Biggest week this year yet

I have not posted about my training in a while. Reasons are the usual - family, work, training and general lack of time to get to blogging. I have started using posterous this past week and hope to have better ability to post shorter updates to posterous and have them replicated to this blog.In any case this week has been the biggest TSS wise so far. I have done my longest run this year (about 400m shy of 15 miles) and some good swimming. This is the first week back in the States after spending 2 weeks in Germany. It was great to be out in Germany and do some workouts in different environment - different pool, new gym and some great running in snowy German country side on the weekend. But I must admit that I'm glad to be back home on my own bike. I no longer need to mess around with position for 20 minutes to dial it in for every session as I did on spin bike in Germany. I do not miss the free for all swimming in the pool - this particular one had sore lack of lanes and swimming through bunch of people and weaving around them was more of a challenge than a good swim. I really enjoyed swim this past Wednesday with my group where we were only two guys in the lane and knew how to share it. And the hot gyms in Europe are just plain weird - time for the designers to learn about air-conditioning. It is no fun to do 60 minutes worth of hill sprints on treadmill where temperature is like during nice summer day. Although I seem to complain about this I'm actually glad my company has a gym in Europe and that the pool was only 10 minutes away from the office and was opened until 10pm.But back to this week - it started with easy recovery after the weekend hill sprints and then slowly ramped up with swims, bike sessions and runs to long run on Saturday in which I covered some 14.75 miles with some serious hills. The first race of this season pointed out some weakness in my hill form so Craig added some more serious hill training on regular basis. This seems to help quite a bit. This Saturday's long run while I had some issues with fueling and getting water on the way I'm really happy with the performance on the hills. I attacked every single hill and took the run on purpose through some serious climbs to see how I fare. While my average pace was 8:50 for the whole run the normalized graded pace was more like 8:15 which is really good for this time of the year.Well we will see how good my hill skills are next weekend during the Quakertown 10 miler which is a great race near my home that takes place over some nicely rolling terrain and sports some good climbs. Should be fun. I wonder whether I can beat my last year's time.

Posted via email from musiljan's posterous