Sleep and Stroke and Stride #2!

It’s been a looooooooong week.
First of all, let me tell you a little something about sleep. Sleep is good. Sleep is very good. Sleep is one of those things that if you don’t get enough of, it’s going to screw up every aspect of your training. As you can guess, I didn’t get enough sleep this week, the result of which is that I was cranky, tired and stressed. I didn’t train enough and when I did train it wasn’t quality training, it was more like “I have to spend 30 minutes on the bike so here’s your 30 minutes on the bike.” Not good. It also effected my diet. I’ve been bringing lunch and snacks to work for a while but because I didn’t have time to get my food ready in the morning, or have breakfast, because my body was trying to catch up on sleep, I ended up eating more junk at work. I was also drinking more junky soda to try to get caffeine and ‘energy’ in order to wake myself up.
These are all very bad things.
When I was in classes I could get away with less sleep since I was doing much less physically. Not now. Now I need at least 7 quality hours of sleep, preferably 8 (or more!). I need my healthy lunch, my yogurt (blech) and other healthy snacks.
I did my second Stroke and Stride last night. I went in hoping to cut off 4 minutes from my previous time (two minutes from the swim and two minutes from the transition. I didn’t quite meet those goals, but I’m pretty happy with what I got.
The Swim: - 18:02 Much better. I still had one or two patches where I lost or struggled with my stroke but overall it was much, much better. I only took 50 seconds off my time but I came out of the water much more comfortably and feeling much more confident.
The Transition: - 1:55 I didn’t quite take a full two minutes off my transition, but I got it under 2:00 and if I hadn’t had some trouble with my bib, I’d have done even better. I knew exactly where I was going when I came out of the water and what I was going to do in what order (I reviewed it mentally the last 100m of the swim). I left the transition feeling great for the run.
The Run: - 25:42 I was very pleased with my run last week and wasn’t worried about trying to take any time off of last week’s mark. However, I think my confidence from the swim and from the fast transition really helped me out and I managed to knock 0:43 off my run time, good for an 8:17 pace. It was a hot run and I might have done a little better if I had a singlet instead of running in my bike jersey, but I don’t really mind as I’m trying to get used to running in the bike jersey more, though that may be something I should reconsider. I saw a lot of people I knew on the run, Kevin the BTC president, Meg whom I’ve been talking to all week and finally met last night, as well as several other BTCers, Mike, Klaus and Chris as well as Mike Ricci. I finished very strong, with some encouragement from Kevin and when I approached the finish line I knew I had come close to my goal.
There was Subway and drinks (water and soda) after the race finish and I hung out with Meg and some of the other BTCers. Joining the BTC is the single best decision I’ve made since I came out here. They’re really great people and I’ve learned a lot from them.
I finished 39th out of 100 people in the 750M swim/5k run. I’m going to do one more week of the 750m and then bump it up to 1500m for the rest of the series.
I’ve got a long swim tonight (for a total close to 4000m). Saturday is my ‘off’ day though I’m going white water rafting, then Sunday I have a 30’/120’/30’ warm-up tri. Then it’s 7 weeks to the 5430!