Push

When the weather is nice and the mood is good, I normally like to push myself slightly harder during my training. And looking at the current pattern of my daily training, Wednesday is normally the day where I tend to push more, if however possible lah.

So yesterday, right after my work ended I rushed to the swimming pool. I was fortunate that the big dark clouds were only passing by, pouring down the heavy rain and thunders somewhere else. I quickly changed to my swimming gear and hit the pool at 5.45pm. I wanted to start early, with a mind set to do 1 hour swim, non-stop.

With not so many other swimmers, I put my water bottle on the edge of the third lane of the pool, as to indicate that I am ‘reserving’ the lane to myself. The first few hundred meters were good enough that I did not feel any discomfort in any of my swimming muscles. Perhaps, the pain has been really ‘broken down’.

Getting to 1km point, breathing was still manageable, and the time clocked was around 25 minutes, if I’m not mistaken. Upon taking few sips of water from the bottle, I continued to reach 1.5km point, where the time shown that I’ve spent 38 minutes swimming.

I know I’ve done 2km swim before, only I forgot what the time I clocked was (and I’m lazy to look back at my old post). Anyway, this time, I managed to swim 2km in about 53 minutes or so (not so accurate, I did not use stopwatch, just reading off the needles).

Ok, I have about 5 to 7 minutes to go before completing an hour of swimming, and I spent those final minutes to add another 400m. So, I did 2.4km in 60 minutes, and I’ll try to beat this record next time, when I have the mood to push again.

Done with the swimming, I went home to collect my running and cycling gears. I’ve promised a buddy to run together before we cycle, and I was 15 minutes late when I arrived at our normal gathering point. He was already doing 10 minutes of warming up run.

I joined him and started my stopwatch. The plan was to run one big loop of our normal cycling route, which would give us approximately 6km distance to run or cycle. He’s a very strong runner and in fact, I could say he’s among the top 3 in JB (out of all this very little community of active athletes I know). I don’t know what you would think, but he holds a personal best time of 3hr36min for a full marathon race.

So, following his running pace can be categorized as a hard effort for me. But, I pushed myself, and managed to stay behind his foot steps throughout 95% of our run last night. It was also a battle with my own mindset which kept on sending me signals to stop and just run with my slow pace. I won the battle, and I was glad that I completed the 5.8km run in 31 minutes.

Still not yet as fast as I wanted, but I’m reminding myself that I’m still in the journey towards that goal.

Right after the run, we cycled. Again, I wanted to see how far I can push myself on the bike after having done the swim and the run. Our normal menu was to do the 6km loop, 5 times.

On the first loop, I was doing fine. The pace was not that fast yet as most of them were still warming up. Getting into the second loop, I was still feeling good as I place myself to lead the peloton cruising at 36-37 km/hr on the flat road until suddenly…

“Pssssttttt…..”

… at 8km mark, my back tire exploded and there gone my chance to push on the bike.

Instead, I had to push the bike back to the car park. What a good 20 minutes cooling down walking exercise that was.

This was not last night's photo (obviously). This was during one of the times where I pushed myself on the long rides, back in February 2009. I did a 79km long ride on Saturday morning, followed by a 131km long ride on the next morning. It was really tiring.

[Training Log]
Wednesday: Swim 2.4km, 1hr, moderate; Run 5.8km, 31min, moderate/hard; Cycle 8km (supposed to be 30km ride, but DNF due to puncture)