Journey to Kona Day 185: Sleep Matters

I slept at least nine hours last night and just took a nap.  This may be the most important training tool.  In fact, I know that I've gotten sick in the past when I haven't slept enough.  In the next 9 weeks, it's important that I get not only an adequate amount of sleep, but plenty of sleep!  I was figuring that I'd get out on my bike early today, but since I slept in, which I almost always do (letting my body decide when I'm ready to get up), I didn't leave the house until after 8am.  I rode my bike for a little over 3 hours, which was enough today.  I had planned to ride up to 4 hours, but I felt a little tired and my legs were definitely feeling some fatigue, so three was plenty, especially with a twenty mile run coming up on Sunday.

Tomorrow is essentially a rest day.  I'll swim, locking in what I learned this week and completing a fairly solid swim week.  But other than that, tomorrow is easy.  I want to be well rested for Sunday's run.  My plan is to get up early (hence the need for good sleep going in, and especially tonight), and to get to the race venue and run one loop of the half marathon course as an easy warm up.  this course is relatively flat, so I'm hoping that my warm up pace will be in the low 9's.  Ideally, I'd run somewhere between 9:00 and 9:30 pace for my warm up.  I won't use pace as my guide, I'll use my breathing, and keep it somewhere in the 4-6 steps per breath range.  After being sufficiently "warmed up," I'll do the Camarillo half marathon, starting at a comfortable 4 steps per breath effort and holding that for the first half of the race, and then, similar to the Santa Rosa 70.3, letting my breathing and effort come up to about 3 steps per breath.  I have no idea what kind of pace that will correspond to, but am hoping that it will at least be under 9 minute miles.

I'll then make sure that I take a nap on Sunday and get a good night of sleep on Sunday night.  I'm traveling for four nights later in the week, and it's going to be really important to make sure that I keep up with my sleep!