Training on Vacation

My next race is this saturday (National Capital Triathlon), so it's been a bit of a taper week for me. Not necessarily by design (this is more of a warm-up race to my "A" race in two weeks, so I'd rather "train through" this race) but by necessity since we took a family vacation to visit friends in Oshawa then spend a few days camping down at Sandbanks.

Not a big deal to go lighter on the training in the week leading up to a race, but I certainly didn't want to take 5 days off from training altogether either as that would leave me pretty flat for the race. And I've been feeling in pretty good form lately - no nagging hamstring/pes anserinus injuries that have been the bane of my season so far, and I finally managed to break 22 minutes on a 13.5km loop I use for bike intervals (there's that goal-setting thing again). So I planned to get some degree of training in while on this trip, and packed my stuff accordingly.

I got a run in before we left on Saturday, and managed to sneak out for another run with Nora on Sunday morning in Oshawa. I didn't have my ice pack for my knee though and over the course of the day and the days that followed some patellar tendonitis reared its ugly head in my right knee. Doing more running less than a week before this race was not going to improve my fitness, but it could aggravate the tendonitis and make things worse, so I decided not to do any more running on our vacation.

I brought my mountain bike with me so I could get a bike session in - I remembered last summer in PEI the red sand that penetrated every nook and cranny of my bike, and didn't want to repeat that with my tri bike. I also wasn't really sure what the roads would be like, and it ended up being a good call as there were definitely some rough sections. I'll say this though: riding around on a steel-framed mountain bike with fat tires and a suspension fork is damned luxurious.

Also got a good open-water swim in - some hard 100m and 200m intervals, and got to work on sighting.

The other complication though was getting enough rest, and the combination of a somewhat uncomfortable sleeping arrangement, drunken Quebecois on their construction holiday, an 8 month old baby, and the birds greeting the day at 5am, meant I was in a bit of a sleep deficit when I got back. I had planned on getting my last good bike session in on wednesday evening but couldn't muster the energy.

Normally thursday would be a rest day and I'd do an easy brick on friday to get tuned up before saturday's race. But it was already a lighter than ideal week for me, so I went with a hard double-brick thursday and will take friday as a rest day. We'll see how it goes on race day. It's looking like it'll be a hot day and my wave isn't going off until 10:15.