Spring in my legs

I am not going to lie. I was definitely missing it today. My biking buddy told me that not only I miss the spring but also my marbles for doing what I did in last two days. But I am know that I am not the only person who does crush training on weekends. 

Easy swim in the morning. 2.5k with some pulling and some easy swimming. I did not want to do any hard intervals because pool was quite crowded and because I need to swim a lot in next 4 days because I will not be able to once my parents are here next weekend. So I need to save my arms.

Then onto my brick. 

First the bike ride. We decided to do the shorter ride today but because of pretty nasty headwind and fatigue it took us 3h40m. These rides are by no means any sightseeing rides, at least not for me. For example yesterday we averaged around 16.5mph (pathetic I know) but I am seriously killing myself to hold that speed on my crappy bike. But rides are great. German countryside is awesome, roads are smooth and we do little sprints to signs marking the town beginning for fun. Of course I lose everytime because well, on top of having very little biking fitness I of course cannot shift to the biggest front ring and to the smallest rear ring so that makes sprinting kind of hard:) 

I only ate one gel on that ride:( After 3hours…

Then onto a run. 55min. Run was quite painful. No kidding. I took 3 walking breaks. I always take 2 walking breaks because I go over this steep hill and there is no way I am going to run down that hill with my ITB. So I usually walk down, it takes me around 75sec. But I was so trashed today that I also took a few seconds walking at the turning point. I had zero desire to run that hill again on my way back but I have this deal with myself: if I run up then I can walk down. If I run around the hill then no walking break. So I ran up again. The last 4min were completely mind over body, I hate last 4min because I need to run them on a road and I hate that! Phew. I did not do 100m strides at the end because that would be useless if I ran them at 8min pace:)  

Running is hard. Mostly because I do not go efficiently. I use the raw power to move. Definitely not like a distance runner should go. And I know I do that. But there is a reason for that. If I did not force my stride and just shuffled along I am sure my form would suffer. Therefore I force my knees to go up, land under my center of gravity and make sure that I use hip flexors and hip stabilizers to not let right knee go inwards with every stride so that ITB can chill out. It takes a lot of energy. But I am going to continue doing that for now. I think that it keeps my ITB happy and it also helps me to strengthen the muscles that stabilize my hips. Once I feel I do not need to overdo every stride for ITB’s sake then I will start working on going more efficiently.  

If I were less environment conscious and if I had ice today would be a day to take an ice bath. But since I loathe wasting water for such a selfish reason an ice bath and I do not have any ice, no ice bath for me. I am going to spend some quality time with foam roller instead.

Ice hockey final starts in 1 hour!!!

Bayern lost yesterday in the penalty shots. Grrr.