Quick Summary

I haven't really bothered with a play-by-play on my training, but for the sake of catching the world up on my endeavors, I'll share a few paragraphs about the past week.

My schedule called for a week of strength building this past week, so I hit hills on the bike (high resistance on spinning bikes) and run (incline work on the treadmill) for my standard tempo workouts. Honestly, I wasn't sure how to adapt my swim workouts to build strength, so I'm working by trial and error and reading up on swimming drills. I also reinstated a pretty intense weights routine, including high volume deadlifts and squats, which left my upper legs spent for most of the week. That's the primary reason why I was feeling so overtrained by the end of the week.

This last week has also been one of readjustment, particularly to the humidity level here in the middle of the country. I go to spinning class and find perspiration beading on my arms to the point where it looks like I've been riding in the rain. And the heat and humidity seriously impacted my track workout last Monday.

Speaking of which, I definitely feel the lack of coach and teammates, especially during my track workouts. It's so much harder to motivate myself to run faster. I clearly need to find some training partners.

Fortunately, joining a team seems within reach, since I've landed a job at a local gym teaching group fitness, beginning with spinning class. I'm very excited to start that, and in conjunction with my classes, I plan to publish spinning podcasts. My style involves lots of shouting, so if you've been wishing for someone to really kick your ass on your cycling workouts, I will make that option available to you very soon.

I feel like I've lost focus, a little bit. I need to just take a couple hours and think through the whole Shawnee Mission race in my mind; that way, I'm not doing it to maintain a particular lifestyle (so that I continue to be a bad-ass triathlete) or image. Because I don't like just working out to maintain a certain body type or general fitness, especially with this race coming up. I want to compete. I want to completely own at Shawnee Mission. I want to be one of the top competitors, not just to prove to myself how far I've become, but because I really, really want to succeed. I think if I refocus my mind on that very important race, it will reinvigorate my training as I go into a week of speed work before recovering for a week.