week totals

Lots of distractions! Recovering from Vegas. work. Two day road trip to Virginia to look at colleges with Alex--900 miles driving and no working out....

I have been trying to catch up on my sleep as well as i have been very fatigued.

Plantar f still a bother....next knee injection cycle starts tomorrow.

Net/net--another dismal training week (basically I had 5 great ones and 2 poor ones). Hopefully turning the corner soon!

Totals:

7000 yards swim
167 miles bike
21 miles run
16 hours training time

Heading home

Recorded my slowest HIM at the 70.3 WC...6:06. Very slow swim...probably took it too easy. Cautious and conservative bike ride and a decent but slowish run. Very tough course...the hardest I've ever raced for sure. Probably could have gone 10-20 minutes faster if I had needed too but didn't see the point...5:46-5:56 is still BOP in this race. Feel pretty good today...had a spin this morning before heading to the airport. Probably will be able to jump right back into training hard by Wednesday or so. At airport now and hope to be home by midnight.

I had a great time...glad I did the race. My performance is not indicative of my fitness...I was fatigued and very conservative.....race report to follow in a couple of days.

Locked and loaded in Vegas!

Quite an eventful past 18 hours!

Arrived at my hotel room at Lake Las Vegas just after midnight (3am my time). I unpacked and tried to assemble my bike. Problems with the rear der...I suspected a bent hanger....frustrating...went to bed at two and didn't sleep well.

Up at 5:45 and registered with the XC folks. Practice swim....15 minutes...felt fine. Short run...felt very tired. Breakfast with Lyndsey Corbin and Paul Ambrose. Pics with XC folks.

Off to the mechanic tent. Took over an hour...bent hanger fixed adequately to race tomorrow (I hope). Back to hotel (the two transition zones are 8 miles apart which is decidedly a pain). Rode bike for 30 minutes...very hilly. Incidentally it was pretty mild this morning....got up to 97 in the afternoon.

Prepared transition bags and checked in. Drove the bike course and run course. Bike course is a monster! Beautiful but challenging! Glad I have my road bike. Run course is very poorly designed in my view.....

Back in room with pasta in my tummy. Very tired and to bed very soon.

I'm bib #108. Hoping to be safe and have fun. Looking for a high quality brick. Not really concerned with outcome....focus on putting in a good effort...

IM70.3WC course

Here is a link to the map course with topo data:

http://www.bikemap.net/route/998352#lat=36.13233&lng=-114.87373&zoom=11&type=2

Looks harder than I had previously guessed. 3608 of climbing is a lot for a 70.3 course. I'll be hard pressed to break 3 hours given that. Heck I may have trouble breaking six hours overall!

The run course has 690 feet of vertical--which again is quite a bit for a half-marathon.

Temperatures have moderated a bit with a high temp now forecasted to be just in the mid 90s....

YIKES!!!!!!

Ironman 70.3WC

I'm heading tomorrow night off to Henderson, NV for the Ironman70.3 World Championship. I get in around midnight so i won't have much spare time before the race starts at 6:35 am on sunday morning.

I'm treating this race as a high quality brick. It's a fresh-water, non-wetsuit swim so it'll be slow for me. The bike course has 2000+ ft of climbing (I think), with a net elevation gain of 500 feet or so (point to point course) and can be windy. I'm bringing my road bike and training wheels and will mostly be interested in my power output. The run is all up and down with I believe 6 significant hills. The forecast is for the 90s....but it'll be a dry heat as they say.

So should be a slow day. If I had to guess I'd say 37-40 minutes on the swim, 6-8 minutes of transition time (T1 and T2), 2:50 or so on the bike and probably 2 hours on the run...probably a 5:30-5:45 kind of a day--my 4:43 PR certainly won't be threatened!

I've been giving my body a bit of a break this week to try to calm down some of my niggling soft tissue issues and I frankly needed it after a pretty robust 6-week training block. I'm looking forward to going hard on Sunday and then settling back in to the routine....

I'll update you from Nevada!

Just hanging on here

So a number of items to report.

My body is struggling a bit. A mild case of plantar fascitis--I think I have it under control. My Psoas muscles--especially my right-- are giving me real problems--hard to generate any speed on the run (I discovered this in my race today). Most of my right foot is black and green from an Irene bruise--painful to walk. MY knee is starting to complain again--my next cycle of injections will start in a few weeks--thank god. Sucks to get old!

I did power down this week a bit--really took three days very easy. I also skipped racing a tri on Saturday--mostly due to family issues. Still, suprisingly to me, I was able to get all three of my key workouts in:

swim:4000 yards in 62:10
bike: 100.3 miles in 5:35
and today: run 13.3 miles in 2:04

The latter was bundled around the Tim Kerr 7 mile run which I ran faster than I ever have before--though still, objectively and distressingly slow....here were my splits in the race:

1: 7:16/153 bpm
2: 7:25/168
3: 7:57/168
4: 8:10/167
5: 8:04/170
6: 8:24/172
7: 8;17/175
7.1; 0:44/178

So a number of obvious conclusions;

-poor tactical management given my fitness--this was in part by design--I ran 3 miles before the race and decided to hammer for a while just to see where I was at

-I did manage to average 7:56/mile according to my GPS--the course was 520 feet long. I was 7 seconds faster than last year and so I won't be that hard on myself.

-still, my run sucks. 4 years ago I had no problem averaging 6:50/mile for 10 miles...gonna be an issue in these long course races in my immediate future

Still, I've managed to get 13 of my targeted 15 IM workouts in so far: 5 bike/4swim/4 run.\

The totals for the week were:

swim: 8000 yards
bike: 228 miles
run: 32 miles
time: 20:16

IM70.3 WC next week--need to respect it!

The week that wasn't

So decided it was best to back off a bit this week. i did stick a 102 mile ride on Monday but my body was protesting on multiple fronts. The most worying and novel was a definite case of incipient Plantar Fascitis....I've been aggressively treating it since Tuesday and also allowing my body to generally recover from and absorb all of my training over the month of August.

On another front, i was finally able to get major progress completed on the revisioning of my race bike. I've completed the replacement of my drive train (upgrade to Campy Super 11), my power meter (SRM wireless with a Garmin Edge 800), new FSA/SRAM cranks/chain rings, and I've converted over to clinchers on my racing rig (Zipp Firecrest 800/Disc). I've taking it out for a couple of test rides, but I still have work to do to get it dialed in.

Lots of folks visiting us at the beach given the prior weekend wipeout due to Irene.

So, I've decided to not race my C race at Marlton tomorrow...I feel a bit cheated by this as I was ready to take down a few folks in my AG but racing there and being gone for 10 hours tomorrow just doesn't work.

I have the Ironman World championship 70.3 to head off to next weekend and I need to make sure my body can handle a half-Ironman...even if it's just a prep for my real deal in Arizona in November....

I think this is the mature and seasoned vet decision to take but I sure don't feel that good about it....