No more base phase

This week marked the beginning of what we in QT2 world refer to as the "vertical" phase. No more endless hours in zone 1, some more interesting workouts, tempo work, and back to running and biking 6 days a week. In a bizarre twist of events, suddenly swimming is going amazingly well. However, I believe that this is simply due to the fact that I started wearing a new swimsuit. It's not like it's some super slick-skinned suit designed to make you 10% faster. As far as I can tell, the only special power it possesses is that it fits correctly and doesn't drag. So, apparently the suit I was wearing before should be burned because it was obviously dragging me down to a ridiculous degree I didn't realize was possible. As a result of this new suit, I did a swim set on Wednesday that I've done many times before, but this was the first time this year. It was by far the fastest I've ever swum that set. I had no right to be swimming that fast. I didn't feel great or especially smooth and in all honesty I didn't feel like I was pushing all that hard. It was just... easy. As a comparison, in my old suit the day before I swam the slowest 800 yards I've swum in as long as I can remember, and 24 hours later swam the fastest one. Old suit Tuesday, new suit Wednesday. If I had known it was that easy I would've done it a long time ago.

Now, normally this would also be the start of the bike strength training workouts, but given my lop-sided abilities between biking and running, we're skipping that in favor of more hard running. In my case, "hard" means running most people's recovery paces, but for some reason I keep trying. Yesterday was the first bout of hill bounding in something like 10 months. I can't really explain why, but I really like that workout. Sure, towards some of the later repeats as I approach the crest of the hill maybe I start to feel like I might throw up. But when I was thinking about it yesterday, I decided that maybe I like it because it's a tough workout that makes me feel like I worked hard and got a lot out of it, but it isn't demoralizing like my other run workouts. There's no pace I'm supposed to hit but can't, no other people running circles around me while I struggle to the top, it's just me against the hill with no frame of reference other than how fast I made it from the bottom to the top last time. I was exhausted when it was over, but I enjoyed it on some strange level. It was lightly snowing, but luckily not blizzard-like.

Today, after another swim that was definitely enhanced by a new swimsuit, I did something I almost never do: I ran on the treadmill. I hate the treadmill, which is funny because when I started running in the first place I'd say I probably spent roughly the first year running almost exclusively on the treadmill. But now I vastly prefer outside. But today the wind chills are supposed to be below zero for the entire day. Not that I've never done that before (I even made the horrid mistake once last year to go out on my bike under such conditions, but that is an error that only gets made ONCE) but today I just couldn't stand the thought of fighting not just bitter cold (maybe 15 degrees tops, if we're lucky) and bitterly cold, gusty winds. So, off to the gym treadmill I went. It was actually pretty cold there, too. My skin was all cold and clammy the whole time, but at least I got to wear shorts and didn't nearly freeze to death. I ran on the treadmill once last year, on the day of an ice storm in which half the trees in the state fell down. So it wasn't so much due to the weather that I opted for indoors, it was the fact that it was fairly likely that I would get killed or seriously injured by a falling tree branch. The year before that my one treadmill run was when I was coming back from an injury and I wanted to test the running without winding up miles from home without a way to get back.

I won't make a habit of it, but as I sit indoors with heat I'm quite glad that I already ran on the treadmill and am not currently dreading going out to face the cold and freeze my face off.