The Water is Open
Vacation week.
More wine than necessary, later nights than planned, friends around the table until the kind of hour that makes the morning feel like a negotiation. And somehow — I'm still not entirely sure how — the biggest training week of this entire rebuild.
794 TSS. Ten hours and change. Six days.
Thursday I was back in Tri Cities for the second course recon. 3.9 hours, 285 TSS, HR running at 126 — the hardest sustained effort of any long session in this block. The course is becoming something I can see when I close my eyes now: where it opens up, where the wind finds you, the false flats that look like nothing on a map and feel like everything at mile 40. That's the point of going back. Fitness you can build anywhere. Course knowledge is specific and it has to be earned in person, repeatedly, until the road stops being abstract.
Saturday was different. Better, maybe.
First open water swim of the season. There's no clean way to describe what it feels like to get back in open water after months in a pool — the absence of a wall, the way sighting interrupts everything, that particular silence under the surface when there are no lane lines to anchor you. Disorienting. Familiar and foreign at the same time. You remember that you know how to do this, but you have to remind yourself, and that reminder takes a full session to fully land.
Then straight onto the bike. Brick.
Legs that had just been horizontal in the water suddenly asked to turn over at cadence. The transition is its own kind of fitness — not cardiovascular, not muscular exactly, just the body's ability to shift modes under duress. Thirteen weeks out, that shift needs to start being practiced. Saturday was the first real rep of it.
The week ran on vacation fuel. Wine, food, friends, 3.9 hours of sleep on Thursday night after the big effort. The HRV strap stayed in the bag — late nights and morning routines don't coexist well — so those numbers are gone. Sleep averaged 6.4 hours. Somehow the average HR for the entire week was 104.2 despite ten hours of work. Sixteen weeks ago that number was 118 on easy days. Something has genuinely changed in the engine room, and it's not subtle anymore.
Thirteen weeks to Ironman 70.3 Washington.
The vacation ends tomorrow. The course is in my head. The water is open.
The work continues.
Weekly metrics: 6 training days · 10.2 hours · 794 TSS · Avg sleep 6.4 hrs · Avg HR 104.2 · Weight n/a Thursday course recon: 3.9 hrs · 285 TSS · HR 126 Saturday: open water swim (first of season) + brick vs. last week: 4 training days · 6.4 hours · 414 TSS Biggest week of the rebuild by a significant margin