Mountain bike trails and intervals

I have begun the intensity portion of the training plan. Now, I really like the volume but these hard workouts should provide the necessary speed to meet my marathon goals. With this increased intensity I am taking more time recover. I took an off day from running following the Steam Whistle 12K on Saturday – well actually two days off from running.
 
On Sunday I started out with some of the TRX Metabolic Blast.  This thing is kicking my unstable cores ass.  A little later I joined the mountain bike crew and helped clear some more trails. Oh my gosh, this is hard work. You have to mark the trail then clear it with a power mover. There is a lot of chain saw work and then comes the old fashioned manual labor. The ground has to be racked and then the all of the little stumps have to be removed – with axe, awl or any type of hand implement. This type of work really makes you understand the concept of functional strength.

Birth of a trail.

On Monday I jumped on the elliptical machine. I normally hate elliptical machines – they make my body move in unnatural ways (that sounds funny – not really what I intended). However we have one (1) special elliptical machine – the Cybex 750AT. This thing actually works for me. It lets me workout hard without the impact. Next was some strength training – back to the bench press.

$8000 – dang

Tuesday brought back the trainer. I had been working on 2 x 20 minutes @ FTP but had failed recently. I dialed it back for some success – 3 x 10 @ FTP. This should allow for me to start building my cycling base again.
 
At lunch I attacked my intervals. After a two mile warm up I started the 4 x 800’s at 2:50. Damn, this was demanding. I was out on the trace and it is ‘pretty’ flat but there is a slight incline. So I ran back and forth and the times reflected the incline. The splits were as follows: 2:51 / 2:45 / 2:55 / 2:53 – average of 2:51. I was a little disappointed. These were hard. As I start to add two more repetitions each week it won’t be getting any easier. Time to suck it up.
 
After work I headed to the Family YMCA to help out with the next couch to 5k group. There were about 40 people eager and excited to take up running in their pursuit to improve their health. This is exciting stuff!