The Olympics
The Olympics are here!!! It’s been so exciting to watch so far and there are still two whole weeks left! The opening ceremonies were utterly amazing - it would have been incredible to be there in person. During parts of the ceremony I was thinking, “are there really people underneath or is it mechanical?” It seemed impossible, but virtually all of the ceremony was human-controlled. Hopefully I’ll be there in 2012 in London. I’m not sure how they’ll top this opening ceremony, but I’m sure being there in person would make up for it! 
It’s been fun watching the swimming and gymnastics so far. The swim team was here at Stanford training before they left for Asia, so hopefully some of there fastness rubbed off into the water, so I’ll get faster, too. haha I was able to see the gymnastics national championships last year in San Jose, and a lot of the same people are competing in the Olympics now. Last night was the men’s preliminaries and tonight is the women’s preliminaries. I was in gymnastics until the fourth grade, and it is always amazing to see all the tricks they can do, knowing how many long hours and repetition went into having one chance to make it perfect. In 1996, I got to watch the Olympics in Atlanta, and a lot of the gymnasts on the women’s team were around my age, so it was really motivational at the time to see people at the top of their game at that age and to be able to see what it takes to get to the top.
Even though it would be nice to sit around and watch the Olympics all day online and on tv, especially since I got a new 32″ LCD HDTV just in time, I’m still getting all my own training in. There were a few highlights this past week. In my tempo swim workout I went 18:59 for 1500 lcm. I had gone that fast a couple months ago, but I think this was under less ideal conditions, so it seems like I’m still making progress. I seem to keep getting stronger in the bike too, my target paces for key workouts have kept seeming easier, so I’ve gradually increased the pace. I’m going to do a test on Tuesday to recalibrate the right speeds to be training at. Yesterday I did a 1:00 tempo ride on the CompuTrainer and average 268 watts according to the CompuTrainer and went 24.54 miles according to my cyclometer. Today, I had another great swim workout. Normally, I would do something like 4000m straight. On an average day I might average 7:10-7:15 per 500. On a day I’m feeling fresher, I’m closer to 7:00 per 500 and when I’m feeling more fatigued, I go more in the 7:20-7:30 per 500 pace. So, today I planned on switching things up to try and get faster at my steady aerobic pace. The plan was to do an 1800 warmup and then 8×500 in 7:00 with 30s rest between each. I ended up going a lot faster, but they all felt really under control, and I wasn’t breathing that hard. I alternated breathing patterns by going right, left, right/left by 50, every other, every other, right/left by 50, right/left by 50, every other. My times were 6:42, 6:44, 6:40, 6:33, 6:31, 6:29, 6:32, 6:21 with 30s rest in between each. Rather than doing long straight sets, I’ll probably start doing more sets at paces like this and see what results. After the injection in the joint last week, I haven’t had pain in my foot while running. I’ve kept things conservative just in case, and started with 15:00, 20:00, 25:00, and 30:00 today. I’ll do four 30:00 runs this coming week and then start to increase a bit. If I’m pain free for another couple weeks, I think I’ll be in the clear.
Ok, back to watching the Olympics on TV!
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