Two weeks out from Tri-Cities

We're two weeks out from IRONMAN 70.3 Washington in the Tri-Cities on September 20, so this was the last full week before the volume comes down. It started in the ocean and most of the rest of it happened in the room off our bedroom, on the trainers.

Sunday's swim, then the bricks

The week opened with the Roughwater, which took both of us about two and a half hours into a current that pulled roughly 80 people out of the race. That's on its own page. Monday came anyway, and by Tuesday we were back on the trainers.

The day-by-day is on the right, so I'll only explain the shape of it. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday were bricks: a bike straight into a run. The runs after the bike are short on purpose, three miles or so, because what they're for is the feeling of running the minute you get off the bike, when your legs don't want to be legs yet, and getting used to that before a race asks you to do it for 13.1 miles, so the mileage hardly matters. If you haven't done many of these, the name explains itself the first time you try one. Saturday's was the big one, an hour and a half on the trainer with the group ride and then a short run off it, and Sunday was the long run for both of us, 7.7 miles for me and 6 with about 400 feet of climb for Michelle.

Where the training is

The Tri-Cities race is a 70.3, and this week was the last hard block of the HumanGO plan for it. The intervals on the trainer were the hard part, Saturday's group ride was the long bike, and Sunday's runs were the last long ones before the taper. Two weeks out, the work is mostly done, and the next two weeks are for getting to the start line rested.

Next week

The volume comes down and the packing starts. The bikes come off the trainers and go straight into the travel bags, the food we've already tested goes in with them, and we fly to Washington for a race that, for once, should be cooler than home. After two and a half hours in the ocean last Sunday without stopping, a 1.2-mile swim should feel short.