Sunday trainer

I am sorry to say I just called it on the trainer ride at 2.0hr. instead of doing the whole 3.0hr. I intended.

I was already doing the slothful person's version of Spinervals 13.0, i.e. sitting instead of standing for all the standing bits, and was growing increasingly puzzled by the problem I'm having with these trainer workouts. Decided I had better just stop--I need to eat a proper dinner (I left this workout much too late, I must be better about that!), I need to do laundry! I was behind on meals all day yesterday, and now it has happened again today--not conducive to the best possible workouts.

Here's the difficulty. If I set the trainer resistance low enough that I can follow the gearing and cadence guidelines on the DVD, I'm just barely working in the bottom of zone 2 as far as HR goes. If I raise the resistance, I can no longer even approximate the right cadence. Which seems totally counterproductive!

(Actually as far as bike fitness-related regrets go, my single biggest one right now is that I didn't get that cadence-meter fixed sooner, or else check in more consistently on cadence in the winter the old-fashioned way [i.e. counting!], because I do not think I have done the neuromuscular work necessary to really "set in" a cadence of 90-94 or so. This is a pity, that's a thing to work on in coming months...)

I don't think this is a technical problem, I think it's just a manifestation of my current fitness level and the nature of the trainer. My basic aerobic fitness is fairly high, so I don't super-easily tip up into zone 2 from zone 1, and I even have fairly strong legs, but I do not have cycle-specific fitness that will let me work at zone 2 intensity for a long period of time like this.

For my ninety minutes on Wednesday, I'll do the sequence of shorter segments on the Spinervals TimeSaver workout, and really concentrate on getting HR high--and then I'll run five miles off the bike, so that I get a good brick in.

And I will try and have a really solid attempt at doing this workout again next Sunday. I am regretful that I have skimped on both bike workouts this week--I am still with a steep learning curve on this stuff, it is not as simple as pure slothfulness though there is certainly an element of laziness and procrastination also!

I have been thinking often recently about this question of uneven development, mostly as it concerns swimming. Maybe I am mistaken, but I feel that I am at this particular juncture an annoyingly (to myself rather than primarily to others!) anomalous swimmer. My speeds, even on stroke, are at the very slow end of what you might find in a masters workout, but I am actually not much different of a speed than someone who, say, was the slowest member of a HS swimming team and swims semi-regularly but doesn't do a lot of other stuff. My fitness, in other words, is very reasonable, as you would expect based on my fairly regular attendance at masters swimming, and I can certainly swim longer and harder than some of these slowish swimmers. In that sense I am fully competent.

But I am purely incompetent (in a literal rather than judgmental sense) on a lot of things that are second nature to these swimmers. Flip turns, of course, but those at least I'm addressing--I don't know at all how to deal with the other turns, and I have not really figured out how to do that "pullout" (is that even what it's called?) on breaststroke. Backstroke is particularly demoralizing because of this--even a nice smooth length of backstroke is then mentally undermined by the clumsy maneuvering I have to undertake at the other end. And my technique on breaststroke is particularly bad (or perhaps it is just that this tends to be the non-freestyle stroke that many swimmers prefer, and they do it better than they do fly or back!).

What I need is a masters swim that has a stroke clinic & a coach who will help with this sort of thing (and a dive start, that is another thing I have never even tried to do in my life, and it is frustrating watching these perfectly slow swimmers with whom I am fairly evenly matched on a 100 IM and could beat on a timed 500 freestyle gracefully dive in at the beginning of their workouts!). I want to be able to do everything properly!

ARGHHHHHH! What I really need is to go and eat, I must stop blogging and get on with the business of the rest of the evening! The other thing I need is to make a bit more space in the training schedule for bike-related things, because given that it is much my weakest link it is not appropriate for me to have only two workouts in the week, and to cut both of them short due to having left them till too late in the evening!