C A T S... Cats, Cats, Cats

We have had a wonderful weekend in athletics here at UK and I couldn't be happier. Casey and the rest of the UK swim team traveled down to Knoxville to compete at the UT invitational. The team swam really well all weekend and the girls' team managed to bring home the victory. The defeated UT, and Virginia Tech (both who defeated them earlier in the year) along with Alabama. The guys weren't as fortunate. They were out scored by UT by only 4 points. But all in all, the team had their best meet of the year by far. Casey swam season best times in all of her events including the 200 IM, 200 free, 100 free, and 200 fly.

UK basketball defeated Rider yesterday here in Lexington by almost 30 points, and we looked the best we have all year. I get more and more excited about every game that we play. John Wall and company are really fun to watch. They are headed down to Cancun to finish up the tournament this coming Tuesday and Wednesday. And UK football defeated the Georgia bulldogs in Athens for the first time since 1977. We are now 7 - 4. This has been an up and down year for us in football. We should not have lost to MSU or USC, but we pulled out some big wins against UGA, and Auburn. I just really hope we can beat UT this coming weekend. I'm tired of losing to them.

I'm sure there were some other exciting things going on in other sports as well, but these were the top 3 in my book. And now its 1pm on a Sunday which can only mean 1 thing: it's Fantasy football time.

And on some sad news, I will be missing my first NCAA xc meet in over 6 years. Me, and several other buddies have traveled to watch the NCAA meet the past 6 years in a row. We all delayed in making plans this year, and now we aren't going. I guess I'll just watch the meet on tv tomorrow.


Tony

Pain

I read an article about pain in the new "Running Times" and it's a pretty good article. It discusses how the top runners in the sport deal with pain during a race and their different perspectives are pretty interesting. The Japanese runners use gaman which is the Japanese concept of enduring pain with dignity and grace. I know that most people don't like to deal with that amount of pain, but I guess the Japanese like to see how much they can endure. Other runners talk about breaking the race into segments so you just have to deal with the pain in shorter amounts of time thus making the race go by faster. The African runners talk about relying on their strength that they get from religion. Haile Gebrselassie (WR holder in the marathon) talks about accepting the pain rather than fighting it.

It's a pretty good article. Maybe I'll start thinking about Gaman instead of getting nervous and dreading a hard workout before I even start it. I have witnessed several swimmers on my team phych them selves out before a hard workout just because the set "looks hard." And I know that I've done this myself. I tell myself that it's going to hurt, and I give in to the pain and end up not having a good workout. If I could just not think about the workout, and do it, then I would be much better off, along with a few other people that I know.

Anyways, training has been going pretty good. My running feels really good as of lately. I have had a few faster paced runs which were unplanned. I would just feel good and pick up the pace for no reason, and finish the run feeling like I didn't try that hard. I did a 5 mile fartlek yesterday which was unplanned and I ended up running the 5 miles in 28:10 which I feel is pretty good for the time of year. My swimming has been hit and miss, but my bad days I'm still holding a decent pace that I couldn't have held in past years, so I know that I'm getting faster in the water, I just really dislike those slow days.

I hit just under 50 miles last week and will be around 55 miles for this week. My swimming yardage has been higher than usual, but it'll probably take a little hit over the next 2 weeks with a big swim meet at our pool this weekend, and Thanksgiving next weekend. But with these breaks in swimming, I'm going to start biking.

My first swim meet as a coach starts tomorrow. We are hosting our annual Autumn Classic this weekend and the kids are swimming Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I'm looking forward to watching them swim. And several of them found my blog this week and wanted shout outs. Kelsey Mclaughlin, Caroline Jacobs, and Casey Ren are three of the girls that I'll be watching swim this weekend. Good luck girls.

T-Bird

Wednesday Update

After a great weekend with the family in Bowling Green, I'm back in Lexington for the usual stuff. I got to have dinner with the family at my grandparents Friday night, do a few workouts with my bro, see my sister as a cheerleader for WKU for the first time, and just have a great weekend in general. I am now enjoying all of the apples and apple cider that I can handle thanks to my grandparents who own "Jackson's Orchard" in Bowling Green, KY. And I know that Eric, Beth, and Casey have enjoyed them as well.

I have really been working hard in the water, and also been putting in the work on the road. I'm still 2 days behind on my running challenge, but that isn't bad for over 30 days of running. And I don't have a workout for today but I did get a suggestion of a video to post on here. This is just a little time trial for fun at the University of Texas. One guy does a 100 backstroke for time (with no 15 meter rule, so it's pretty much all under water) and another is a 150 breaststroke for time. The most impressive thing is the 100 underwater.


http://www.floswimming.org/videos/play/80787-friday-afternoon-texas

and here is another video that is just funning.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/failblog/videos/326/

Tony

November already?

Sorry for the lack of posting in the past few weeks but I haven't really had much to blog about now since the season is over but I'll give you a quick update.

Training has been going pretty good. I still have yet to touch my bike since my last race, but I have been slowly upping my mileage in running, and trying to hit some big numbers in swimming as well. I did swim a PR for yardage a few weeks ago by swimming over 37,000 yards, but I proceeded to catch a little cold the following Monday so I took 2 days off from the water, and then took a few days really easy so I was around 15,000 for that week. I managed to hit over 30,000 last week and I felt like I didn't swim a ton either, so that is a good sign. My last three weeks of running has been 40, 47, and 50 miles. This week is going to be a down week before I keep going up the ladder. My running challenge is going really good too. It is over 3 weeks into the challenge and I have run 22 times in 24 days. I have a 2-a-day planned later this week so I'll only be down by one run at the end of 4 weeks.

Coaching is going great. The kids had their first meet a few weeks ago and they all swam pretty well considering it was an early season meet. They have a pretty hard set planned for today with 6 x 200 FAST!!! And tomorrow they have a 5,000 straight swim. Good thing I'm not swimming with them right now, ha.

Fantasy Football is as exciting as ever and I'm in first place in my division. I am playing the guy that I'm tied with in my division this weekend so there is a lot on the line.

I may have a new favorite show that is called "White Collar" which comes on USA on Friday night. It's pretty good.

And having an American win the NYC marathon this past weekend was also awesome. Congrats to Meb for the big W.

Tony

Who likes IM?

As in Individual Medley, not Ironman. The workout of the week is going to be a main set that our swim team did almost a week ago. It is called the Ultimate IM set and I know the kids did not have fun doing it. The send off's can be changed around to fit any swimmer, but this is a long set so it shouldn't be performed by anyone who doesn't usually swim a large amount of yards. Or if you aren't really used to swimming a lot of IM. You don't want to mess up your shoulders because of the amount of Butterfly you must swim during this set.

And unfortunately, there isn't a video to post with this workout, but here is how the set is broken up (and I'll post the "B" intervals for the set):

4 x 400 IM alternating 5:45 and 5:30 send off's
8 x 200 IM all on a 2:55 send off
16 x 100 IM alternating 1:25 and 1:15 send off's

We had the 400's and 100's on alternating intervals. They would swim one at moderate pace and then one fast. The 200's were all on the same interval.

Out of the 20+ swimmers that started the set, only 3 finished the entire workout as planned without missing an interval. Most of the swimmers were forced to swim freestyle on the faster interval during the 100's. This only happened after they missed an interval.

And an update on the 100/100 challenge, I'm 9 for 9 right now. I have actually not missed a day of running so far and its going good. Most days I'm keeping it pretty easy with a shorter run of 30 - 45 minutes. I did do a longer run on Saturday and plan on doing another this weekend. I put in 40 miles last week and plan to be around 45 this week.

T-Bird

The Pushup Challenge and the 100 in 100

This is a little bit different from some of the past workouts that I've posted but its a good little off season challenge to try out. The main goal is to see how fast you can do 100 push ups. This challenge originated from this guy's friend (who is a girl) who said that she did 100 pushups in 2 minutes and 47 seconds. So, being the man that he is, he felt he should be able to do this easily if she could do it. And, he fails miserably almost doubling her time.

You can break it up however you want, you just have to finish 100 pushups as fast as possible.

http://www.flotrack.org/videos/coverage/view_video/235353-flotrack-2009-xc-season/201816-the-pushup-challenge

Here is the link to the guy who explains the challenge and shows his attempt at the challenge. I have never tried it because I'm too scared of how horribly sore I would be for the following days.

Monday I also started a running challenge that I have heard some people do over the winter to help them with motivation. Dave K wanted to do 100 runs in 100 days and for me to do it with him. So far, I have ran twice in 2 days so I am on pace, haha.

The rules:
a.) each run must be over 30 minutes to count.
b.) there can be multiple runs in a day as long as there is at least 2 hours between runs

That is pretty much it. Nothing too complicated. And I have started up my winter of swimming as well. I'm going to act more like a swimmer when I'm in the water and focus on some more distance swimming which I have never really done much of. Yesterday I did 3 x 1000 on a faster send off. This was extremely hard, and I died miserably on the last one, but it gives me some room for improvement if I decide to do this set again, ha.

That's about it for now.

Tony

WOW

Last week might have been the least exciting week of the year. I was taking some time off, and I filled that time I usually spend training by just sitting around. I was bored out of my mind. This week, my coaching schedule is in full swing. The kids are swimming 2-a-days, 3 days a week and have started swimming a workout on the weekend. So I went from working just around 15 hours a week to around 23 hours a week. So I don't feel too much like a bum anymore, haha. I have ran the past three days and have swam a little, but no serious training has begun yet. This past Saturday was a lot of fun with Ben and his girlfriend coming up for the game on Saturday. Those two and Casey and myself all went to the UK/Bama game, then to Mellow Mushroom, and then to the movies for a pretty exciting Saturday. Sunday, Casey and I were able to enjoy a little tennis, which neither of us had played in forever.

Now, the workout of the week is going to be from the Hansons-Brooks project. Brian Sell is running the Chicago Marathon this weekend (I think, ha) so I figured I could show a video of his training. He has been known to run 150+ miles weeks. He did not break 10 minutes for 2 miles in high school, but has since become an Olympian by making the 2008 US marathon team. They are doing 8 x 1k at just faster than marathon race pace. The coach talks about throwing the marathon guys on the track a few times just to keep a little speed in their legs. They did this workout 5 weeks before the Boston marathon. Enjoy

http://www.flotrack.org/videos/speaker/129-brian-sell/170131-hansons-brooks-workout-2009-boston-marathon-episode-12

Tony