Game plan

It became official last week that I need to stay here in Hannover until the end of September so I can actually plan my life now. Woo-hoo.

The plan is: Hannover Tri on Sept 2^nd. Olympic distance. 

I met five or six people on TT bikes while biking this weekend (I usually do not see any people on TT bikes) so it means that people are gearing up for the race so I better sign up before it fills up.

But racing when I know that I cannot kick butt/get PR/racing series points/etc  is no fun and I know that I cannot achieve any of those goals unless I switch from my very mindless training to more mindful one.

Therefore I have devised a new game plan for the next 2 months (only 2 months?!? That’s like nothing. I better not expect to kick any butt but hopefully I will be able to pull off a decent result):

Run: I will let awesome PPC to guide me. All I can do is to do my best to stay ITB-pain free.  Which means not to do anything stupid, pay attention to my stride, do strengthening exercises and visit the sadistic PT every few weeks even if everything feels good. Prevention! I am slowly getting to ~3h30min of running/week. Wow! That’s huge.

 I saw an orthopedist today to go over MRI results and there is nothing wrong in my knee (although there are some “fokales Knochenmarködem in medialen Femurkondylus lateral” (whatever that means but I saw some white spots on the bone) that the orthopedist said are probably the signs of overuse/too much training in the past but they have nothing to do with this pain). Which is good on one hand, but not so great on the other because it means that I still do not know what the trigger is. He prescribed running shoes orthotics for me but I am very cautious to try them because I am worried that it might cause more bad than good.

 Swim: Just continue doing what I am doing. I have committed myself to 17km/week for next couple week and I am sticking with it. I have finally learnt to chill out and adjust when people in the pool are a$$es. Now I deal with the pool situation much better and am less anxious. Plus I have adopted the “bit**” attitude: I was here first, I swim faster, so move out of my path or I will kill you (not intentionally of course but who knows what happens when I swim into a 90-year old grandpa). I am doing much more real workouts now, harder and faster efforts.  (This 17k+ swimming is part of a long-term plan, and it has really nothing to do with the tri in Sept.)

Bike: I must make huge adjustments here! I have been doing only long slow rides until now, usually 2x/week. I gave myself an option to do the third ride but I very rarely did because well, I had an option not to. And even if I ride 5-6 hours/week, it is not going to cut it. Therefore I need to commit to more riding (unless I commit to it I am never going to bike more, I am too lazy for that) and to doing intervals. I have already started on Sat, I did 4x5min hard efforts (230+ Watts). I loved it! The only problem is that the road where I can do anything like this is 1hour of riding from my house but can’t do anything about that. So the plan is one long easy ride, one longer intervals ride and one short intervals/or big gear intervals ride in a week.

PS(es):

Tour de France! I was never able to watch because I either did not have TV or I was at work but I watched both Prologue and the last 40km of Stage 1 over the weekend. Of course the only reason why I watched was so see what Peter Sagan (because he is from Slovakia) can pull off.  And sure he did great. Ok, not Prologue, that did not work out very well, but in Stage 1 he did great. Smart guy. Sure, I felt sorry for Cancellara when he was doing all the work the last 200m and even gesturing Sagan to pull for a bit to get more time on the others and he would not, but everyone knows that Sagan is after stage wins and does not really care about overall placement and how much time he puts on other rides so it was clear that he would not pull. 

EURO 2012 is finally over and Germany will start talking about something else than soccer:) Although I like soccer very much. The only problem is that the matches were at 8:45pm. What were the organizers thinking???? At least the final could have been earlier. I am sure that there were a lot of little boys or people like me who have to get up very early in the morning who wanted to watch the finals but could not. And do not tell me that it is because of summer heat. I remember watching the final couple years ago and it was during the day!

I officially withdrew from Ironman Mt Tremblant today:(  I waited until today not because I was hoping for a miracle thinking that I can still do it. I was waiting until the last minute hoping WTC changes the rules for the Americas region refund/withdrawal policy.