EC Tucson Camp - Day 3 & 4

Its been a couple of days since I blogged, crazy how time can slip by you with a bit of a fatigue “on board.” Motivation to do the small things like blogging quickly goes out the door. Thankfully, today is a re-group day with just a swim and run this morning.

Wednesday was also a bit of a re-group day. We rode out and back over Gates Pass, but the morning started out with a hefty 1.5hr swim session that concluded with 5K. Afterwards, we popped out for a run/drill session which was nice. We got video of it so we’ll once we get it edited, we’ll try and post it and I’ll put the link up here as well. Doing the drills allows you to get into your run session much quicker than just running as a warm up and you actually get more run quality time for that session. Really good info.

Day 3 Totals
Swim: 1:30
Bike: 1:40
Run: :30

Yesterday was a tough ride up Mount Lemmon. We “commuted” to the base of the climb. The climb is 20.5 miles up. We all started as a group, but as you can imagine, it splits quickly. My personal goal was to ride sustainable steady up to the 10 mile marker, then once at 10 miles, raise my effort by ~5% and be able to hold it to the top. Climbing is something that I don’t really enjoy and usually I am a “head case” with sustained climbs. Over the last 2 seasons, I have tried to embrace climbing since it is quite a weakness of mine, I think I'm getting better. To overcome my "issues," I ride most long climbs on my own where I can dictate pace and effort. So yesterday, I did just that and as it has in the past, it worked well for me. I rode strong the whole way raising my effort the entire 2 hour climb. Good start to the year for climbing. Ride took us a bit under 5 hours.

Later that afternoon, Chris, Jeff, Tom and I went to the University of Arizona rec pool for a nice hour session. Given the days earlier session up Mt Lemmon, the main set was kept short, multiple 50’s.

Day 4 Totals
Bike: 4:40
Swim: :60
Run: :00

All in all, I’m feeling ok this late in camp. Legs are sore, but to be expected. I have been using recovery pumps daily which has been helpful. If there is one, simple, easy thing that aids in recovery, pneumatic legs pumps are well worth the investment. Nearly as important as a nice pair of race wheels.

Additionally, camps seem to revitalize my motivation to begin capturing my “numbers” again. I tend to get lazy downloading my devices to training peaks, especially after I start getting error messages attempting to download my device. After talks by Alan, it doesn’t make sense not to keep logs. Having the ability to track TSS (training stress score) which is a composite number that takes into account the duration and intensity of a workout to arrive at a single estimate of the overall training load and physiological stress created by that training session, gives you the visualization and capability to appropriately predict necessary recovery periods in a training block. A long story short, I’ll be using a more of a number approach this season, should be interesting.

Off to the morning swim and 1.5hr run this AM.

JFT’in,
Crazy J