I am a little late with my weekly post this week due to a busy Easter Sunday and my April Fools pranks. Easter Sunday started out with a rapid pace. I finished my 2 hour run in in the morning, then back home to cook up a couple plant-based dishes for the family Easter dinner, showered and up to the in-laws. It was nice this year since my parents joined us, so we could just have one big meal and not have to have two separate ones. I made a Quinoa Peanut Soup, Pasta and Vegetable in a White Sauce and my wife made some pumpkin bars from a recipe on the Forks Over Knives website that was really good. They were easy to make and pretty tasty. I think my wife and I ate all the bars. Nice thing about eating plant-based is most other people don’t even try the food and I end up with a good stock of leftovers.
Monday started off with my typical hour swim. The pool at HPC is always so sporadic as to how crowded it will be. There is always the standard base crowd, but then there are always these other people that drift in and out. I headed over to Rodale Fitness Park for my post-work run. They have been actively de-foresting the large trees in the park since the recent hurricane damage. They close off the parking lot during the week but it only seems like they do work during the daytime. Regardless everyone still uses the path. I try to utilize the surrounding road a bit since I don’t want any trees falling on me. My run was to be a 35 minute Zone 3(HR) run bookended with a 10 min warm-up and cool-down. I was feeling pretty good and I jumped into Zone 4 quite a bit, especially on the hills. Ended up averaging 8:25 for those 35 minutes which kind of surprised me. Everytime I looked at my watch it was closer to 7:50 or 8:00 min/mi. Maybe I only looked when I was running faster.
FTP Testing
Tuesday was still a little bit on the cooler side, so I decided to do a trainer ride that night. I also wanted to re-assess my power and heart rate zones one last time before it really gets nice outside, so I did the 20 Minute Test on Trainer Road. Functional Threshold Testing(FTP) is the maximum sustained power output you can maintain for one hour on a bike. They typically use a 20 minute test to do this and then calculate your 60 min power from that 20 minute average. Many cyclist use the watts/kg measure since the cyclist weight obviously affect their power usage and it levels the field to compare with others.
FTP testing is always a bit taxing, 20 minutes is better than an hour. I usually end up with a pile of sweat on the floor. I pushed through it pretty well and ended up increasing my FTP from 202 up to 223, which I was pretty psyched about. 21 watt increase in a month is pretty substantial I would think. My watts/kilogram is almost 3 which is improving too. If I lose a few more lb’s and keep hitting the bike hard I would like to get around 3.5 or so. Pro’s are usually around 4-5watts/kg which is insane.
Wednesday was another hour swim. I had a set of 10×50’s with 25 hard and 25 easy on each rep which totally spanked me. The burn came on quickly since it was early in the workout, so its everlasting effects could be felt well to the end. After sitting on my butt all day at work, I finished up the day with a set of 4x60s Z4 running intervals. I really focused on maintaining some form while still pushing the speed as much as possible as well as negative splitting them. I still managed to get up to a 6:00/mi avg pace on the last set. From there on out it was an easy jog.
Thursday was cool and really windy, but I pushed myself out the door for a road ride. I was almost blown away during the first half of the ride. The wind gusts at one point almost made it feel like I was stopped. Needless to say I didn’t pass many other riders out that night. The second half of the ride was mostly tailwind which was a nice cruise home. Glad to get out though.
I hit the pool early on Friday morning, but so did everyone else. Apparently everyone else wanted to get an early start on the day too. Many had the day off I guess. One lane even had 3 women in it. Good practice for a IMLP Swim start! Anyway, I settled into my LSD swim groove and life was good. I was only supposed to swim for 45 minutes, but ended up doing an hour. I really enjoy those long slow swims…they are so relaxing.
Saturday was really nice. Still a little chill in the air, but sunny and low winds. I got out for a ride around 9:30 and ended up with about an 2:15 ride. Even through in some hills at the end. This was the first full ride with the new carbon wheels and they performed flawlessly too. My rear training wheel is getting checked out in the shop, which turns out to be a bent axle. Always somethin’! The only bad thing on Saturday was there were a bunch of A-hole drivers out. I guess nice weather and opening day of trout season brings out the d-bags who don’t know what four feet is. It is a bit scary out there these days with everyone texting and driving all the time.
Sunday was still nice, but a bit more cloudy. I headed down to the LV Parkway around 9:30am for my long run of the week. The place was buzzing with some leftover opening day fisherman trying to clean out the rest of the put-and-take fish out of the sewage-polluted water of the Little Lehigh Creek. It made for some extra entertainment during the run though. I made some good use of the time by catching up on some of my favorite podcasts in the first six miles and then a couple chapters of the book “Unbroken” in the last five. I also find it very interesting how almost every other dog I see at Lehigh Parkway is a Pitbull. What is the deal with these dogs? It is like they are status symbols or something. Not to bash the breed, because they can be really good dogs, but the clowns I see walking these creatures don’t appear to be happy-go-lucky dog owner. It is the owners of these dogs that give them the bad rap.
