Monday, March 30, 2009

Extreme Taper: OC Edition

I have officially made it through the first three weeks of my training plan pretty much exactly as prescribed, although yesterday's planned 3 hour road ride turned into a 3:45 death march in lightly falling snow. My legs said enough was enough, and I just couldn't keep up a decent pace. Though technically, I think my power average was still in the assigned range (just barely) and I racked up the assigned amount of kilojoules, so I'll call it a win. Okay, I think I'll call the fact that I went outside at all a win.

As icing on the cake, yesterday marked the 21-day threshold for habit formation, although I think wrote down 100 days of no blown-off workouts as my first goal for 2009. It's a both a good goal and a silly goal at the same time. It's good because it was something I needed to improve on, but silly because it's not like it will do me much good if I decide to sit on the couch and eat ice cream for Day 101. I don't think that will happen, though.

Speaking of sitting on the couch, my three weeks of hard work have earned me one heck of a rest week leading up to the Ouachita Challenge Sunday. Days off include: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I'm not sure if I'll know what to do with myself, but my muscle fibers need some time grow back (hopefully stronger) before the race. I'm pretty sure that there really won't be a whole lot more sitting on the couch than normal, since I will need to use a lot of the free time to catch up on the housekeeping and other miscellany than have been ignored during my training binge. Hopefully, I'll still find time to put my feet up for some book reading and movie watching before time to leave on Friday.

My one real workout this week is on Wednesday, which is 1-minute intervals, and I'm actually really excited about this one. The night before the Long Run Park road race a couple of weeks ago, I was supposed to do 4 X 45-second "openers". The instructions said "FG" (I took this to mean Full Gas), so I went out and KILLED IT and I managed to knock out some pretty impressive power readings, for me at least. It was exciting to pour it out for the first time in forever, but it was probably also a contributing factor to my crappy race the next day. So I'm looking forward to KILLING IT again on fresh-ish legs without worrying about ruining my race, as I will have three days to recover afterward. Then I should be able to show some restraint for my next set of openers on Saturday.

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