The journey continues

The mind is a powerful thing. All week I've adopted the mentality that today is my lucky day and its been a solid week. Work went well, my workouts were great, my daughter was awesome, though when isn't she and my wife is fantastic. I never really saw myself as a perky optimistic etc etc, but lately that's become a big part of my attitude and approach. Nothing's going to go wrong.

Heading into a workout with this attitude makes even the long slogs of a workout fun. This week marked my first full on day in day out go running and biking. I'm slowly incorporating all the various aspects of my fitness plan to avoid burning out so this week I'll start to add in some light weights after each run/ride and next week I'll start to add in the dreaded swims. Truth be told though, I'm kind of oddly excited about even those workouts. I know it'll be rough since I'm not much of swimmer but thats part of the process.

So, back to this week. I joined Training Peaks in order to capture even more data about my workouts, plus I was searching for a way to incorporate my heart rate monitor data with the data I picked up off of CycleOps Virtual Trainer and Training Peaks actually makes it super simple. Especially since I can push the data from Garmin to Training Peaks and then download and subsequently upload the Virtual Trainer data to the same workout and it automatically merges the two. Really happy I came across those two programs. Otherwise how would I gather this kind of summary data from Training Peaks for the week?

Overall, I'm feeling pretty happy with the week. I finished it out with a long ride Saturday on the Ironman Wisconsin 70.1 bike route. The course I did was I suspect the first half of the ride portion but still it was great to be able to see the route and the other riders as I pushed through it via Virtual Training. Below is the data from the last ride of the week and with more and more time spent in the Endurance Power Zone vs the Active Recovery Zone, I'm feeling pretty good about things. Even more so when I take into account my initial Avg W/kg was 2.11 W and Saturdays was 2.66 W.

While I've still yet to fully explore both Training Peaks and Virtual Training, I heartily recommend them. As training tools they provide solid data in an accessible manner and for someone new to all of this, it's not overwhelming seeing all this data at once.

Good runs, great long rides without having to deal with traffic, stop lights or other pedestrians and on top of everything its warming up!

Must be my lucky day!