Great day...AWESOME weather

A good start to Build 3 Week 2. I recovered nearly 100% from yesterday's ski. And I've embraced the idea of not scheduling a Monday morning workout; it's great.

Hit the pool for sprints today at lunch. 200wu, 2x100, 4x50, 8x25, 200 cooldown. Short and sweet. Average heart rate was about 150, which is high for me but normal on the springs. Interesting that my hard sprint on the 50's came in on 40-41 seconds, but my cooldown times for each 50 were 44-45. With such a significant difference in effort level, I was expecting a more significant difference in times. But that 4 to 5 seconds is 8 to 10 percent, so it kind of makes sense...but not entirely.

Was planning a hard 5.4 miles after work. All day, I looked out the window at the most awesome spring day weather so far. So I upped the mileage to 9 miles just to spend more time outside and kept up a good pace. This 9 mile route is on the local trails and has some significant hills. When I stepped off, I decided I wanted to see if I could do 9 minute mile average. I came it at 1:21:47, averaging 9:05 miles. The best part was getting out on mostly dry trails under a warm sun. A nice run. It would have been great, but my right calf muscle started "paining" again. That always happens when I run steep hills. Hurts on both the up and down hills, but no pain on the flats. Not sure what it is, and stretching only helps a little. I think it is simply a muscle imbalance.

This was the longest run of the year, and probably the longest I'll do to train for olympic distance; 9 miles is almost 50% longer than race distance. But it's only half of the distance I'm doing for the Pocatello 50; given that today didn't really hurt, I'm fairly certain I can grunt out the last half of the 18 miles because it is mostly downhill (yeah!).

Weather changes again on Wednesday, back to cool and wet/snow. But tomorrow is supposed to be almost as nice as today.

And I'm pretty sure I'll do the Bengal Triathlon just for the heck of it. That's this weekend. Certainly a "C" race. I'll just count it as my first outdoor brick.

And I got a new stem for my bike this past weekend. I went with an 80mm cuz it's the shortest they had on hand and felt good. We'll see tomorrow when I get on the bike!