Indoors.... its the new outdoors!

So apparently everyone is moving their workouts indoors today.  Buzz on the Tri-NE discussion board is that nasty thunderstorms forced everyone to cancel their morning workouts or move them indoors.  Here in Columbus that was my only option for the brick workout I wanted to do today. 

Last night I made it directly from work to bed around midnight.  My alarm went off at 6am and I was up and at em and into work by 630.  I turned the rig on, changed a blown lamp, tweaked a thing or two and then headed off to the gym.  Met fellow crew member Rob-A-Roni at the gym down the street at 7am (the hotel gym is awful!) only to discover they don't open till 8am.  Fortunately there was a Starbucks across the street so we stopped for coffee and walked about for an hour till the gym opened.

Once the gym opened I jumped on one of two stationary bikes (fortunately a brand new one) set it to random hill workout at around a 70% difficulty setting and went at it.  In the end I did just over 20 miles in the hour on the bike, and managed quite the giant puddle of sweat under and all over the bike.  So I'd say it was a quality bike workout considering I didn't actually go anywhere.  Quick mop up of the bike and over to the treadmill for a quite good 5K workout.

After mostly doing my bricks on the Providence Bicycle TT course that starts with that nasty hill I was beginning to wonder if I could actually start a brick run at faster than a 10mi/min pace.  Fortunately I was happy to find that on the treadmill set at a 1% incline I was able to get up to 8mi/mile pace within thirty seconds of stepping on it.  In fact it felt so good I decided to do a descending set for the 5k that went like this....

Mile 1 8mi/mile
Mile 2 7:30mi/mile
Mile 2-2.5 7 mi/mile
Mile 2.5-3 6:45 mi/mile
Mile 3-3.2 6:30 mi.mile.

Felt great!  So apparently I can manage a little speed off the bike.  I'm curious to see how this translates to the non treadmill world though on a 5K course that doesn't start with a mile long hill.

After all that I was back at work by 10:30am and I'll be here again till midnight.  So no rest for me today.  Tomorrow I hope to get a 10 mile run in.  Now the funny bit about running ten miles is the way my job works.  I have to come in at 6:30am and turn everything on.  I don't have to be back at work till 10:30am.  However...  I can't be more than about ten minutes away from the venue in case theres a problem.  So my ten mile run will have to consist of a route that either takes place entirely on a treadmill.  Yuck!  or is made up of ten laps of a one mile loop around the venue so I won't be that far away if something goes wrong.  Not exactly fun either!  But this is the nonsense I have to put up with while training on the road.

Right then...  back to work.  I hope everyone manages to get their workouts in today!