Tapering before Ironman (Plus a 'zoo' of a nightmare)

I am thoroughly enjoying this tapering period. Last week held concrete evidence that my body needed some time to recover. My Saturday ride before graduation was supposed to be four hours and it was more like three, and I did not run after, nor did I swim on Sunday. I noticed right when I got on the bike I did not have that oomph that I usually have starting a ride. I went on to the Ironman course and spun up a bit just to see if I had any sprinting legs today.... nope. It was rather windy again and that just added to my frustrations. So instead of trying to push through and get my normal two loops in after the first one I just turned around and headed in. I was pretty ruffled about not getting in the workout that was on my Ironman plan. But I realized that this was my body screaming "DUDE I NEED SOME REST!!!" Sometimes you just have to listen to your body, it knows what is going on.

This week calls for:

Monday: 2,500 swim
Tuesday: 1 hour bike, 30 minute run
Wednesday: 3,000 swim
Thursday: 1 hour run (6 miles)
Friday: 2,500 swim
Saturday: 2 hour bike (35 miles), 30 minute run
Sunday: DAY OFF!!!!!!

Totals: about 8 hours, 8,000 meters swimming but I will probably get in on off days and do some drilling, 12 miles running, about 60 miles biking.

Thursday is also my last day at my internship, I think Friday will be my first Friday off from work since January. This calls for some excessive celebration: sleeping in till noon! Most likely that will not happen and I will be up with the sun like normal, but it does sound heavenly.

Let's get to my dream I had last night. Feel free to comment at the bottom of the post if you know anything about dream interpretations because I would love to figure this one out.

My dream started out at some Ironman event in Europe, it must have been Lanzarote in Spain because I high-fived Chris McCormack the day before the race. The dream took me through my normal race day routine, stretching, eating, the whole nine yards. All the athletes hopped in the water and we floated there like little fishing bobbers waiting for the gun to go off. My buddy Jesse looks at me and goes, "hey man get on my feet (it means get in my draft) and just follow me the whole race" (It is fact that you can draft while swimming just like race cars do in Nascar). So we took off and it felt like I was being towed by a motor boat. We weaved our way up through the field and eventually caught up with the pros. For some reason I my arms were not getting tired so we swam harder. I ended up getting out of the water in like 37 minutes (This would be an Ironman record ha ha). Once we got into transition there was a muscular bull named Bodacious standing in front of my bike; he would not let me pass. I would try to distract him but Bodacious stood his ground and would not flinch. All the athletes were catching up to me now and taking off on the 112-mile bike ride, Bodacious did not seem interested in any of them. This stupid bull stood there for the next six hours, my bike was the only one left in the transition area. And this is when my alarm went off. I am sure if I got to sleep a bit longer I was going to turn into a matador and turn the bull into Mongolian BBQ or something :)

Anyway, dreams are weird. Subconsciously I believe the dream was telling me that I do not need to worry about the swim anymore and the 112-mile bike will be the 'bull' of the race for me. I do not even want to know what animal would have shown up for my run ha ha. Most likely an elephant, or a rhino; both slow beasts with poor endurance capabilities.

I have been watching the weather down in Florianopolis, Brazil and it appeals to be quite the quagmire. Although the highs are only in the upper 70's the humidity was 100% yesterday. This means I will sweat like a fat kid in Bikrams Yoga when I race (Google Bikrams and you will get the joke). When you sweat your body loses its electrolytes especially your sodium content which is key to endurance performance. There is a neat little product out by NUUN that is a better tasting salt tablet that helps replenish this lost sodium. I will experiment with it this week during a bike ride in the heat to see how my body reacts. Most likely it will do fine, and I will implement it by dropping one of these tablets into my gatorade every hour during the Ironman.

Daley

"You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."
-Yogi Berra