I can’t say that my body is feeling any better after a recovery week, but the way I built my training plan, I guess I couldn’t expect to feel too rested. I don’t have another recovery week until the week of the Doylestown duathlon on April 9th, which is in just 5 short weeks, so I guess I have to suck it up. I guess there is one thing to be happy for, and that is that the weather is starting to turn more favorable to getting back outside to train, which I intend to do more of this week. I managed to get outside on the bike yesterday for around 6 miles after doing around 65 minutes of spin class.. I also got out this morning to run before the rain kicked in too hard (although I still got wet). Tomorrow I expect to get to the gym early and do a “medium swim” for 40 minutes and then drive back home and do a short run outside before going to work.. its a little bit of a change from my normal schedule because generally I would just swim and then run on the indoor track, but that’s the trap I fall into because its convenient, well, convenience is over.

I’m still kind of sore in my lower back like I mentioned the other day, I thought it was my tailbone, but i’m not sure its that. The soreness calmed down pretty good until I went and did an interval class today at the gym after my run since it was raining outside.. its all sore again from that, so I can only attribute the soreness to all the different type of strength exercises i’m doing during circuit and interval sessions, I just hope I didn’t injure anything. The strange thing is that tt doesn’t bother me to run, swim or bike, so I think i’m in okay shape because I can always drop the circuit and interval sessions if I really need to. As for the rest of my body, its all sore from head to toes, from my legs to arms and to my core muscles .. I’m hoping at some point that the soreness actually goes away, but if I remember the soreness during the constant marathon training, it never really does until after the race (and I have 12+ weeks to go yet)..

The plan for this coming week and beyond is to start to get outside at least one or two nights on the bike after work just to get more miles in on an actual bike. I’ve spent the entire winter on a stationary bike and in multirple spin classes per week, which only does so much for my endurance. The fact we set the clocks ahead next weekend is a good thing because that gives me more time to ride after work .. so I intend to adjust my schedule to make that happen.

So for this week I still put in 500 minutes of training broken out as 97 minutes swimming, 99 minutes running and 152 minutes cycling .. mix that in with 155 minute of circuit training wrapped up a pretty heavy week. The circuit training was more than i expected because Stacey took us over 95 minutes on Tuesday morning.. sometimes she just doesn’t know when to say when.. (or maybe I don’t know when to say when). This week we have a track interval, which is going to suck, but I asked for it because I really do get endurance benefits from it regardless of how much I hurt later on in the day.. probably the only other highlight was that I finally swam my first mile non-stop on Friday .. it took me 37 minutes, but I did it.

Lastly I’m feeling like my revised diet is working for me because I don’t feel or look as bloated as I did a few weeks ago. I feel the difference in my performance and in how I feel as a result of increasing my protein and cutting back on the sugar and sodium. I’m on a pretty strict 2800 calorie diet … I actually resisted a few “goodies” this week including pizza Friday night (i ate a salad), donuts at work on Thursday and Rita’s Italian Ice today (i had cottage cheese instead when we got home). That is willpower .. its not as hard as you think once you put your mind to it.

So back to the hard training this week, hopefully I can make it to my Thursday recovery day .. (i’m halfway there).