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Swimming at Lake Temescal

A slightly late recap of week 3 of my 4 week build phase. The total hours are a little down partly because of the missed pool swim and partly because I’ve changed accounting of my ride time. I now only count time moving, which on Saturday was actually 25 min or so less than time we were out on our bikes.

Swim: 1hr 56 min

Three swims this week. I think overall my mood was discouraged with swimming.

Monday and Wednesday I did my pool swims as scheduled. Monday’s main set was 4x200yds which I thought went well. Between 3:40 and 3:50 for each of the 200s. I was actually kind of excited about that pace. On Wednesday I came back down to earth with a 2700 yard session at the Oakland YMCA crammed in before I had to be at Kelly’s school for an event. This time my 200 meter swims were at more like 2:00/100 yards, though mixed into a lot more yards. My endurance felt better than the previous couple of week, but obviously it effects my pace quite a bit.

I felt by Friday like it was too late to get faster so I bailed on my so-called quality set. Instead I went open water swimming on the weekend for the first time this year. It felt suddenly great to be out swimming. No chlorine. No black line. No locker room full of fat ugly naked people. It’s like trail running after running on the treadmill all year. Plus, wetsuit buoyancy is always fun. I think this will be the pattern from now on, open water experience will be more useful to me than a third pool workout.

Bike: 6hrs 13min

Another two M2 sessions on Tuesday and Thursday. At Tuesday’s class there was hardly anyone there as the class was riding to Santa Cruz for the tour of California stage finish. On Thursday they all turned up smashed for racing 120 miles with 3 trips to skyline and back to coast, or something like that. It was all super grande burritos this and tacos that. Um, what? Anyway, it serves them right. Maybe next year!!

Our weekend didn’t lend itself very well to a biking. Three birthday parties to take our daughter to! However at 3pm on Saturday we dropped her off at a party and set out towards Davis hoping for a little central valley flat and fast. Patty was pleading for a break from the hills, and I was trying to get a little race specific. As we got out that way the sky filled with dark thunderstorms and the wind started to blow.

It could be like that in Boise. Maybe it would be good experience. Or maybe we’d be hit by lightning or blown off our bikes into the path of a truck. Or maybe we’d just be plowing into wind and rain for hours. We bailed on mental toughness and turned and headed back towards home. Our ride was around the Three Bears loop again. We made about 42 miles or so out of it, with lots of climbing.

This ride was a little discouraging. I felt slow over the hills, as usual, but quick on the flats and rolling terrain. On the hills I worked hard to get up each climb only to look back and see Patty 40 meters back. Three months of bike training over her and I’m just 40 meters ahead of her? On top of that my GPS data would suggest that on the flats I wasn’t exactly going too fast either. I should be able to sit in at 18+ miles/hr given the watts I do these days in class, but instead I average more like 15-16 miles/hr. Perhaps the fatigue runs deep and a taper and race excitement will do me some good.

I’m contemplating getting a Powertap. That would answer a lot of questions. And REI has 20% off right now. There’s only one reason not to get one: money.

Run: 1 hour 55 min

While I’m still not running that much we hit the trails twice this week and loved it. It was great to run in some beautiful places again. The first run was an evening one out in the water district near Moraga, slotted in before an LMJS Race Committee meeting. It was mostly just the horses, the wood peckers, the bunnies, the turkey vultures and us. Running over hills seemed hard but I also felt strangely strong. It was a good run.

On Sunday, again following the theme of squeezing in workouts where they will fit, we dropped Kelly at the third of her parties and went running in Tilden Regional Park until it was time to pick her up. I felt like I wanted to run for hours, but I also felt tired from the bike ride the day before. Not so much that it really got in the way of running, but still it took the edge off the fun. Patty declared that she hated to run after biking and that she wasn’t cut out to be a triathlete. She does seem to have taken a general liking to biking however and we’re hoping to do a century this summer.

Nutritional experiments

I’ve also been experimenting with what to drink/eat on the bike for the race. It’s still a work in progress but I tried just carbo-pro in water (3 scoops) and while it has a slight flour-like taste to it, it’s still easy to drink and I didn’t get sick of it like the Gatorade. This week I’m going to mix in some Nuun for flavor and electrolytes, and if that is vaguely successful then at this point I’ll go with that mixed with pieces of bonk breaker. Unfortunately that leaves me a little short of sodium especially if it’s hot and I have no heat training at all. I tried adding salt directly to the drink mix but the taste took a big dive in the direction of sea water, so I don’t think that’s a good option unless it can be covered up with more flavor.

For the run I’m going to do what I always do, do the Gu. I might up my planned intake to every 3 miles instead of every 45 min. Then I’ll take liquid at the aid stations. Actually I really haven’t decided that, I might run with a bottle.

Anyway, that’s it. In just over two weeks I’ll be loaded up and driving to Boise!

Biking, Running, Swimming, Triathlon

Riding in Sonoma

Another big training week, over 12 hours this week. I finally completed plan on the swimming and biking, plus my yoga session, but only ran twice. In theory we were going to run off the bike on Saturday, but our ride went so long we high tailed it back to Oakland to pick up our daughter. In general I’m feeling pretty strong right now and the cold I was sniffling with a week ago seems to have mostly gone away. One more big ride in a week and then I’ll begin to taper. Exciting!

Swim: 2hr 28min (6435 yards)

Three full sessions this week which really increased my distance. On wednesday I fitted the swim into my day by swimming at the Oakland YMCA downtown. They have a 25 meter pool rather than 25 yards so I did my workout in meters. Who knew a meter could be so much longer than a yard? Anyway, that resulted in my longest ever pool session: 2734 yards exactly. It was a messy mix of lane swimmers so I didn’t even bother to log my lap times, but the core of it was 500 meters of drills and 10x100m as fast as I could.

During most of these laps a man with a sleek swimmers body stood at one end of my lane watching us. He was waist deep in water and looking annoyed. Eventually I guess he decided we were not good enough to swim with and he left after doing two laps of butterfly in the next lane over. Sorry dude, we are not butterfly swimming freaks like you, but at least we were swimming laps, and I’m not swimming that slow when I’m swimming 100s. I could see why he might be generally annoyed though, in all the other lanes at least one swimmer was pushing the definition of swimming to include -floating with the current- or -jumping up and down shaking hands above the water-. Sigh, swimming sucks. And not because of the swimming part.

Bike: 7 hrs 8 mins

Another two sessions at M2 and I’m feeling like my biking is really coming around. I now classify hills as nothing but rollers that I can mostly cruise over without too much trouble. Tuesdays class I already blogged about. Thursday I was working at home, combined with trying to get a family of raccoons out of our attic so I had to take public transport (bus, bart train, bus) into San Francisco to take my class and then (bus and bus) all the way home again. The instructor was a fill-in so it was a different style. He had us do a spiral ladder 3min, 2 min, 1 min, 30sec, with power increasing up from 70% – 110%, then reverse the durations but keeping the power high (110% down to 95%). After that I think it was 3x5min at 100-110%. I say I think, because I think I blanked out somewhere in there. The session finished with some sprints. 100% is a 10min max power. By my counting I did close to 15 min (broken) at or above 100%, and a bunch more in the 90% range. Ouch. Still threshold workouts like that are what I need.

Saturday we drove up to Windsor, CA and rode a variation of the Vineman course. In total we rode 60 miles, thanks to getting lost a few times. It took us forever, but included stops at goats, horses, muffins at a cute general store, and a lot of stops to look at a slightly blurry printout of the full vineman course map. A beautiful bike route the whole way, the hills are still very green.

Anyway, I spent a good amount of that time on my aerobars and have gained a lot more confidence. I don’t think I’ll change them again, just go with it now I have something I consider slightly comfortable. While Patty and I generally don’t ride too fast together, I did a few sections at what I considered the effort I hope to use in the race. The result was a little over 18 miles/hr on average over rolling terrain. It would be nice to have a power meter in the race, but it isn’t going to happen for this one, so at this point I think I’ll go off my HR, which I think should be 140 or less. I may go into M2 and ride 70-75% on the power for 1/2 hour or so and see what my HR does to get a final plan.

On the down side I partially pulled out my rear shifter from the end of the aerobar and lost my lowest two gears during the steepest climb of the route, so I’ll have to fix that this week. I did still make it to the top though. That course is super-rough in places, I’m surprised anything is still attached to my bike anymore. Also, my hydration wasn’t too good either as again I got pretty tired of the gatorade. I took in about 50oz of fluid containing about 650 calories, plus 220 calories in bonk breakers and a 100 calorie Chocolate Gu. 1050 calories, or 215 calories and hour. Not enough! However, that didn’t count the muffin, and the muffin was good!

Run: 1 hr 46 min

Still not much running, but I did try. We set off to run 13 miles on Wednesday. Following the longest swim I’ve ever done that morning and a pretty tough bike session the night before, we made 3 miles and gave up. Both of us felt exhausted and hungry and decided instead to just go get hamburgers and extra-salty fries! The next morning I ran to Kelly’s school while she rode her bike for Bike to Work day, then ran home. At least that was a decent run so I can still do it. Otherwise it’s getting pushed out of the way to let my other key workouts happen without being compromised by exhaustion.

Biking, Running, Swimming exhausted, hamburgers, m2, muffins, salt, sonoma, vineman, ymca

I finally took a HR monitor to the bike class at M2 Revolution tonight. This is what my HR looks like during an bike class, apparently:

All in all pretty low compared to running intervals.

I think the workout was:
1) Ladder warm-up:
3 min, 2 min, 90 sec, 60 sec and a few 30 sec building up power as we go, alternating high and low cadence with some standing
2) threshold set
4 min @ 90% power followed by 4 min @ 100% power
2 min @ 90% power followed by 6 min @ 100% power
3) Strength set
(2 min climbing cadence 75rpm at 110-120% watts 40 sec aero, 40 sec hoods, 40 sec stand) X 2
(1 min 70rpm 120+% watts 20 sec aero, 20 sec hoods, 20 sec stand) X 2
4) Activation set:
4 x 20 sec high cadence, high power. 500+ watts.
5) Cooldown, easy spin

** 100% watts is max average watts over 10 min TT.

Biking

San Mateo Memorial Park

After visiting the Oakland Museum last week I’ve had the Mommas and the Papas song “California Dreamin’” in my head all week. This past weekend we headed to the hills above Pescadaro for some camping in the redwoods and bike riding along the pacific coast. Apart from a little rain on Sunday, it was California Dreamin’ all weekend long.

Training this past week was going along great until I hit Friday and with a dentist appointment, Kelly’s Egyptian feast and an appointment for her to get her hair cut, converging on a work day when I needed to get out of town for a camping trip early, neither running or swimming happened. It’s also debatable how much work happened either.

Swim: (1hr 28 min) 3700.0 Yds

On Monday my main set was 16x50yds. There’s only so many ways these workouts slice the yardage. If I’m not doing 50s I’m probably doing 100s and if not 100s then it must be 200s and if that’s not the case then it’s probably a straight swim. Then repeat. Anyway, since I don’t really do other strokes, dislike using pool toys and can’t remember ladder sets, I guess that’s what I’m stuck with. And I’m kind of OK with that.

I did notice that when I swim ‘fast’, I swim about 3-5 seconds faster than when I swim easy and concentrate on form. When I swim fast I also use about twice as much energy. In the end, if I can swim my easy pace for 1.2 miles then I’ll be happy with the result. Actually, if I can actually swim 1.2 miles I’ll be happy. Not. A. Swimmer.

On Wednesday I did another 2500 yards, the main set was 4x200yds. I did the first in 1:57 and then the remaining ones in 1:59-2:00. Felt easier to go that long in the pool than last week and I was actually looking forward to Friday’s swim that never happened. Before my last triathlon I was swimming more like 2:15 min/100 yards at best.

Bike: 6hrs 40 min

The two M2 sessions went fine this week, though Thursdays left me almost falling down the steps as I left. A large part of the workout was low cadence/high power strength work which did a number on my legs. Perhaps that’s a good thing since they were apparently shocked by having that kind of resistance inflicted upon them. That maybe also part of how I never managed to get a workout in on Friday.

On the weekend we had what was definitely our best long ride.

Setting out from our campsite deep in the redwood trees we wound our way down to the coastal town of Pescadaro, then headed north towards Half Moon Bay on the Stage Rd through some rural countryside featuring goat farms and two pretty good sized climbs of about 400ft each.

From there we turned onto Hwy 1 and rode south along the coast, flying downwind at more that 20 miles/hr with the sea pounding onto the rocks beside us (and trucks thundering by on the other side). Fortunately the shoulder was pretty wide most of the way. A+ scenery.

At Ano Nuevo State Park we reversed direction and headed north back up Hwy 1. Progress was less speedy going back into the wind, but I tucked into my aero position and kept up 15-16 miles/hr most of the way.

At Gazos Creek Rd, the back road way past Butano State Park and back up into the hills we stopped at a Gas Station. I heard something fly off my bike, but couldn’t see anything so assumed it was nothing in that way that you do. A 1/4 mile later I realized one screw of my left cleat had come off and it was now very hard to get my foot disengaged that side. That’s the problem with biking, there’s always something to fix.

In the end we covered 50 miles and about 4500 ft of climbing.

I also experimented with how many calories I could take in liquid form. I placed about 340 calories in each of three bike bottles, using a mixture of gatorade and carbo-pro. In the end I actually only drank 2 of the bottles because I also ate 1.5 bonk breakers and a Gu. That meant I took in around 1000 calories and 50 Oz of fluid in the 4 hour ride, which isn’t too bad calorie wise, but of course I probably could have drunk more. More experimenting to come, I think I’ll dial back the calories in the drinks, especially the amount of gatorade…

Run: 1hr 35 mins

It amuses me how little I’m running now. Still with 11 hours of training last week I think things will be OK. The one run I did last week was an evening run at Lake Chabot. With the rains and warm weather the area is the greenest I’ve ever seen it. Too bad I didn’t run with a camera.

The run felt strong but I could feel it the next day. I’m losing my trail running muscles.

Uncategorized

Mount Tam seen from China Camp

Wow, it’s May. That means I’m now into my more focused race specific training, the so called Build phase. Four weeks to get myself ready. Unfortunately the Base phase now ends a little unsteady, featuring a marathon, dubious swim training, and now two months of twice a week bike training at M2 and what I’ll call “time in the sandal weekend” riding for the past month.

Although last week was a recovery week I still logged over 10 hours.

Swim: 1hr 41 min (4200 yards)

Mondays swim was just an easy 1000 yards in the pool. Almost not worth getting wet for, just did laps and tried to not get run down by the master swimmers. Switching to Mon, Wed, Fri puts me there when the Masters swimming are churning up the middle lanes. This is going to be an ongoing problem. I noticed some of them wore fins. How is that allowed? Anyway, a good recovery swim.

Wednesday’s swim was a 500 yard warmup followed by some drills, followed by 1000 straight yards. The schedule called for 500 yds of the drills so I’ve been rotating between some bi-laterial practice, finger drag, fist swimming, catchup and some sighting practice. I could use more of all of those, especially the bi-laterial breathing, but at least I get some in. Interestingly I swim faster either with bi-laterial breathing, or 4 strokes per breath. However, I don’t last too long like that before I start gasping for air and inhaling water.

The sensation of drowning is never far away even though I’m still amused with actually being able to swim these days.

Fridays swim was a 500 yard warmup and then 8×100 and then a cool down. A pretty short effort, but it was supposed to be a fall back week. For the first time in who knows how long (perhaps ever) I swam three days in a week. Time to get to the pool has to happen at lunch time and it’s easy for it to get bumped for something else, usually work related. The 8x100s went well with all laps under 2:00/100yd pace. My first two were too fast, around 1:50 pace, but that’s too fast to do 8 of them, so they slowed to 1:55-1:58 for the rest of them.

Bike: 5hrs 19min

A fall back on the bike too this week, so other than another two sessions of power training fun, we treated ourselves to a mountain bike ride in Marin at China Camp State Park. This park is pretty cool (for mountain bikers) in that a) the single track is actually open to mountain bikers and b) hikers seem to have given up the trails to the bikers as a result. We can now rip it up as much as we want. Just Kidding.

The trails were really spectacular, and pretty hard in places. The initial climb was up 1000ft to an old Nike Missile Pad that overlooked the bay, Mt Tam and San Rafael. This is where the photo at the top of the page was taken.

Run: 1 hr 50 min (10.7 miles)

Another not great running week. It’s been a month now since my marathon, the arbitrary time I give myself before I do anything crazy in the running department. Unfortunately with all this other training going on I don’t really see much chance of doing anything interesting. The good news is I did run three times (sort of): a 5.5-ish mile run twice around the lake Wednesday evening, and a beautiful four mile run in the heart of the redwoods Friday evening. Also, just for fun, we ran a mile or so off the mountain bike yesterday. Mostly we ran out of trail so we headed back to the car and called it a day. Overall the running feels fine at this point, but I’m going to have to start upping the long run a little now and perhaps do one of my mid-week runs at tempo pace.

Oakland Museum

In other news, the Oakland Museum reopened this weekend with a 31 hour party. We decided to head down there at 7am and check it out. There was a lot of bubble blowing going on on top of the roof, free yoga in the main hall, and a pancake breakfast put on by the Oakland Fire Department. The changes to the museum are awesome, I can’t wait to go back and explore further. One of the best museums around, especially for Californian history.

Marin Farmers Market and Sports Basement

We headed over the the farmers market, which was only about 3 miles from where we biked the previous day. The report: a) strawberries not there yet, and what’s with nobody offering tastings anymore? I guess they know they are no good so far this year, b) Oakdale cheese is still yummy goodness and c) Kelly had her first pony ride there.

After picking up picnic supplies we headed down to San Francisco and ate in the Presidio. The after mouth of the Escape From Alcatraz was going on. Patty took her mountain bike into the nearby Sports Basement to get the gears worked on, which have never worked right, producing the quote of the week:

“Sorry, we’ve got 50 bikes to ship today and triathletes are very high maintenance.”

Biking, Kelly, Running, Triathlon