Showing posts with label Mike Zimmerman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mike Zimmerman. Show all posts

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Brick Laying

Entering my 3rd full week of training in the 18 week plan for 2012 B2B in October. The heat wave doesn't help much at 100+ degrees for most of the past 2 weeks. Nonetheless, I have had fun laying down the foundation for progression. I have amped the mileage back up and tipped 100 miles on the bike (week total) for the first time this year.

I have been using Strava GPS on the iPhone to track my progress and help me monitor my data and I have loved it! It makes keeping track of progress simple and you can go back and look at previous workouts. I have played with many different apps to track and monitor endurance training but this one seems to be the best so far. I link my ANT+ devices to the program and it tracks my HR (and cadence if I want it too) and plots it against other data collected. Makes it simple to see which zone I'm training in an adjust workouts accordingly. I have added the summary of some of my last rides off to the side bar of this page.

Had a great Fourth of July with the family on Wednesday! Despite the heat, we were able to get out and grill and Braden made his racing debut earlier in the morning at the McDougle Middle School track where he ran a 50m "race" and got a ribbon from the Zimmerman boys. It was neat to see how excited he was and fun to be a part of... All the Zimmerman boys were in attendance for the 4 mile race that started before the "little firecrackers" division and I raced it with them after Roger and I bike just under 15 miles TT style just before the start. I was happy with my pacing and felt really good considering that I am still laying the foundation and training is just getting amped up. Let's hope the heat doesn't kill progress...

I'm going to try and stay in AC and keep laying bricks...

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Summer Is Here

You know it's summer when training starts to get really tough and the weather becomes brutally hot. Case in point, this past weekend when my training partner, Zimm, decided to enter us into this little race out in Wilmington. Despite the fact that it fell at the end of my longest training volume week of the year, happened to be 90 degrees on the roads, stiff winds working against us, humid, and Mother's Day, made this a difficult task to pull off.

I went down the day before and enjoyed the beach with my beautiful wife and 2 boys that morning before heading over to the hotel around 2pm on Saturday. After a short, and failed, attempt at napping with the boys, we decided to head back to the beach where they ran around some more and enjoyed the sand and surprisingly warm water. We had a good meal at Mellow Mushroom (altough not as good of service as Patrick Costello provides at the Durham location) and then headed back to watch a movie with the kids at the hotel.

A sleepless night with Eli in my bed and Braden in Carrie's and then up early on Sunday morning to race did not start off Mother's Day quite as I had planned... Nonetheless, Carrie was an awesome fan and brought the boys to watch me roll around for about 90 mins in the ridiculous heat, wind, and humidity. We wrapped up the day with another trip back to the beach before heading home.

RACE RECAP: The race was a duathlon with a 3.2 mile run, 16 mile bike, and then 2 mile run. I finished 9th overall out of 150 people and was 2nd in my age group. I had the 4th fastest bike overall (1st in age group and top bike with a non-tri or disc wheel bike) and was pleased with how I finished. I knew I could do better (I lost some time in transitions digging for a water bottle out of my backpack due to dehydration after the bike) but happy to have my lungs back and working again. Zimm Sr. and Jr. each had good races as well and seemed excited to back and training again.