Sunday, February 19, 2012

Phew, we made it through this block

What a solid week!!  Jaime and I just wrapped up our 2nd three week block of training today.  I think we are both very ready for a recovery week to recharge our bodies.  We both had a really solid week, capped off by a nice, relatively speaking, weekend.  In addition to good training sessions, we went to a comedy club in Westminster on Friday night which was a really good time.  Good to get some laughs!

This weekend had a nice long run on Saturday around Bear Creek Lake park, then a long swim at Wheat Ridge Rec Center.  Today we had a nice long ride from Morrison to Golden, 3 trips up lookout mountain, and back to Morrison.  The ride was very well attended by the Adrenalin powered by EPC team with a good combination of various paces.  It was so nice to finally get back outside.  I think I actually got a bit of a sunburn on my face today!  Not positive, but I think I set a PR up lookout on the first trip up.  I'll have to go back through my training logs to find out.

Next week will be a much needed recovery week for Jaime and I.  I'm really looking forward to doing the next round of swim and run fitness tests after some days of light activity and recovery to see where my fitness is at.

It is looking like the plan to qualify for the World Champs at the race in Alabama has had a wrench thrown in.  The Alabama race is now the ITU world championships, so I will now attempt to qualify at the West Championship race in Las Vegas in less than 2 months (yikes!).  Press release here:  http://www.xterraplanet.com/news/press_article.cfm?id=3200 
This is relatively suboptimal, since I'm really just building back the fitness from last year and most of the athletes in the southwestern part of the country are in the middle part of their season.  I will go and do my best and if things work out, great, otherwise, I'm not going to get too worked up over it.

There were 2 great paleo meals that we made this week.  On Saturday night Jaime went out to dinner for a girls night, so I made a grilled flank steak with my favorite rub and sauteed onions, peppers and garlic, with roasted Yam chips.  The key to this steak is the rub.  It is a mixture of cocoa powder, ancho chili powder, garlic powder, cinnamon, salt and pepper.  You can play around with the proportions, but generally speaking I like to go in declining % of the total as ancho, then cocoa, then garlic, cinnamon, salt, pepper.  Rub the steak down, brush with extra virgin olive oil and grill to medium rare.  I prefer to cook the food while listening to my Wilco station on pandora on the TV, but that is your call.  Top the steak with the onions and peppers, serve with the chips on the side.  Delicious!


 The other good paleo meal was sauteed salmon with roasted butternut squash, crispy kale chips, all dressed with a maple sherry vinaigrette.  Kale chips may be my new favorite food.

My favorite workout this week was probably today's ride.  We had a solid group out there today and pushed each other.  Best workout song was Moth by Audioslave, which came on during Wednesday's AeT run (which happened to be one of my best runs of the year).

Keep training hard and don't forget to rest when you body says to.

NS

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