calculations I've been able to do based on the other ones, I should be able to do it in either 19:50 or 20:30.

0:38 50m swim on 11/17/2010
1:42 100m swim on 2/9/2011
3:37 200m swim on 3/23/2011
7:35 400m swim on 1/12/2011
42:11 2000m swim on 2/16/2011

Biking has been going better since I relocated my cleat to the middle of the shoe. Not super awesome yet, because I can still feel some aggravation, but at least I'm able to do a little bit of riding now. I'm hoping hoping hoping to be able to ramp up the distances quickly, since I'm still planning on doing another hairshirt this year.

Running on the elliptical kinda killed my tendon during one extremely hard session. One Saturday I did 20 minutes softly and I thought that meant I was good to go for unlimited elliptical workouts. On the positive side I learned a lot about my injury because of it. It'll definitely be easier to work around now that I know this. I've got an appointment with my chiropodist where I'm going to discuss some options. Should be fun!

Strength training has been a bit of a mixed bag. Yes it's a lot more than I did last month, but I wasn't really able to follow the whole P90X plan. I already had to skip a few of the workouts because of my injury, so basically all I had left was the upper body ones. They can be a little tricky to fit them into my swim schedule. I've more or less figured it out, but at the same time all this work has been aggravating an old couch surfing injury. Seriously. Couch surfing and computer typing. Jebus. So I'm forced to do less of the exercises they're saying to do (avoiding all the shoulder ones and some of the pull downs. It's annoying.

I'm still going to follow the P90X schedule as I can, and I'm keep doing the workouts I can do. I'm pretty stoked that I can do more pushups than I could before. Plus even with as few core workouts as I did, I noticed a difference in lower back pain, my annoying hip flexors, and I can definitely feel the difference swimming. At the bare minimum I'm going to keep up wth regularly doing the main core workout, because it's awesome.

My weight and nutrition have been a challenge this month. I was making a good push to get down to my goal of 150, and by the middle of the month it certainly looked doable. I had one bad day and it domino'd the rest of the month. The night before I missed dinner. I was exhausted (probably from running too much of a calorie deficit, now that I think about it), so I passed out as soon as I got home. The next morning I got up to head to the pool. I ate a Clif bar on the way (just finishing it as I was parking), and I had a balls-out swim.

At the end of 800m I got a serious headache. I've had these before from swimming, but this one wouldn't go away. I felt like I was going to puke and I was dizzy. I had no time to digest that Clif bar (as if that would have even been enough), so I was basically running on complete empty. When I got home I was completely out of it. 

That night we had a party and I overate. Like a lot. For the next 18 hours I ate non-stop. My body was seriously trying to tell me something, and I couldn't help but listen. Since then I've upped my intake considerably, especially just before swim. I can handle a calorie deficit for cycling, and even running works fine coming off a fast, but not swimming. The next month I'll be concentrating on proper nutrition instead of what I've been doing.

I also discovered that a Tim Hortons Turkey Bacon Club has only marginally more calories than the bagel I usually eat for breakfast, but it makes me feel way more full and it's got way more protein. Super.

Next month's schedule has been set, and I'm going to be going up to three days of biking, one day of water running, and one day of "running" (read probably walking for half an hour). Everything else should more or less be the same. I'm going to eat better, and it's going to be awesome. That's the plan.

To get the extra cycling in during the week, I finally figured out a plan how to ride from work, since we don't have showers there anymore. On Mondays and Wednesdays I'll drive my bike to work and leave it there overnight. Then on Tuesdays and Thursdays I'll take transit to work then ride home. 25k (taking a lot of meandering bike paths) means I should be able to get in close to an hour of riding each Thursday. Tuesdays when I ride to the pool for water running I'll get in a bit more. It's awesome when you can combine training with transportation.

Just a few simple changes to the plan that should help. First I removed a P90X legs and back workout. I probably can't do most of the leg one with my injury anyway, and I'm sure I'll get enough back work on my Saturday swims. Into that time I moved my 30 minute trainer ride from Sunday, which makes it a complete day of rest. Only exception is the 13, which is an exceptional swim workout.

I'm actually pretty surprised how well the P90X and my Training Peaks annual training plan meshed together. The random day I chose to start (March 7), actually works out to be the start of a new build period. So both recovery week periods line up.

It also worked out that the major two upper body P90X workouts are on the same days as swim workouts. I'm not sure if this is necessarily good or if it's going to to too hard. I'll likely do the strength training in the morning and the swim at night. If it seems like it's going to be a bit too hard I might cut the strength training down a bit.

Okay, now my strength training plan is uber public so this means I'm going to have to stick with it, right?

Swim: 2h 49m  - 6400 m
Bike (rollers/trainer): 5h 37m 56s  - 164.94 km
Run: 0
Other: 0 

Wow, this month went really fast. It sucks to have missed as many swim workouts as I have this month, the total time spent is about half I did in January. Still, I have started logging active time only, so that must account for a good part of it.

On the bike I really picked it up, but at the same time it looks like it's reaggravating my injury again, so this number will drop for next month. I might have to see if I can get a better look at this. It's not really supposed to be affected by non-impact activity. I have been doing a few key upgrades on the bike though, so I'm really getting excited to test them out on the road. Hopefully that will be possible sooner rather than later. 

For March I'm going to make an effort (yeah, I said this last month too) to actually work on building muscle. I've got the P90x queued up and ready to go. I might not be able to do any squats or much lower-body stuff right now, but any gains to my core or upper body will be well used when it comes time. Plus it's time to get rid of the winter insulation so I'm ready to run once I get the go ahead. Now's the time.