Healthy Habits/Zipp Sponsorship Week 27 Summary

First off, I would like to thank my new sponsors, Healthy Habits and Zipp!! Healthy Habits is an outstanding bike shop located in Bettendorf, IA. They are stocked with all kinds of great Tri-Bikes and accessories that can help to save precious seconds. They are the shop I purchased my Orbea Ordu Limited Ed. from last summer and now they have teamed with Zipp, makers of the world's fastest wheels to sponsor me for the upcoming triathlon season. I'm super excited to have Healthy Habits and Zipp on my side and I know I'll race faster with their help! Healthy Habits provides me with outstanding bike maintenance to keep my Orbea flying through the course and Zipp has teamed with Healthy Habits to provide me with a set of 1080 wheels, the fastest non-disc wheelset on the planet! This picture shows the bike I purchased from Healthy Habits along with the new wheelset I'll be racing on this year. In ideal conditions I'll keep my Zipp disc on the back with the 1080 on the front for the fastest wheelset known to man...when it's windy I'll run the 1080 rear wheel with my Zipp 808 front wheel so I don't get blown over and still have an extremely fast wheelset. I know Healthy Habits still has at least 1 set of 1080's left in stock at a very nice discounted price.

Week 27 of training was a good one for me. It was my first week back into full training mode since the cyst was removed last week. I have not felt a single bit of pain in any of my workouts since the aspiration of the cyst. For the week my total training time was 16.5 hours. It included 31.5 miles running, 130 cycling, and 10,000 yards swimming to go along with 1 trip to the weight room, 2 sessions of lunges, 5 days of core work, and 3 days of speed drills and strides. I had a few workouts that have me very excited to race. On Thursday I did a tough 5x5 workout which includes 5 times of 5 minutes hard followed by 5 minutes recovery on the bike. My wattage numbers were my highest ever with an average of 334. My previous high average was 317. I believe this workout was the best I've ever had on the bike. It got me excited enough to sign up for a triathlon next Saturday in Galena, IL. It is a sprint distance consisting of a 660 yard swim, 17 mile bike ride, and 4.2 mile run. I've heard it's a very hilly course which is perfect for what I'm looking for in this race. I want to get a good week of training in and use the race as a hard training effort. It should prepare me to race better in my upcoming events.
My favorite workout of the week was a run I did with my wife and daughter on Mother's Day. I pushed the baby stroller in a 5k in Rock Island while running with my wife. We ran 19:05 and my wife won the race earning herself $100.00 in the process! The 6:10 pace pushing the stoller felt very easy for me giving me confidence that I'm in shape to get off the bike and run sub-6 pace right now in a triathlon. Later on Sunday I rode 50 miles with Stephan Marsh, my summer training partner from last year. He is home for a week before starting an internship in Omaha, NE. I'll miss training with him this year! He helped me so much last year and I don't think I'd be taking this journey without the help he gave me to realizing my potential. On Sunday night I had another confidence building workout consisting of 2x 12 minutes steady on the trainer following each one with a mile hard. My first brick mile was 5:43 and my 2nd was 5:25, a pace I hope to hold at the QC Triathlon on June 2oth for the 5k. Galena...here I come...I can't wait! Thanks for reading. DREAM BIG!