May long weekend

Minute ride from Rick Bremness on Vimeo.

May long weekend and I opted to stay home for the weekend and do some training here rather that drive out to Penticton.  This is a timelapse of my the first half of my 90k bike. I had a big ride yesterday and today is Super Sunday.

 The day starts 9AM at the Bonnie Doon pool. It was a clear and sunny morning, no wind and 18 degrees.  I got to the pool a bit early and sat outside on a bench, in the sun and enjoyed a morning coffee before the swim. I was there to do a one hour swim training session that I was long overdue for. I had been doing a lot of swim training on my own, this was the first session back swimming with the team since the Ironman race last August.

After a tough hour of 300m warm up /400m kick /800m swim /400m drills. I was pooped and now a 2 hour run. There was a pretty big group, out for the run but as the day wore on people would slowly drop off. After a an hour I turned back and started my way back to the pool. It was a tough grind but it sure feels good to stop.

90 km ride

Recently I have been doing a lot of running and swimming and not much else.  I have had to miss a few of the weekend rides lately so I was not sure how good or bad I was going to feel.

It was the usual Saturday group ride from Ardrossan Hall. There was seven members of the Cops for Cancer Ironteam that showed up for a 9AM departure.  The conditions were perfect for a ride, little wind and 16C.  Most of the people on the ride a getting ready for Ironman Austria at the beginning of July so they were out and going hard.

We headed South and East towards Tofield. After an hour and a half and a good 45 kms a few of us turned around and headed home.




Today ended up being a 90 km ride over a 3 hour period.  It seems that when I am riding with the team I tend to push way harder than I would if I went out on my own.

It felt good to be back it the saddle and it was a great ride today.

A new trail and some "Great training"

Henday Bridge

Went for a nice run today.  I ran a little more than 13K, my first run on this trail across the Henday Bridge to Cameron Heights. This is a picture I took last year when I first rode my bike across it. It is a tough run because of the climb out of the river valley. I seems no matter where I run I end up facing a big hill. No matter it is "good training".
Last week I went for a run the other direction and ran across a new trail a bridge by Ft. Edmonton.

New foot bridge near Ft. Edmonton

I left home with the plan of an easy mid week run and as I can across this wonderful new trail I saw a set of stairs the head up the north side of the river.  I thought it would be fun and "great training" to run up the stairs.  So I do, and in a big hurray, I reach my max. heart rate of 172 bpm. Now once I have hit my max. I cannot stay at a reasonable HR for the rest of the run.  I follow the trail to the south and find a path that goes up river bank to the Wolf Willow area. Nice, but now I am tired,  my heart rate is not coming down,  I still need to get back across the river and up the other side. I was so sore all week after that, it felt great today to get out for a more reasonable run. Lesson learned!