Sunday, May 2, 2010

Moving On

I got some tough love about last week's results and I definitely I needed the wake-up call. I put way too much pressure on myself to perform at Xterra West and I absolutely caved beneath it. I didn't handle the food poisoning right, swapped tires when I shouldn't have and stressed out about the heat and the course. Dumb.

I absolutely went into last weekend half-cocked; my easy workouts this week have been nothing short of amazing as I wound up dropping 6 secs per 100 in the pool and running incredibly fast in very easy HR zones. Honestly, I think I dug too deep a hole back in February and never got out of it. Looking back at my training data, I should have recognized it and taken some time off. This is where having someone else coach you helps tremendously. Alas, I still lack the funds to hire a coach. Moving on.

Speaking of moving on, my next planned race is Xterra Tahoe City in June. I had planned on racing Xterra del Valle with brother Steve, but my heel and my bank account are still recovering from the Vegas Race. No worries; plenty of racing left!

The Tahoe course looks steep. Here's the course map from the website. For those of you fuzzy on reading contour maps, the more squiggly lines you cross, the steeper it is. The 22 mile bike course has 2400 feet of gain in it. For comparison, San Juan trail is 22.8 miles with 3700 vertical feet. Actually, looking at it like that makes it seem not so bad. Cool! Mountain champs looks WAY worse: 15.5 miles and 3600 vertical feet. Yeeouch! Looks like a great course, though. I'm all over it. Sorry for the .pdf file, I can't seem to embed it in the 'blog. Computer noob!

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Anyway. Rest and relaxation is done and I'm ready to get back to training. I'm re-visiting some base work and transitioning all my bike workouts to power-based. I've seen some improvements just basing my power zones off my approximated FTP and I'm sure I'll see much more improvements once I get my CP zones all dialed in. I'm excited to see what the rest of the season holds. Off to bed; master's swim in the morning...
E.

2 comments:

allison said...

I think that sometimes it is the races we do poorly at that we wind up taking the most from. They serve maybe even more important of a purpose than the races in which we feel successful.

Jim Stewart said...

Another thing to consider is the stress that you had with your recent job transitioning and ending of school. That is quite a lifestyle change to have to process! Don't be too hard on yourself!