Day 133, Week 19, Short Core [8:30]

I decided to run in 2nd gear instead of do elliptical to get my 300 calories.  I came up short 9 calories on my estimate of time to run.  That's okay.  If I want to be sticky about getting in 300 calories, our walk with Chumly burned at least 9 calories, so I'm okay.  I planned on 20 minutes for the run, so do 21 next time.  Feeling real good.  Finally feel rested.  I had 13 pushups and some other parts of the core workout had more reps than usual.

Day 132, Week 19, Short Brick [45min/1.75M]

45 seconds on the single leg work was a bit much.  40 seconds was a good challenge.  The run was really hard.  Still recovering I guess and maybe more water and nutrition might've helped.

Day 131, Week 19, Short Core [8:30]

Switching around my plan for the week because I feel like I'm going to be recovering all week since I crapped out on my 7 mile run yesterday. So, Thu, today, Short Core, Fri: Short Brick, Sat: Short Core. Not much to say about today.  Got core done and elliptical to burn 300 calories total.

Day 130, Week 19, Medium Run [7M]

Gave out at 4.84 miles.  Really hot and muggy.  If I had my wits better, I might have walked the remaining 2.16 or even run some of it.  But, even on walk back I was feeling exhausted.   I'm sure I'm still recovering from Sunday's race, so I'm not concerned about it. I might rethink the rest of this week.

Day 129, Week 19, Long Core [34 minutes]

I bit tiring more than usual, probably still in recovery from Sunday's race, but not bad.  Reduced rest periods by 15 seconds (4:45/6:45/9:45).  And added elliptical to get 300 calories burned.

Day 128, Week 19, Short Core [8.5 minutes]

Good short core day with elliptical for 300+ calories burned. Back and shoulders are feeling fine.  Mary put on generous Ben Gay a couple of times yesterday and my hips are fine and not hurting like sometimes they are wont to.  That's probably because I didn't actually run a big percentage yesterday.  And, my calves, hammies and quads feel fine.

Day 127, Week 18, Ft. Ritchie Olympic Triathlon

Horrible race.  Although, the split legs of the swim were great.  Both were successive PRs of 1:59, 1:56 per hundred yards for 0.25-0.50 miles.  However, with having the split legs and running along the beach between them, I tried to mark laps on my watch and it screwed up all the tracking for the whole race. I did the best I could to salvage my results with what I got.  And on top of that, I got no GPS data for the swim. Ah, c'est la vie.  The think I hated about the swim there was that on the back side, I frequently would have vegetation plastered on my when turning to breathe.  That alone may make me reconsider do this triathlon in the future, and I don't like the having to get out and run the beach between the two legs. My swim finish 67/135. I'm very pleased with that.

The bike actually was the hardest course I'd ever done, even more so than Diamond in the Rough up in Perryville with it's monster hill coming out of Port Deposit.  Ft. Ritchie climb was 75.5 ft/mi and Diamond 49.6.  My weekly long rides, now up to 45 miles are typically 65 ft/mi.  Waterman's will be 4.  The worst thing was that around mile 14 give or take a couple, my back started to spasm along with my top shoulder muscles and biceps starting to hurt. The back was by far the worst. The only way to get relief was to coast standing-up straight and tall over my front wheel and stretch my back.  Unfortunately, there was many opportunities for coasting especially after the turn around and the 3.5 mile long hill on the way back with a 3.6% grade. Actually, that was quite doable for me in my lowest gear.  If it'd been much longer, it would've become grueling, any much steeper I might not have been able to do it. However, I think it did drain me quite a bit and it really made my run suffer. My bike finished 111/135.  I also lost time early on by a contact slipping out of place.  The might have taken me 3 minutes or so to fix. That is fine.

The run was the worst of all.  My spasming back forced me stop half a dozen times to lay down and stretch out my back which really did a good job on relieving the pain.  However, it would always work it's way back, especially on hills. And the tough bike ride forced me to walk a lot more than run.  I almost decided on the first loop that I was done because I knew I couldn't continue with the back pain. However, on the last time I stretched my back I told myself that I know what I need to do to be able to finish.  Don't worry about when the back pain comes back, just stop and stretch it out and run as much as I can, then walk.  It doesn't matter if they give me a medal or not and I go past the 4 hour cut-off, it's just finish the course that matters.  I ended at finishing at 4:04:14 and got my medal.  Yeah!  Here's the profile of my pace during the run.  You can see when I was running, walking and stopped to stretch. (Faster is up.)  There's a few down spikes and those are when I stopped at the water stops. The drop of at the end is me forgetting to stop my watch.

I'm pleased that under the circumstances I was able to keep my chin up and finish.  I finished 134/135 in the run.  There was a guy that passed me while I was stretch who said was battling leg spasms, so maybe he was the 135th. Of course.  I estimate maybe I lost 6 minutes stretching my back.  If I hadn't, then, I would've moved up one place.

I finished dead last overall and that's fine considering my battle.  Taking out the stretching time, I would've come in 132nd.  Of course, the stretching time was also resting time, so maybe not.  In the end, my bike performance was the killer.  I'm not sure what happened there that I got bad spasms and other muscle pains. The cropped up before I got to the hard part of the ride.  On July 27th, I got a new demo seat to try out and also some aerobars.  On the 29th, I did a 45 mile run with them and didn't have any problems.  The only real difference today is I swam 1500 meters beforehand. Maybe if I had my aleve on me I might have been able to fix the problem with that, but I'm not sure about that. The only other thing I can think of is maybe I wasn't drinking enough water.  I drank maybe 1/2-3/4 of the rate  usually do on my training runs.

Another lesson learned as that I almost went out of T2 without my bib, but luckily the volunteer at the  exit pointed it out.  I lay out everything so I can see everything I need so I don't have to think about what I need.  It's all there right in front of me. But, this time, I layed my wet suit over my stuff and during transitions I grabbed underneath it for the things in my head I needed to get.  Today, my bib wasn't in my head, so I had to run back and get it.  It wasn't a big deal, just frustrating that I screwed up my plan and that I had to run back while at the same time my back was killing me. Lesson learned it don't put my wet suit on top of my stuff.

Next is North East on the 29th.  The bike looks like 16% less climb than today and the run is about the same.