Oysters and Miles
There's a place on Chuckanut Drive where you can sit at a picnic table, look out over Samish Bay, and eat oysters straight from the water they were just pulled out of. Taylor Shellfish Farms. If you haven't been, go.
That was Bellingham this week. A few days away with Kristin, hilly walks through a town that doesn't let you stay flat for long, late nights, good wine, and oysters that tasted like the Pacific Northwest smells. Not a training trip. Not a recovery trip either, if I'm being honest with the data.
Sleep averaged 6.1 hours across the week. One night came in at 4.6. The wine shows up in those numbers whether it's logged or not, and it wasn't logged. Weight came back at 184 on the one morning I checked — the oysters and Chardonnay accounted for, no apologies offered.
And yet.
Six training days out of seven. 6.2 hours. 406 TSS. Average heart rate of 112 across all sessions. Three weeks running now — vacation, staycation, call shifts, a cold still in the rearview mirror — and the training has held at six days and 400-plus TSS each time. That's not an accident. It's also not heroic. It's just what consistency starts to look like when it becomes habit rather than effort.
The Bellingham miles were mostly walks. Hilly ones — the kind of town where you think you're just heading to coffee and end up climbing for twenty minutes without meaning to. There's aerobic value in that, modest but real, and more importantly there's something about moving through a place on foot that no car window gives you. You notice things. The way the light sits on the bay in the morning. The particular quiet of a Pacific Northwest hill town before the cafes open. Olivia would have loved it.
The numbers that matter most this week aren't the TSS or the hours. They're the two valid HRV readings I got — 7.4 on Monday and 6.7 by Saturday. A small dip as the week accumulated, the sleep debt doing what sleep debt does. Not alarming. But honest. The body keeps score even when you're on vacation, especially when you're on vacation.
The patella is still there, still quiet during activity. Still on the watch list.
Here's what three weeks of data is starting to show: the aerobic base is absorbing training load without the heart rate drifting. Averaging 111-112 across sessions, week after week, even as the TSS has built. That's the signal Alan Couzens talks about — not how fast you're going, but whether the engine is running efficiently at a given output. Right now, it is. Quietly, without drama, the foundation is doing what foundations are supposed to do.
There's a half Ironman in September. Twenty-five weeks out, give or take. The gap between where I am and where I need to be is real but not frightening. What it requires is exactly what the last three weeks have looked like — not perfect weeks, but persistent ones. Training that survives oysters and late nights and call shifts and hilly walks in Bellingham.
Back home now. The routine resets tomorrow.
More soon.
Weekly metrics: 6 training days · 6.2 hours · 406 TSS · Avg sleep 6.1 hrs · Avg HR 112 · Weight 184.2Three-week TSS: 468 → 453 → 406 · Three-week avg HR: 111 → 112 → 112