Training Updates and New Furniture

After my last post in December I took a short hiatus from my blog and along with it, my training as well. I did manage to mostly keep up with my running and biking, but did zero swimming. Two weeks ago I finally said ‘Enough is enough! The off-season is over!’ and started taking my workouts more seriously. I was also very tired of seeing so many little red boxes in TrainingPeaks. So with a bit more fire under my feet, I started to get back into the swing of training (swimming too!). My weekly hours are still low, but I’m putting in pretty hard efforts on the bike and I’m seeing my running paces slowly but surely getting speedier.

Week of 2/22:

Monday – 1 hr ride: 20 min FTP test. Was hoping for a teeny tiny bit higher of a number but ended up with 178 FTP, which isn’t terrible, and hey, it’s still the beginning of the season.

Tuesday – AM Strength Training: 40 minutes, PM: 45 minute run (4.9miles)

Wednesday – 1 hr ride on the trainer

Thursday – 2500y swim (oh so very slow)

Friday – 1 hour speed work session on the treadmill. I HATE doing speedwork on the treadmill. I think it’s a mental thing, but it seems tougher than doing speedwork outside. However, I had to get the workout done before work, so treadmill it was. 1.5 mile warm-up followed by 3×6 min efforts at 5k pace with a 3 min recovery in between. Ouch. The last one I thought I was going to puke. Finished with 1.5 mile cool-down, for a total of 6.75 miles

Saturday – 1:15 on the trainer, followed by a 2 mile run

Sunday – 10 mile run @ 9:20 pace. In beautiful weather. In shorts. I kind of hope winter is gone for good, I’m ready for some warmer weather.

Total Hours: 8:25

Non-training updates, I finally put together all of the office furniture I ordered. I guess I should back up a little. When I had my mid-year review at the end of January, I was given the option to work from home 80% of the time (I was currently able to work from home 50% of the time), and of course I jumped at that opportunity! However, the third bedroom in our house, which is ‘the office’, wasn’t so much an office as it was a room to put stuff that we weren’t sure where to put it yet. Lots of documents, a couple of boxes…and more documents/files. I did have my desk from my condo set up and JMR had his drafting table set up on the other side of the room, but it just looked like a hodgepodge of furniture with lots of documents, and didn’t feel like an official ‘office’.

Soo… after doing a lot of research, I finally pulled the trigger and ordered two new desks, a little cabinet, and an office chair (we only had one and were sharing it). I started working on assembling the cabinet a couple of weeks ago and it took (I’m not kidding) four hours. Maybe I was reading slowly, maybe it’s because I was half watching TV as well, but it took for-ever. So I didn’t exactly jump to assemble the other pieces of furniture.

The small size is deceiving as to how long it took to assemble

Finally on Saturday I decided to tackle the smaller desk. Surprisingly it only took 2 hours:

JMR’s drafting table is back in the corner. It was quite the mess while I was assembling.

Still need to organize and file our many papers, but it looks better!

Sunday I was ready to tackle the final desk, however it was the largest. Oh boy. It took longer than the other desk, but wasn’t terrible, around 3 hours or so (I didn’t take an official ‘before’ picture, so below is a random one from a few months ago):