IMTX Training - Week 7

This past week was Week 7 of Ironman Texas Training. This week included my new longest bike ride of 80.4 miles, beating out last week's 79.4 mile ride, and also included my longest swim of 4100 yards, which is just short of the Ironman swim distance of a bit over 4200 yards. These growing workouts included getting in more than 16 hours of workouts for the second straight week (although just barely over 16 hours!). This week was the last build week of the current phase of training before I start a recovery week next week.

Here is how this past week of training breaks down:

Swim - 9500 yards, 3:45:38
Bike - 80.4 miles on roads plus time on spin bike or trainer, 6:32:58
Run - 25.2 miles, 5:26:38
Other - stretching specific or other training workout, 0:15:00

Overall training time 16:00:14

This finished out the current build phase of training. Although my scheduled workouts had me believing that my training time would increase over last week, I actually had a slight decrease in training time. I think this was due to increased speed in several long workouts.

I was feeling really good following my longest ever swim workout of 4100 yards this week. I put off the swim until the evening hours, which is not when I do my best swimming, and maintained a great (for me anyway) pace finishing in 1:31:44, including the rest interval breaks. In addition to my successful long swim workout I also had a great long bike workout. I rode almost the same route as last week with a teammate, covering an additional mile in 27 less minutes. The increased speed was partly due to better weather and partly due to holding a better level of effort throughout the workout. I also made a point not to push my knee too hard this week and it seems to be feeling fine.

90 days until Ironman Texas...