Back to Racing--Part 1!

As I mentioned in my prior post, I actually was able to race a couple of times in these crazy Covid times.  I did an open water swim on 7/12 and a sprint triathlon on 7/18.  this post is a quick review of the Swim.

This swim was a tidal assisted point-to-point swim in the intercostal.  The tidal current was quite strong as evidenced by my results:

I'm obviously not the kind of athlete who can drop a sub 25 minute half-IM swim (those are the guys that get out of the water first at International IM races).  That said, I did swim pretty hard and there are a number of positive stats that say this was a good race for me.

Firstly, I did the race last year as well but was 59 seconds slower in 2019: 25:26.  Comparatively, there are a number of swimmers whom I train with and I think are comparable to me I out swam by I greater margin this year than last.

I'm having trouble finding then results on the web but as I recall, I finished about 20th OA out of about 80 or so swimmers.

Fun swim and great to actually race again!  I'll take it, especially given my relatively low volume of swim training!

The path forward is clearer now....

Well, to no ones great surprise, Kona 2020 is not going to happen this year.  Anders and I will be transferring our entries to 10/9/2021.  So at the moment, we are both about 14-15 months our from our "A" race.

On the racing front, I actually have done two races this month--one a 1.2 mile swim and the other a sprint triathlon.  I'll update on both of those shortly but let me focus on the shift in the balance of my 2020 training focus given the Kona news.

As I mentioned, in my last post, in the middle of June it was increasingly clear that 2020 was going to be pretty much of a lost year as far as Triathlon racing (especially long course) and mountain climbing goes.  I've made the decision to generally back off of my training load in aggregate volume and in terms of intensity.  My focus is shifting to just staying in good shape and just having fun with my training as opposed to building my fitness for a specific goal.

This plays out differently across the three disciplines.  My swim volume is actually increasing with the regular access to OWS.  I won't be swimming as much as might have with an IM build but I am thinking about swimming across our Lake in Minnesota in a few weeks (that swim is over 6,000 yards) so I'm going to do a few longer swims over the next few weeks--I did Midge's 4,200 swim the other day in around 80 minutes (with no current).  Here  is my updated swim history for the 30 weeks of 2020 (trailing 4-week average):

My bike has been the biggest change--both in terms of volume but also, the length of my long ride.  I've shifted from Bike Monster (300+ mpw/100+ mile long rides) to what will likely be 200-250 mpw with a long ride of 50 miles or so....I'm actually in pretty good bike shape (as evidenced by my triathlon last week--more on that shortly) but just going to take it easy for the rest of the summer:

I'm also backing off the run/hike a bit as I had a bit of a knee issue post race and for the most part, I'll just run once a week or so to minimize wear and tear on my knee:

Not surprisingly, this translates into less aggregate training time....

2020--half way done (thank god!)

so over the last 3 weeks I've begun to adjust my training focus a bit.  Pretty clear at this point there will be no racing this year--especially long course.  I'm pretty certain that there won't be a Kona in February, as currently scheduled either.  As a consequence, I've decided to not push into my long-ride training, which is what I would normally do at this point.  My bike volume will scale down a bit as a result.

I continue to do more run/hike than last year when I was in pure "bike monster" mode.  Aldo June finally brought a return to swimming as I now have consistent access to a place to swim.

Here is what June looked like, volume-wise:

Swim: 17.3k yards
Bike: 1,104 miles
Run: 134 miles
Time: 101 hours

Comparatively, 2019 looked like this:

Swim: 21.2k yards
Bike: 1,384 miles
Run: 46 miles
Time: 103 hours

For the 2nd quarter:

Swim: 21.8k yards vs. 60.0k yards last year (down 64%)
Bike: 3,756 miles vs. 2,759 (up 36%)
Run: 404 miles vs. 545 miles (down 26%--this was driven by last year's Bolivia expedition)
Time: 331 hours vs. 339 (down 2%)

Looking ahead to July:

Last year I swam 23k yards and I would expect to match or beat that this year
On the bike I did 1,444 miles (47/day) as I was in full-on bike monster--this year I'd expect to be in the 1,000-1,100 range.
Run last year was 70 miles--I'll best that again this month.
107 hours last year--probably about what I'll do this year as well.