Boring swim.

Two points:

1) I did NOT swim an odd number of lengths.  So I have no idea how my Garmin Swim ended up on 25m instead of 50m.  It does worry me a little bit, because up until now I’ve been putting complete faith in the distances and numbers that it has been reporting.  But now that it has lost (or gained) 25m somewhere I will have to test it against some manual data collection.

2) I have no idea how this workout even happened.  I had zero motivation when I got home from work.  Zero.  I really didn’t want to workout at all.  And I was especially unmotivated to do the pushups.  I was so unmotivated that I didn’t even try to motivate or trick myself to go workout.  I actually agreed to skip it and just have dinner and drink some beer.  And yet, somehow instead I got changed and went and swam (I didn’t do the pushups).  Still not sure how that happened.  The only thing that I can think of is that Evil Me who usually tries to convince me not to workout was somehow aware of how terrible/guilty I would  feel if I didn’t do it and so just went ahead and jumped on the bandwagon and sent me to swim.

I got up early (0430) again and knocked out my (5-mile) run before work (and before the sun was up).  It felt terrible.  The first two miles were the worst, after that I warmed up and loosened up.  But I was still a good 25-seconds off my pace from my last 5-miler.  Not a big deal, the easy runs are just about doing them but a little annoying.

I also think that performance-wise I’m really an afternoon/evening athlete, in that I do better workouts in the latter half of the day than I do in the morning.  I’m pretty sure that there is some scientific research to back this up too.  I’m not actually going to go and find it and post anything about it HERE (maybe someday I will) but trust me on that.  I know a lot of things.  And I’m pretty sure that’s one of them.

Regardless, based on my current life situation (long commute, work hours, avaialbe run routes, etc.) it is way more optimal for me to do my workouts in the morning.  So I’m going to keep doing that.  I hope.

Old faithful: 8 x 400m with 200m recovery intervals.  The usual route.

I gotta tell you, I’m pretty happy with those splits.  Obviously I’m nowhere near where I need to be eventually.  But considering I’m only in a low/moderate intensity run training phase, the fact that I was at a 6:45 – 7:30 pace without totally blowing out a lung (including a 7:07 final interval!) is good enough for me.

So Monday was a holiday here in Thailand.  So of course, I wasted my whole day, didn’t go and do any of the local sightseeing that is still on my list and even messed up my workout.

I was supposed to do pushups and a bike ride, which would have fit perfectly with my day off: I could have driven out into the country and gotten a nice ride in with some scenery.  Instead I brain farted, did pushups and tried to swim.  I say tried because even though our pool opens at seven AM the maintenance guy decided to clean the pool at 0830 while I was swimming and after two or three laps of dodging his scrub brush and vacuum hoses I lost my patience and kanked it.

Which put me in a bad mood all day because I was in the middle of good workout.  I was actually doing a programmed workout with a warm up and then 5 x EBEH laps (25m each of Easy-Build-Easy-Hard).  I wasn’t necessarily enjoying it at the time (my upper body was smoke from doing PU first, not a good plan) and that probably contributed to my willingness to be thwarted by the pool man obstacle course.  Nevertheless, it was frustrating and my 100m splits were 15-20 seconds faster than my normal LSD plodding pace so I felt like it was a worthwhile exercise.

As for the pushups.  Ouch.  220 reps with only 60 seconds rest between sets.  For the first time since starting the second run through I added extra rest (+60 seconds before the final set of 55) and still had to take a quick break.  I went to my knees for about 15-seconds somewhere around 35-ish.  Overall though it felt pretty good.

Two more days of workouts before my next max rep test.

This was the best week I’ve had in a long time.  I got back to my daily workout routine and I even got into a MORNING WORKOUT ROUTINE.  Awesome.

I was intending to do a neat little summary chart here that included my mileage and minutes for each discipline for the week and some other neat stuff . . . but I’m getting caught up from a couple days behind so instead I’m just going to post this picture I took of a guy driving down the main street of North Pattaya with fully lit and operational charcoal grill sidecar.

“Jeez Bob how did you get a concussion-broken-arm-second-degree-burn-combo injury?”

“Well, I wrecked my motor-scooter-kabob-stand while weaving in and out of traffic without a helmet.  You know, a regular Tuesday.”

Good 5-mile run.  The best one I’ve had in a while.  Sub-nine minute pace is solid for me these days.

It boggles my mind that I used to be able to do 5-miles in 40-minutes.  Who was that guy?  I’ll ask him when I get back to that level.  Which I will.  Eventually.

BTW, I’m also wickedly impressed with my consistent pacing.  One second difference on the out and back?  Without ever looking at the watch or my pace?  That’s pretty pro.

which means towards using it to improve.

This graph above is from this workout below:

And these definitions:

Are what pop up when you click on those little question marks next to the relevant term in Garmin Connect.  So.  Yeah.  Doesn’t help much right?  I will say that it explains why these numbers are always the same for me (because Avg Efficiency is the Avg SWOLF normalized to a 25m pool . . . and I do all my workouts in a 25m pool).

Good first step.  Now I’ll have to do some research and figure out ways to use these numbers to try and get better.  Or something like that.

Two nights of early to bed resulted in this week’s sign that the apocalypse is upon us: namely, that I woke up early, then actually GOT OUT OF BED and did my workout BEFORE work.  Kiss your loved ones, folks, the end of the world is nigh.

40-minutes on the bike:

I’m only posting this map shot because for the first time I noticed that there is supposedly and airport damn close to my route.

Didn’t feel great on this run, combination of being rushed getting out the door and being a little underhydrated.  Gonna work on consistently drinking more water since we’re getting into the hot season and I can’t walk from my car to the office without breaking a sweat.  Never mind going for a 5-mile run.

I’m also going to start making 5-miles my baseline easy run again instead of the four I have been doing lately.

Also, before my run I knocked out my planned pushup workout.  Felt really good.  Much stronger than when I did the same workout the first time through the program.  Very encouraging.  The final set was supposed to 45(+) and I did 50.  Probably could have done a few more but I was in a hurry to get to my run.

For the first time in a long time.  Skipped my pushups but honestly I’m sleep deprived enough that I don’t really care.  I’ll knock them out tomorrow.

I played around with my breathing tonight.  Usually I just breath every third stroke but tonight I did some 5-breath laps and some 4-breath laps.  Nothing structured, just playing around.  I’m not sure if it had any effect but I’m going to compare these charts from tonight:

With the charts that I usually get from swimming and see if there’s any difference.  Probably not but it might at least force me to learn something about the damn things.