Catching Up Part 2

July brought along the build phase of the plan and the workouts stepped up considerably. I also made a conscious effort to not miss any workouts if at all possible. If I did skip a workout it was normally the swim on Sundays since that would take me away from the house for a long period of time on the weekend time. Also, my swim is pretty well established so if I had to pick one discipline to skip that was the one. This new training period brought forth the schedule I have been on for the last 7 weeks as well. Tuesday and Thursday bike rides added speed work and hills to the 1 to 1:30 rides, and the Wednesday and Friday runs added intervals on Tuesdays and sprints on the end of the run on Fridays. The real work was on Saturday and Sunday mornings with the long rides in July extending from 2h 20min to 2h 50min where I was now covering close to 50 miles on the ride. The longer runs on Sundays started creeping into the 1h 20min range covering the mid 7 mile length depending on how I felt. Those long runs are a lot more difficult when you had a 3 hour ride the day before, and a swim on the same day as the run, but they call it the build phase for a reason. The end of July brought the first recovery week of the build phase to close the month out. Looking at July as a whole, the first three full weeks featured 8 workouts on average with total training time creeping from 6 hours the first week up close to 8:30 in the second and third week. The recovery week at the end was a nice break with the time brought down to a restful 5h 30 min of training to close out build period 1.

At the end of July I was tired, but felt very strong kicking into August. This was the first time I have really experienced what a recovery week can do for you in a training cycle as the beginning of Build 2 I felt much stronger than in previous weeks. As they say, rest is the key to adding endurance. Also, in July I finally got below the 200lb mark for the first time in almost 10 years, and can definitely see the difference now in body composition.