build build build (training notes 11/03/07)

aha! so it was a build week! you can see my schedule this week at: http://www.google.com/calendar/render

the air cleaned up pretty well, and i managed to get some solid training in this week. i shuffled the schedule to put the long run on Wednesday, just to get some extra space for the smoke to clear. the catch is that Wednesday became a 2-workout day (3, if you include the weight training), with a solo long trail run in the morning and a solid swim workout with USC Triathlon in the evening.

no biggie. sort of. my long run accidentally turned into a 115 minute run, when it was supposed to have been 90 minutes--i misjudged the distance on the trail and didn't realize the mistake until i checked Google satellite maps later (geez, what did we ever do before Google Maps and Google Earth? dark ages!). this kind of made the weight training session and evening swim go from an easy weights and easy 2400 yards to a survival stretch.

but i figure no worries. i'm increasingly of the suspicion that training for endurance event is really about training the heart and lungs, and not just the muscles, to sustain greater workloads for longer periods of time. meaning that a principle should be to see a progression in the total amount of time your heart and lungs are working during the course of a day--with the training time not necessarily having to be a single long workout in a single discipline (e.g., 3-hour runs), but just as readily multiple workouts in multiple disciplines (e.g., 60 minutes of swimming, later followed by 2 hours of running, etc.). of course, the long single-discipline workouts are valuable, but probably more so for training sessions focused on muscle conditioning...for hearts & lungs, you can think more about cumulative time for a given heart rate and elevated breathing.

the Friday long swim was painful. excruciating. i thought i was swimming backwards. but that was probably because i was still recovering from Wednesday. but i managed to recover fine over the weekend.

the workouts are only to get longer and harder from here, so i'm just seeing things as milestones on a journey to IMNZ.