The road ahead

Well, I'm not going to lie - my body was a bit beat down after Sunday's race. My quads were sore well into Tuesday, even after going for a less-than-strenuous 60-minute spin on Monday. I swam Tuesday, and nixed the afternoon run that I usually do in favor of some more stretching/rolling/couch time.

Felt better yesterday, and hit the gym for my mid-week mini-brick, which went really well -- 75-minute ride, including two sets of 5 x 1-minute hard seated intervals with one minutes rest in between. The brick portion was a rather benign 20 minutes on the treadmill (.5 percent grade) starting at 8:47 and ending with 8:25s.

Today, I feel great. Plan on a run of some sort this afternoon, somewhere in the area of 45-60 minutes, with a handful of short intervals thrown in. Tomorrow, Drew and I are swimming in the lake (hopefully, a double-loop, or two miles) and Saturday's our long run. As mentioned, the Plan and I have a serious disagreement over running volume, and it's now really starting tro get ugly -- Coach Fink is demanding a 2:45 run this week, and I haven't yet gone beyond two hours (to his credit, the longest run in the Plan is three hours, scheduled for the following weekend). I'm a bit torn as to how far I want to push my running, considering I have that wonky hamstring, but I think I need to get to at least 2:30. As such, I'm thinking Saturday will be 2:15 and the following week we'll shoot for the 2:30 (Week 27).

The big surprise is that we may actually get up to Madison for a ride! Yes, friends, the stars have aligned, and it's looking like Cath and I will blast up there Saturday night, crash, and then hit the course with some friends on Sunday morning. Given that I remember very little of the actual course from 2006, I'm excited to give it another look-see before Game Day. Logistics are still being worked out, but it's looking good so far.

Stay tough, everyone - the starting line is just up the road a piece.