Last week was my recovery week after a three week block of high volume training. My training demand was much lower and that turned out to be a good thing, as winter arrived in Colorado. Over the course of four days last week, it snowed a total of about eighteen inches at home.
I completed three bike workouts last week. All were easy effort, endurance type rides and I did all three on my Wahoo Kickr trainer in the basement. This gave me an opportunity to try out the new TrainingPeaks Virtual app, which is very similar to the popular app, Zwift.
The new TrainingPeaks app worked well for me and given it integrates fully with my TrainingPeaks schedule and is free until March 2025, I think I will stick to using it for indoor rides. I’m not a big fan of riding in virtual worlds, but I discovered I can basically ignore it and watch TV instead.
As expected for my recovery week, I felt sluggish for the workouts I did early in the week. This was particularly the case for swimming. With my body recovering from the high volume work I had done, I just felt tired.
The final workout of the week on Sunday however, went very well. I had a longer run to do and I was a little apprehensive about it, given I am still building run fitness after my injury. I needn’t have worried however, because I felt great and managed to do my longest run since September 2nd.
My longest run since injuring my knee in early September
The next three weeks will be critical for my upcoming race in New Zealand. I am planning to do between 11.5 and 13.5 hours of training each week. This will include a fair number of workouts at race intensity or higher. I will also be doing brick workouts that will involve running immediately after my weekend long rides. Volume in all three disciplines will also increase compared to the previous training block that I have just finished.
It’s time to get as fit as I can ahead of traveling to New Zealand !!
