Crawling Into The Pain Cave

Today was the first of my BIG IM assessment sessions and man oh man did it go well. The short of it:

• 14 mile warm up (ride over to ECV TT course)
• 100k @ IM Goal Watts (Dean Phillips was kind enough to join me for 80k. I can't thank him enough for the company as it made the session FLY by). Avg. power of 271 watts/norm of 275 and I felt absolutely sensational throughout. Despite the wind and lack of aero kit, I covered the 100k in 2:33 and passed through 56 miles in 2:18. It felt very easy.
  
• Rode home 14 miles (total of 90 miles of riding on the day)
  
• Quick Transition and out the door for a hilly 17+ mile run. Avg. pace of 6:25 for the distance. Passed through 13.1 miles in 1:23:50 and despite a really painful blister on the ball of my left foot and the fatigue that goes hand in hand with being nearly 6 hours deep into a pace session, I held it together and capped the workout. The final 30 min. of the run were anything but easy though. I won't lie.
  

I still have a way to go until my IM fitness is 100% and I'm ready to make an all out assault on IMWI, but as long as I can continue to stay motivated and injury free, I am extremely confident that I'm going to have a good day on 9/13.

You can never disrespect this distance though, so as good as I felt today, I know that race day will feature nearly 4k of swimming, an entire 180k of hard riding and a full marathon and as such, I'll be sure to lay down the necessary training that will allow me to handle this absurd distance when the day comes.

Things are headed in the right direction though, that's for sure.

Here's the Garmin File from today's long T run if you'd like to check it out.

p.s. Big props to my Dad for helping me with today's run. Gatorade every other mile really gave me something to look forward to out there, especially when I had to run by the beach and think about all the fun everyone else was having while I suffered alone.