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First day of school.

Kelly first day, Kelly, school

Leading up to this race there was only one thing on my mind: my arm that I injured by falling off my bike two weeks earlier. I made the decision to drive out to Boise anyway, get myself in the water and see how it went. The goal was to just make it to the finish now, the swim was going to be a one arm affair, the bike would be about staying out of trouble and hope that something didn’t happen that I couldn’t manage. Then the run would be completed with whatever I had left. All the while the goal was to enjoy it as much as possible.

Pre-race:

I drove into Boise Friday lunch time and headed straight for the quest arena in the middle on the downtown area. The Ironman show was obviously in town and very fit people where all over. I was hoping to grab my packet and get out of there and head for the hotel. There was a lot to get ready. Unfortunately there was a lot to get done just to get a race packet, and a long line to even get to that point.

After all that I stopped by the rock tape guys and showed them my arm. They seemed interested in doing what they could for it and 20 minutes later the guy had deep tissue massaged me (”don’t hit me if it hurts”) and cross crossed my arm in black and white rock tape. I wasn’t really sure it would do me much good but any support was probably worth trying, plus he did really ease out some sore spots.

Swim (51:15):

The race started at 2pm. As the pros headed off down course Patty helped me get into my wetsuit. In the blazing sun we were all out there baking like seals on a rock. Sweat ran down my face. The thought of getting into the water started to seem very appealing. We shuffled down the boat ramp. We were next.

Suddenly I noticed that I’d become calm. I was looking forwarded to the relative simplicity ahead. Put on cap and goggles, get in water, swim. No more worrying about if I had everything at transitions, what I should do about my arm, should I even be racing. Just swim. The final prep had been stressful. My swim bag that I needed to put my wetsuit in after the swim had gone missing, and when I’d discovered my front wheel soft from being parked at T1 all night I’d not have time to change it so I took it to the tire guys and had them put air in it. That would have to do.

We waded into the water and within a couple of minutes, right as the pros came out of the water and everyone was watching them, off went our wave. The area around me was filled with my wave for quite a while as I started to swim as best as I could. Every pull with my left arm hurt and felt weak, so I mostly swam with my right arm. Slowly I drifted off the back of the wave, although plenty of others of my wave also drifted back. I could at least move forward.

After a while I heard a kayaker yelling at us. The swimmers around me and I were headed in towards the center of the course a little. When I stopped to see what was up the scene around me was confusing. The chop had picked up further from shore and from so low to the water it difficult to decipher the buoys I was supposed to be following. For a moment I thought we were totally off course, but it wasn’t too bad. I corrected slightly and headed for where I saw the most swimmers.

I was actually surprised how far out I’d got, looking back to the shore the beach looked very small. Now would be a bad time to panic I thought. That made me panic a little.

I made the far out turn buoy as another wave come by. I imagined for a moment that might go badly but I kept my line and they swam around me mostly. At one point someone smashed into my left hand, just what I needed, and there was the occasional side body contact, feet contact, the usual. Nothing too bad. With a wave every 5 minutes I was never short of company.

Periodically I’d go back to my fallback mantra: pain is just another feeling. My wrist and arm felt bad, every pull hurt, but it wasn’t getting worse. For a while I tried swimming with a closed fist, like a drill, but then give up on that because it didn’t feel that much better.

Sometimes I’d stop to see where I was, wonder how far to go, wonder how many yards that was. Then I’d start counting my strokes again. Breath 5 times then look where I was going. Repeat. Sometimes I’d try to match pace with another swimmer but then three strokes later they were magically gone.

Heading back to shore seemed to take a lot longer. The chop was going over my head pretty frequently and I swallowed plenty of water. The good news was it was some of the best tasting water I’ve ever had the pleasure of choking on in an open water swim.

We rounded the final buoy and headed for the boat ramp. This swim was starting to drag. My right arm was getting tired and my left shoulder was starting to ache from whatever modified stroke I’d just made up. Probably one where I wasn’t rolling as far left as usual. The boat ramp finally appeared under me and I kept swimming until it got really shallow and then I was back on my feet.

T1 (6:40)

Well I was sort on my feet. Woah, sea legs. Running wasn’t a good idea so I walked up towards transition. Patty reported later that I didn’t look too good. Actually I felt good, and I was certainly excited to be out of the water and tired of swimming, and thankful my arm held up to my main request of it for the day. I was just needing a moment to adapt to being vertical.

At the top of the ramp I looked back down at the water and was surprised to see white caps (my wave had white swim caps on) still in the water. Not last out of the water!

I pulled off my wetsuit to my waist and then had the wetsuit strippers do the rest.. That was awesome, I was out of that thing in seconds and jogging into transition. Not too many bikes left in my rack.

I kept my transition simple, But everything had to come out of my transition bag. Wipe feet with towel, put on socks, put on cycling shoes. Grab helmet, everything in helmet into tri-shirt pockets, two Gus and my bonk breaker bits, etc. Race belt on. Helmet on. Grab bike and go..

Bike (4:00:51):

At the mount point I got on my bike as carefully as possible. I had to take off on my aero bars which was a little wobbly and for some reason I had trouble clipping in. Fortunately nobody hit me. I headed up to dam, tried to change down gears and found a problem. The indexing for my bottom two gears was out and they wouldn’t engage at all. Bonus! they worked fine the day before. Sigh, bikes. There’s always something out of your control!

I took it easy down the hill away from the dam. There was plenty of people and it seemed like a good place to have an accident. Fast moving younger age group athletes coming from behind, slower riders ahead. Everyone getting settled.

And so began the bike. For the first hour my plan was to take it pretty easy. I was cruising along ok, working my way past plenty of people but none of them were in my age group. I took it easy on the hills while others got out of the saddle and attacked. I watched my power meter and sipped my bottles.

All the while I was slowly realizing certain things, while other things remained a mystery until it was too late or until after the race. In no particular order:

1. Wind

It was a brutally windy day and the further out on the course we got the more exposed it was. 150-180 watts equaled 8 miles and hour. Sometimes it was like climbing a hill for 5 miles, or 10 miles. Sometimes downhill peddling got me 14 miles an hour and being sand blasted from the side in a cruel wind tunnel. Sometimes it was gusts that made me fear of being picked up and slammed into the pavement, and I didn’t want to do that again! Or gusts that would take away my speed and I’d have to accelerate back up again. And sometimes, seemingly so rarely, it was downwind and I felt too drained from the upwind effort to take enough advantage of it to make up for the slow upwind trip.

It was frustrating.  I consoled myself noticed nobody around seemed like they were  doing much better, but it didn’t matter if everyone was suffering too, time was drifting away from my goal and I wasn’t making any progress on my age group.

My lack of experience riding in wind was obviously going to cost me.

2. Power

The second thing was my power meter and gear selection. This was my first time riding outside with a power meter and the results were actually pretty surprising. And surprising is never a good idea in a race. With the bike crash it was my first time back on the bike and I knew that would be an issue. Still, better to ride with it I thought, get the data recorded and use it as a learning experience.

In the end, I don’t know. Not that I think it wont be useful going forward, indispensable even, but for this race I got some confusing messages that didn’t really help. Where it was good was the hills, until of course I couldn’t change gears down and further, and I had to stay on my aero bars because of my arm. Then my cadence went south and my power spiked. There was no choice, it was that or walk. But mostly I moderated my output into the wind and hills with the meter.

Where it was a problem was that I’d see my watts were low, 110-120, change gear and try to pick up my speed. The moment I did this my power would spike over 230-250. For most of the race I would do that, freak out at the high instantaneous power, and back down a gear again. Back to low watts and low speed. “If you have a choice between two gears pick the lower one,” was the voice of my bike coach guy in my head. I wondered about that as a peddled along, perhaps my gear ratios were the problem. Then one time I tried it, 50 miles in, waited, spun my legs up in the bigger gear and then saw the power drop back down to 150. Maybe that would have been useful earlier on! Oh well, races are a good place to learn new tricks, right? In the end I gave up plenty of time simply by listening to the meter instead of my own body.

3. Position

Thirdly, as a said, the only way I could ride a bike one armed was to be on my aero bars the whole time. Every moment be it up a hill, into the wind, or even if I just wanted a moment in a slightly different position. Always on the bars. I slowly realized that I just don’t ride enough on my bars to be able to do it for 3 turning into 4 hours of riding. I was beginning to get sore all over, and it as slowly occurring to me that I don’t have as much power in that position as I rarely ride like that in class. My hips were starting to give out too, so a problem was my power assumptions weren’t based on the same position. Who actually knows what my threshold would be on my bike. I never tested myself like that, but thanks to the accident I was riding like that. Clearly that wasn’t working out too well. I rode my the power I wanted for the first hour and then after than it collapsed. That could either mean that my endurance wasn’t there, or my power pacing was too high.

4. Flat tire, again!

I only know that one after the fact. When I picked up my bike, following my run, my front wheel was flat. Yep, I rode a soft front tire for who knows how long. Not dead flat, but soft enough to push your thumb right into it. Even if I’d known I wouldn’t have been able to change it one handed, but who knows what that did to my ride. Nothing good I suspect.

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It seems like all that was probably a bad experience. In fact it was pretty fun out there. We love Boise and the reality was, above silly watts and flat tires and broken arms, that it’s been my dream for years to do this race, 6 months of training and I was finally out there doing it. I didn’t doubt during the bike that I’d finish, not once. I watched birds of prey fly over fields, the deep dark green of the snake river’s valley farms, the sprinklers, the sun, the big sky. The place has beauty of its own. I also love riding fast, even if it’s not fast like all the athletes ahead of me. Blowing through town, through the red lights, through wide closed off streets, people cheering. It’s a blast.

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For nutrition I worked my way through my three bottles of carbopro mixed with nuun perfectly. Each hour I’d stop and fill my aero bottle and eat since I wasn’t going to take any chances while moving with one arm. Hour 1 and 2 I ate half a bonk breaker, and on the third hour I took a very warm roctane gu. Then I grabbed Gatorade from an aid station for extra fluid and put it in my aero bottle for the rest of the trip back to town since I was so far into overtime I’d run out if supplies. In a way when I think what went the best in the race, I think following my race plan nutrition.

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Finally the 56 miles came to and end in the middle of downtown Boise. I unclipped way out from the dismount to make sure I could, pulled up and got off without even falling down.

T2 (3:45):

Transition number 2 had its own problems. When I wonder if I rode hard enough in the bike I think of this transition. My legs were not pleased to be walking. Volunteers directed me down a row of racks almost to the run start. Another volunteer grabbed my bike from me and racked it for me and asked me if I needed anything off it.

Near me another athlete was having a quick conversation with his family. Wind was the topic of the day. Another guy near me joined in with “I can’t feel my legs!”

The slowest thing about this transition was just getting myself to my rack spot. After that it was swap shoes, helmet off and hat on. I grabbed 3 Gus and headed for the exit.

Run (2:20:58):

My plan was to run between each mile marker and walk 30 seconds while I worked on my bottle. At transition I’d made the call to leave the bottle behind. It was hot from sitting in the sun all afternoon, had leaked into the transition bag, and I just felt like I didn’t need something else to hold onto after 4 hours holding onto an aerobar with my right hand.

My legs felt like lead weights as I headed out onto the run course, as I expected they would, but they loosened up over the first couple of miles. Initially the idea of running 13 miles seemed pretty unimaginable so I just started to think about running to each aid station. I gave up my mile marker walk plan within a couple of miles too and instead concentrated on the aid stations. Each aid station I grabbed a sponge to cool off (it was hot out and I was getting overheated between stations), then grabbed a cup of water and a cup of Gatorade. Before exiting the aid station last drop zone I made sure to finish both.

I was actually running pretty well I thought, but the aid stations got harder as I went. The two cups were getting harder to get down, so in that sense I got slower mostly from that. It became a balance between dehydration, and getting a stomach cramp from drinking, and time in each aid station. I didn’t really know what might happen if I stated to blow off the drinking and eating so I started to actually stop at the aid stations until I drank what I could. I think in the end that was the right thing to do.

Around mile 10 I started to feel some cramping in my left quad, which started to make my left knee hurt a little. A couple of miles later my right quad was also signaling it was done for the day. Oddly I kept running while a lot of people around me were now walking. Destroyed quads was the common theme out there after the windy bike ride.

On and off through most of the run I’d been behind the same woman. We’d go through aid stations at different rates but somehow I ended up right behind her again. I thought of passing her, but wasn’t sure I’d be much faster anyway. Perhaps that was a mistake, she was like the easy pacing option, but she wasn’t exactly moving fast. The last mile we chatted for a bit. She was from orange county and said she’d started to fade.

I pulled ahead of her and headed for the finish. By that point I was just glad to be done. About 50 yards from the finish the orange county woman ran by sprinting for the finish. I picked up speed and caught her by the line. I think I heard my name called but it was a big blur.

Across the line a volunteer grabbed me to make sure I was ok. I really was, apart from my quads and my arm I was totally fine. He pulled off my timing chip and I was done.

Conclusion

In the end I had a pretty good time. There’s no doubt that WTC puts on an amazing race, they do everything they can to make sure it’s a good experience. Physically was a long tough day, but once I made it through the swim I wasn’t in any doubt I’d make it.

I’m still a little sad about the bike split, but if I’d gone harder then I don’t know what would have happened later. Maybe I should gone harder to find out, but It’s easy to try and guess afterwards of course and I’ve yet to look at my power data. I tried to pace the bike at the time, but in the end I neither caught much of my age group, nor ran very fast off the bike. To figure out exactly why that was and what to do about it will clearly take a lot more contemplation, followed by much more work on the bike.

Going forward we’re away camping and hiking for three weeks and my legs have mostly recovered and my arm seems to getting better. After that we hope to do more biking, perhaps a fall century and return to Bizz Johnson for a half marathon. I’d like to do another Half Ironman race, maybe even later in the summer, but we’ll have to see.

Race reports, Triathlon Boise, Half Ironman, race, Triathlon, Wind

My bib number for tomorrow is 671. You can follow the race as on ironman.com. It starts in the afternoon, my wave is a little before 2:30pm mountain time.

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Well tomorrow I pack up the car and head to Boise. I still haven’t for sure decided I should race, but at this point I’ll take my stuff out there, plan to advil up, tape up the arm, wrap it in an arm cooler and wetsuit and get into the freezing water and see what happens.

Or maybe I’ll change my mind again, rip the aerobars off my bike and sit on the couch and eat donuts and cry.

This morning I did try swimming with it. To be honest it hurts to swim. I’m just hoping to limp through the swim at a one armed pace. Once on the bike I’ll stay on my elbows and hopefully out of trouble. Watch my watts. Drink my bottles. If I make it as far as the run I should be good to go.

So, tomorrow I drive to just past Reno. Friday the rest of the way to Boise. Patty and Kelly arrive out there by plane Friday night. And on Saturday afternoon I race. I’ll post my bib number here. You can follow it on ironman.com. My wave starts at about 2:30 Mountain time.

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In other news I’m hoping to blog as I travel, so this is also an experiment in writing a blog post from the iPad.

The above photo was taken with an iPhone and the transferred wirelessly to the iPad. The post was written with BlogPress.

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The last two weeks have seen the high point and low point of training for Boise. I finished up my build with my biggest ever week that finished with a 12 mile run and a 52 mile bike ride. 40 miles in I was cruising along at 18-21 miles an hour. Perceived effort seemed low enough to sustain. Someone else was even drafting off me, the leach. I was getting stronger as the ride went on and I finally felt ready.

Then that all came crashing down! At mile 50 I managed to fall off my bike after Patty and I got tangled up with each other. In a split second my steering was yanked sideways by her bike and I flipped over onto the surprisingly hard pavement. This left me with a sprained left arm, bruised ribs, as well as plenty of road rash. Ouch!

The wrist and arm seem to be getting better each day, and the problem isn’t so much in the wrist but more the tendons that connect up the forearm to the elbow. I’m pretty sure no broken bones. I think I twisted it as I came off, rather than it taking any impact with it.

I’ve tried running and biking. The running is a little painful because it bounces my arm at the elbow but if I orientate my hand to have my palm facing up it is basically ok. Bike riding is possible if I ride on my aerobars the whole time, which should be mostly the case for this course. Now the big question is: can I swim? I’m going to wait a few more days until I give that a try. The water is Boise is currently in the mid-50s, so I might not feel anything anyway. If my practice swim works out I’m headed to Boise Thursday night to give it a go. I’ll just hope I don’t flat or something.

Here’s some more pictures of the Davis bike ride. Actually we rode along a creek for a lot of the way and it was pretty scenic. This pictures are from the part which was flat farmland.

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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 4×200yds 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

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 10×100m 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 3×5min 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

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 16×50yds. 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 4×200yds. 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

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 8×100s 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