I've been neglecting my blog for no good reason - laziness perhaps? It was a rough week. Not so much rough as in the training was rough, but I had one of my dreaded "bad weeks" mentally. I think my allergies hitting full bore had a little to do with it - all week has been brutal with that. But I was just in a gloom all week, floating along, and even when the weekend hit I wasn't feeling all peaches and cream. Maybe this week will be better in that respect?
Anyway, my training - I had to force myself to work out a few times, and have yet to implement P90X in as I'm now afraid of re-aggravating the elbow tendinitis I've JUST gotten over. As has been a scourge to my weight training for years, my muscles gain strength and size in an extraordinarily fast amount of time, but my tendons and ligaments can't adapt as quickly. So I find myself routinely neglecting the cardinal rule: only increase 10%/week (oh yeah, that's a rule in triathlon training, too). I'd jump 30%, 50%, sometimes even 100%, lifting as much as muscle memory and strength gains would allow, and inevitably I'd go down with an injury. I've been lucky in that I've never snapped or torn a tendon or ligament (to my knowledge) and all weight lifting injuries have healed 100% but it's a systematic problem that I seem to follow like a lemming over a cliff.
With that in mind, I need to follow my triathlon training and NOT jump like I'm prone to do, and I also need to listen to my body, which I'm innately good at. This week I've been plagued with pain in the back of my left knee. This only occurs while biking, and it gets progressively worse regardless of stretching or rest. I think it has something to do with my leg position but I'm not sure how to fix it, there are only so many ways to pedal a bike. It's one of those things I'm going to have to suffer through.
I've been replacing my running with elliptical work as I'm worried my weight will cause knee problems. It had become evident after having a swim/bike day, getting home and having my knees scream at me. I need to be careful about that - at my size a knee injury can be devastating and potentially derail my efforts for a very long time.
We had our first TNT team swim this weekend. It was a basic swimming drills practice, and I nearly drowned half a dozen times. Apparently the only things I was doing correctly were finding myself in the pool and cinching my swim trunks securely. Coach threw pretty much everything else out the window (as she should have) and I had an insanely humbling moment during kick drills.
I will preface this by saying that I leg press over 1400lbs. and can rack out just about any leg curl/leg extension machine. There I am, arms resting on a floating board, being told to ONLY kick the length of the pool. Sure, no problem. So I kick and kick and kick and kick and kick...a rubber ducky floating in the pool passed me. That's how slow I was going. How is it that I can lift a small car with my legs, but I can't kick my fat ass 25 yards in water? I didn't get it. As I moseyed on back during the return lap and settled at the end of the pool, Coach walks over and says "That's OK, Ryan, in your tri you get to wear a wetsuit so you're not gonna have to kick like the rest of the group will. But I still want you do to the drills."
Two things: first, that's fine about having me do the drills, I need to do the drills, I want to learn how to swim properly. Second - how the heck does wearing a wetsuit all of a sudden negate the need to kick?!? I'd have asked her that second one but she sent me down for more laps to work on my breathing, as my head does a full 360 rotation and she'll have none of that. Yeah, almost killed myself trying to breathe - apparently we humans can't breathe water!
It turns out that I was bringing my trail arm forward as I was breathing in, causing a wave of water to rush toward my face. It took 4 laps to finally develop a rhythm that allowed me to breathe an adequate amount and not kill myself. This required the implementation of a hitch in my swim stroke to allow for breathing. So, to recap my sports mechanics quirks: I have a hitch in my golf swing (at the top of the stroke right before I come down on the ball), a hitch in my billiards break shot, a hitch in my baseball/softball swing, and now a hitch in my swim stroke. What the hell?
Anyway, to move on to more fun matters: I bought my bike! And no, not the Fuji - as I was browsing Performance Bike's website Thursday I saw that the Scattante R-330 was back in stock! So I went to the store, spoke with the guy who ordered the Fuji, and he looked online and confirmed it. You'd think that corporate would contact the stores to say "Hey, remember those bikes that were selling like hotcakes until we ran out? Yeah, we got more in." but nope, more lack of communication. So Matt ordered the Scattante, and as Performance was having a "10% off everything" sale, the bike came to $539, down from $599, which was down from $999. Megascore. I also bought a bike carrier, fat boy saddle, spare tubes, a pump...all the essentials. Oh, and I went to Trader Joe's and bought a metric shit-ton of White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Clif Bars...those things are dangerously good.
With that in mind, happy training, and be well!
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