Week 8...Starting to Feel Fit!

This week I really noticed the fitness starting to come around.  I've been placing a great deal of emphasis on hard days and easy days and sticking to a similar schedule each week.  Monday is a recovery day with all 3...swim, bike, and run.  None of them are hard with the exception of a swim set that is at a difficult pace for me to maintain this early in my swimming season.  Tuesday is easily my most difficult day of the week.  On Tuesdays I run and bike but both are hard interval sessions.  I've been tracking my nutrition since January and I've made a point to eat more carbs for breakfast, lunch, and snacks throughout the day and that has allowed me to get some really good quality in on Tuesdays.  I either do a run/bike brick workout with both of them at a high effort or I split them up with a running workout and later a bike workout.  I've been very happy with how I've been able to double up both quality workouts.  Wednesday is another recovery day with swim, bike, and run but all easy with lots of technique work in the pool.  Thursday is another very hard bike workout but the run is easy and short leaving me feeling fresh to hit good intervals on the bike.  Friday is swim, bike, and run with quality in the run in the form of either a tempo run or intervals.  Saturday is a long bike ride.  This past Saturday was my first outdoor ride of the year.  I went 67 miles and it felt very good for my first time outdoors on hills and in wind.  I did 45 minutes at my goal Ironman wattage and it is not a wattage I'd be able to hold right now for an Ironman but I've got nearly 70 days before I need to be there.  Sunday is my long run which is done at a comfortable pace.  This past week I went 14 miles and I felt great.  I am recovering very well and am excited about the strength gains I've been making on the bike.  For the week I swam 3 times totaling only 6,700 yards, biked 258 miles, and ran 50 miles.  The swim yardage is down from past years due to spending so much time on technique.  I do sets of 16x50 kicking without a board where I alternate between kicking on my right side, front, left side, and back.  These are very slow because I've never kicked well probably because I've almost always relied on doing kick sets with fins prior to this year.  I'm trying to spend the time at the expense of getting more yards.  The kicking has gotten easier and my balance in the water has gotten better in just 2 weeks.  I'm not planning to race any triathlons or duathlons until late June but I'd like to get in a hard 5k and a hard 1/2 marathon before those to get the first race soreness out of the system before I race a triathlon.  Thanks for reading.  DREAM BIG!!