Monday was a busy day. I watched the Tour. I picked the remaining beets, and then prepped and canned all of the beets. (My first time canning beets – here’s hoping they’re delicious!) I ground wheat and made pizza crust. (We grilled pizza for dinner. Yum! I made mine with fresh-picked Sunsugar tomatoes and basil, a bit of home-grown onion, and store-bought sausage & cheese. Winner!) I prepped a few pounds of bananas to dry them. (They’re pretty delicious, too.) I did laundry. Bottom line: I never got around to working out.

Because I missed three days last week, I wanted to stick to this week’s workout schedule as closely as possible. Monday was a swim. Tuesday was a 40-minute ride with really super-duper hard 15-second intervals, followed by 4:45 recovery. But I didn’t want to ride my bike home because I didn’t want to miss Tuesday’s evening broadcast of the Tour. So – get ready to gasp – I put the B2 on the trainer and did my workout indoors. Yes – ME! On a trainer!

True to form, it sucked. But I never got my heart rate up very high. That’s partly because of the short intervals. I imagine it’s also because I’m not used to the trainer; perhaps I’m not riding as hard as I would on the road because I’m afraid of tweaking my beautiful carbon fiber road rocket that’s rigidly attached to the trainer. Nonetheless, my peak heart rate was 136.

When I got off the bike, I felt a little twinge in my left Achilles tendon, right below my gastrocnemius, a little on the inboard edge. Nothing so dramatic as a ripping sensation, just a bit of weakness. And just enough to make me think, OMG NO YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME!!!!

Every now and again, it would twinge. The next day’s workout was a run with a 3 km time trial. I did the run, primarily to gauge the condition of my left leg. It felt twingy a few times, but still nothing dramatic. I didn’t stress the leg as much as I might otherwise have, so my pace for the 3 km was 11:50/mile – I’ll take it!  Even better? I managed to do the run on my lunch hour.

I’m rather pleased with myself that I made up the missed workout by doing two in one day, and knocking out that run at lunch.

I decided to watch the Tour Thursday morning instead of swimming before court, and then swimming after work. Again, another notable thing: this swim workout had one 800-yard interval. I did it without the snorkel. Yay! My race swim is a half-mile, which is 880 yards. And since I got into my head that I needed to do eighteen laps in that interval, I ended up swimming 900 yards.

I need to keep an eye on the Achilles tendon. It’s got a definite sore spot. I should be massaging the crap out it instead of writing a blog. I will monitor how it feels throughout my upcoming workouts. I start training for the half-marathon right after Race the River, and since I’m also doing the Multnomah Falls trail run the week before the Leavenworth half-marathon, I’ll be running Badger in August. I will need this Achilles to be healthy and happy. But the swim and the run and the fact I managed to ride a trainer all have me feeling pretty darn good about myself right now.