Steve in a Speedo?! Gross!

July in Review

>> Monday, August 17, 2026

Here's what July looked like in my training log:

• SWIM: 7,800 yards
• BIKE: 258.6 miles
• RUN: 95.02 miles
• STRENGTH/CORE TIME: 57 hours and 25 minutes

As I stated in my "June in Review" post, I knew July could hold shorter bike mileage because of being gone for the first week (Henry's fencing tournament in Portland, also posting about a long run in Portland). But I still cranked out over 250 miles, so that's not horrible.

Running was just fine at 95 miles. It would have been over 100 (my loose threshold for it being a "good" month) if it weren't for backing off mid-month for the Raspberry Run 1 Mile (the 1-mile race on the 19th replaced an 11 mile long run on the 20th, so do the math...).

And my stregth time was nice! 57+ hours is easily a top-10 month for me based on time.

None of the individual weeks in July were that great, except for that last full week of the 20th. It was a post-race week, and I got in some nice bike time as I noted in this post. It ended up having 23.5 hours of training time, which is a BIG week!

Ramping up now for the TC 10 Mile. Back with a post about 2 good "coached" training runs shortly!

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Alternative Swimming Pool (and Alternative Swimming Distance)

>> Saturday, August 15, 2026

My gym's pool currently looks like this:

So I headed to a different gym to swim earlier this week. That pool looks like this:

Post-swim at the Eagan YMCA.

A funny thing happened there. I did a longer warm-up and didn't do any math to figure out if I was swimming fast or slow. And then I went into a very common workout: 6x200.

Doing 200s is my MOST common swim workout in about the past 8 years of training. For my 200s, 3:0x is fast, 3:14 is around average (these days... used to be faster), and anything near 3:20 is slow. So I did a triple-take at my watch when my first 200 clocked in at 3:34! I honestly thought I was just having a rough day during my first rest period. But when I started my 2nd 200, I counted strokes / length of the pool. Normally, I'm at 27-29, but suddenly I was at 33-35 strokes....

Ahhh.... it was my first 25 METER pool when I'm used to 25 YARD pools.

The rest of the workout went well, even though I had no idea what sort of times I was swimming.

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