Recovery week has begun!  My first one of my training season.  The plan this week is to slightly back down on the weights that I'm using for strength training while maintaing the same amount of reps for each exercise.  I'm hesitant to back completely off of weights this week as it may cause me to regress in any of the strength I have built up over the last 3 weeks.  Doing my first workout like this a a couple hours ago felt really easy and really enjoyable.  Workouts will not be nearly as long this week as they were in the past 3 weeks.  Next week I'll begin my base training which will really start making things real for me.

I'm looking forward to begin my first round of base training but am also nervous about getting the amount of free time to devote to training.  I'm also incredibly excited to get to this next stage to feel like I'm really building toward Madison.  I understand the value of the Prep stage but it gets incredibly stagnant and boring.  So this week will be all about stretching and staying active, and also saying goodbye to the relaxed life for 9 months.

So I'm now three weeks into training and am feeling really motivated and determined.  It's a far cry from how I was when I restarted.  The new trainer has definitely been a boost in my training morale. Training loads have slowly begun to change as well.

This past week I had to make some changes.  My last swim was last Monday for the foreseeable future as gym classes have raided the pool during my lunch hour.  So, in place of swimming, I'm going to move my leg strength workouts to Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays with uppper body strength work on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  With this new plan, I can better address a lot of my leg strength concerns for Madison.  Along with this shift, I'm focusing core strength work on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Hopefully this will address my weight and stability concerns.  With these shifts, I'll be placing my rest day on Fridays to help care for the dogs, saving my long workouts for Saturdays and Sundays.  It will be a work in progress for sure and most likely need to be adding AM workouts, possibly during winter break.

Outside of training, things are definitely stressful.  Prepping for this race has become a bit of a financial strain and logistics nightmare.  I fear that I have promised too many financial commitments and may not deliver.  These thoughts have weighed heavily in my mind as training begins to increase.  With the holidays and all the repairs/upgrades my bike needs, I just don't know what I'm going to do.  I'm losing sleep which doesn't help training and is keeping my mind drawn away from work, training, and my love.  I don't see things improving anytime soon.  I just don't know...

So I'm "back in the saddle" again, both literally and figuratively.  This is the week that I restarted my training for Madison.  The past few weeks nursing my ribs gave me an opporutniy to tweak my training plan and get the first few weeks of my training planned out.  The biggest change I made to my original training plan was the weight training.  My hope is that the program I have set up will pay off hugely on the bike and swim course of Madison.

My ribs feel significantly better although lifting seems to irritate them ever so slightly.  The biggest discomfort that I feel occurs on days when I'm doing the Lat pulls.  I also may need to look into the possibility of reworking my leg strength work as Wednesdays are way too short to get an effective lift in.  An option I may have is to get up early on Wednesday mornings, head to the weight room at the apartment and lift there then head into work for the day.  I'll toy with it some more and see what may work best.

Riding, running, and cycling have been really great so far.  I'm very sore from the first real bike workout I had yesterday so it will be interesting to see how my run goes for me later this afternoon.  The soreness feels great but we will see if I'm still singing this same tune after a few weeks of these sensations.  So there you have it, just a small update on what I'm up to, more to come in the coming days!