T77 - Wind is Like Privilege - Swim/Bike Brick, Run

Gainesville

Strange title, I know, but I'll get to it. Today was a run-bike session together which mandated that the run be done several hours later. So as it was I called Justin to see if he wanted to train, since I can do a swim/bike brick from Campus Lodge and he only wants to do short workouts in preparation for his Sprint Tri this weekend. So I met him a little after 5 and we got started.

Swim - 30 minutes, 1500 meters

2 Lipodrene

They have a nice outdoor pool at Campus Lodge, and today it happened to have some music going for the after-work tanning crowd. Justin was doing some sprints, but I kept a solid pace and got in the full 30 laps I'd aimed to do in the allotted half hour. Or so Justin told me. He also told me that I was bringing my right arm out way too far on my strokes, something I am consciously doing. So I'm going to have to try and modify this a little during my short swim in New York. Maybe bringing the arm forward and bending the elbow as I come back to eliminate the drafting effect while still keeping the arm in.

Bike - 1 Hour

Did a nice transition at my car and headed down Williston on the bike. I hadn't done this road in a while and I remember why, it's just all trucks and a very narrow bike lane. Not exactly prime biking conditions. I also have some bad, bad associations with terrible rides on that road as well. But after I crossed I-75 I settled into Aero and was doing a solid 22-25, even after yesterday's grueling bike effort. I mean, I know I have to show off a little when I train with Justin, since he destroys me in the run and is a slightly better swimmer too, but I was just straight flying. He kept up, but I was thinking "Damn, I"m just crushing this today." I looked at the plants for any sign of wind and saw none, thus assuming I was just that good.

Then I turned around. Justin had bailed at the 20 minute mark as he'd wanted to do a shorter ride, but at 30 minutes I turned around, having averaged about 22 on the way down. Crushing a short ride, I thought. Well, notsomuch. Despite my thinking there wasn't much wind, I couldn't manage to muster much over 18 at the beginning of the way back. I even slowed to around 16 before I said "Fuck this, I'm averaging 20 on this bitch" and pushed it all the way to the end. Made it just over 20 miles in just over 1 hour, averaging exactly 20. The gel I took at the 15 minute mark helped, but during the ride I sarted to think, ya know, wind is a lot like societal privilege. Could be racial, gender, socioeconomic, whatever. But here's my thoughts...

Like wind, when you have privilege working for you, you don't even notice. You breeze through not realizing that you have a great force working behind you. You usually just think you're doing awesome all on your own. Or, for some, you realize you have it and decide to take full advantage, pushing as hard as you can to get the best possible result. But really, you never notice it until it is working against you. When wind, or privilege, is not in your favor everything becomes twice as hard as it usually is. You spend a lot of time saying "This isn't fucking fair. This looks so easy but for some reason I just can't do as well as I want to." Then you either decide to let the force against you win and perform poorly (as I did most of last cycle), or say fuck it, work a lot harder, and get the result you want. Like I did on my ride today. Last cycle I was a nigger sitting in jail. This cycle I'm Barack Obama. You see what I mean?

Deeper than usual? Sure. But it can't all be gels and Cliff Bars.

Run - 45 minutes (treadmill)

In continuing with my theme of improving my speed with treadmill work, I opted to do today's short run on the treadmill at 6.4. Which was too fast to maintain, so I dropped it to 6.2 and did ok. My stomach started feeling a little weird, which I found odd since I hadn't had any more Lipodrene and had only a Cliff bar and PB&J. I felt a little strained going at that speed for 45 minutes, which some might call sad, but I think its an improvement that needs to be made. Yeah, this run was kinda pathetic, but I need to keep doing treadmill work on shorter runs until my speed improves. I did get to watch the end of the Mets-Marlins game. But for some reason the bullpen only seems to like to close out games quickly when I'm tryingto watch them during a workout.