Evening 8 Mile Treadmill

I really need to up my running game. I spent most of the year running after a bike and/or swim. The general thinking was that a brick more closely emulates what we do in races so it's better. Certainly there's transitional goodness in the brick but I'm learning that it's not nearly the whole story. Just as I learned late last year when I felt weak on the six gap century that I need leg strength to complement my aerobic fitness... this year I'm learning that I need leg turnover on my run. All the long slow stuff I've done has hopefully served me well. I can go all day. But I may have realized my speed/turnover shortcoming a little too late in the game. Now I need to step up with some solid tempo run workouts. Possibly not ideal for Ironman training at this point. But I absolutely need the turnover to make my lower heart rate stuff more efficient.

Three weeks of solid training left. I need to get a lot of runs done. And I need to allow myself to do run workouts that aren't coming off the bike.

Tonight I headed to the gym for one of my classics... 8mph for 1 hr. I benchmark my average heart rate. Early on I could tell it'd be high. Possibly expected given the Six Gap Century yesterday but rather disheartening all the same. Average hr was 162bpm. It didn't hurt which is a good sign. Sometimes these treadmill runs are miserable. This one felt good but the metric it returned wasn't all I had hoped it'd be. I'd like to see it around 144bpm at this point in the season.

Afterwards a little swim and hot tub action. Just to loosen the legs up.