"If at any time you feel like doing nothing, do nothing."

. . . . . Or so says Joe Friel about the few weeks following 70.3 and Ironman-distance races in his book Going Long.
Well, the truth is, I don't ever really feel like doing nothing, but my body has crashed pretty hard the past couple of nights, so I've let it. The last few mornings there was just no way I was getting up at 3:45 or 4am to travel almost 20 miles for 4:45 or 5am Club workouts. It looks like I'll be seeing the club on the weekends this week!

That isn't to say I did nothing. Tuesday night I went out for a little more than two and a quarter miles of light hill repeats. I felt AMAZING: the strongest and quickest I've felt in months. My body is recovering so fast from the HIM. (I actually went more like 2.5mi, but I don't count the part where I dropped the pooped puppy back off at home.) And I could have gone a lot longer, but I'm not pushing it on my 2nd week back from a big race for which I was undertrained to begin with. Besides, it's all too easy in the first week or two after the race to push too hard to get back because you're still on a race high.

So yesterday I took my first complete rest day of the week - no running, no swimming, no cycling, no walking. I sat up till about 10pm and paid my bills, ordered my Road ID (now everyone can stop panicking when I'm out alone in the heat running 8+ miles or riding 30-50), ordered my Infinit, did some laundry and continued hanging things in my house, piece by piece. Tonight my plan is to do some light strength work (using my resistance bands and focusing on my problem areas as well as doing some tri-specific moves) and a swim/spin brick: ride to the pool, swim a few hundred; hop on the bike, ride 5-10 miles; back to the pool, swim a few hundred; hop on the bike, ride 5-10 miles; repeat a few times. 3x20-25 at very low resistance:
  • Hip adductors
  • Hip abductors
  • Chop squats
  • Dual-armed pushes and pulls
  • One-armed pushes; one armed pulls
  • Multi-directional lunges
  • Flies
  • Core
No more than two hours total.

And speaking of eating . . . I'm still not eating as well as usual, but I'm eating less like an elephant than I was before FL 70.3. I've come to the conclusion that I'm a freak of nature when training: I lose weight as soon as my training load decreases. When I weighed in for the race, I had lost 4 pounds during taper week alone. WHO (besides me) GAINS WEIGHT WHEN THEY'RE ONLY TRAINING SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE OLYMPIC AND HIM LEVEL and then LOSES IT as soon as THE TRAINING GOES AWAY!?!?!!?!?!? JEEBUS!

Anyway . . . that's the haps.

2 tidbits of wizdom:

Alili said...

You are so not alone with the gaining during training. I think my metabolism has gone stupid...

Wes said...

I've definitely lost some of my appetite too since the training tapered off for the HIM... I've been very careful these past two weeks to make sure I am not eating too much.

Those Road IDs are cool. I've had mine for a while now, and I don't run or ride without it, unless I forget :-)

Even with me retaking my LT tests, you are putting me to shame sista! I love it!! Light hill repeats? Multi-bricks?!? WTH? You are some hard core tri chica :-)