Peak weekend

This peak weekend was pretty awesome. I have watched many waves of IM-trainees struggle through the 120 mile bike and the 20 mile run to various degrees and, while I was hoping for some good days, I also knew there was a chance for meltdown, as I'd seen many other athletes end up in that condition.

We continued to have the luckiest summer weather ever. For the 7AM bike start, I was happy to have arm warmers, which bodes for a perfect day.

Bike

My riding partner and I had agreed to experience our own days, so she started earlier, and I was sort of on my own. I certainly took advantage of friends riding the same direction for some wonderful drafting, but I didn't try to adjust my pace to keep up with or hold back for anyone. This meant I also got to deploy my primary triathlon super-power of "not messing around" and was able to bike for 8:05 hours and be moving for 7:45 of them.

That means I had 2.5 minutes of stopping time per hour, counting traffic lights, refuels and a bathroom break!

Next year, I would like to ride a little more assertively sometimes, and on the completely opposite side of that coin, would also like to ride a little more socially, which would mean stopping with others. But for this weekend, a result like that was an amazing training result for me.

I had a nutrition plan that would have been good for 9 hours, and ate all of the Gu's and bars, but fell behind on liquids a bit. One of my take-aways was that my backup run nutrition plan needs to have an option to rely less on liquid calories because there is a chance I will be tired of drinking after the bike portion.

The random musical selection continued. The biking song of the week was "76 Trombones," which proved remarkably adaptable. "One hundred and 10 miles I have biked today, with 8 more miles to go...." or "70.1 miles and I will turn, turn turn turn turn right". There were short intervals of "3 blind mice" but the trombones were with me on & off for about 3 hours.

Run

Then Sunday came around and it was time for a 20 mile run in a moderately hilly neighborhood. I was super lucky to have run company for the 2nd hour, and then company again for the last 4 miles. As rough as my hip and foot started to feel, for that workout, the hardest part was finding a reason to keep going. If I had walked the last mile, I would have made my time goal, but it sure felt good to run it in, so I need to feed the loud mental voice that says "keep going!" instead of the one that says "good enough", especially on race day.

This run 4 loops, so I had 3 chances to refuel, and I got to use my super power again, with 5 minutes difference between total time and moving time, or less than 90 seconds per hour. While I'm proud of that, I also need to remember that it is like running 15 seconds per mile slower, at the speeds I would like to be going. Any stopping is not forward progress, but less stopping is better than more.

I'd been feeling a little stalled in my running progress this summer, but when I looked at some numbers for runs over 15 miles, and this weekend's run fit really well in there

Three of these dots are from Spring marathon training and three are from Ironman training, and I am super pleased to see them melding well together. Next weekend, I hope to add another point to the data set with a 16 mile run, then taper should start to actually kick in

Half-iron relay: bike leg

I was the bike leg of a relay for a half-iron this last weekend, and had an amazing bike that greatly exceeded expectations.

This is awesome, because I'd been a little anxious that my current bike plan of prioritizing friendship and bonding for long rides was going to have a negative impact on my ability to reach my IM bike goals. But the results from Saturday helped me feel good about keeping the hard work hard, and the easy work very easy.

So, back to those expectations. How did I set those?
I am a data junky, and have years of Garmin files from bike rides. I've found feet of elevation gain per mile to be a good normalization factor, so I've made some plots to answer the following question:

By year, for rides over 30 miles, what was the relationship between speed achieved and the climbiness of the ride?

I've broken it down by year, but re-started the data collection on 2013, when I started riding a carbon-fibre road bike, vs my older aluminum one.

Also, I wanted to separate my 2013 results from the 2014 results, since I purposefully dropped weight throughout 2014.

Here's the data I've collected over the last 2+ years:

Speed vs. Climbiness for bicycling

From this chart, using last year's line, I had a notion that for the course I was going to do this weekend, at around 30 feet/mile of climbiness, I should expect something around 14mph.

As you can see from the little blue dot hanging out up in the sky, I actually came in much closer to 16mph, which was amazing! But also a little nerve-wracking, since I was part of a relay and was worried the runner wouldn't be expecting me yet.

As it turns out, everything worked out fine, and I am going to continue treating most long rides as wonderful time with friends. I'll check in again with an individual brick workout in mid-June to verify that this plan is still working.

Colonies Zone 1000y FR Race Report

Finally! Improvement in swimming!

I've raced this event at the April meet 5 times, and have a number of ways this was my most solid performance yet

2010: I was still in my first year at Team Z and identified myself as a swimmer. I had no idea how to pace a 1000, and my splits showed it with a 17 second positive split between the 500's.

2012: Nothing special performance 9 seconds slower than 2010.

2013: Aiming for some redemption, I started from the blocks, and then had a person in my heat to chase down for the second half. There was only a 2.5 second positive split between the 500s. I took 2 seconds off my 2010 time, and had a great race.

2014: I started from the blocks, but had a hard time pushing the limits on the pace. When it felt uncomfortable, I backed off, and had my slowest performance yet, almost 20 seconds slower than my PR.

2015: I was late to the event and was placed in the last (slowest) heat. I'm very thankful that they made room for me, and talked with my heat mates in the hour leading up to the event explaining and apologizing -- hopefully I didn't seem like a speedy jerk who didn't understand seed times. After all the traffic anxiety getting there, I made time for a long warmup, including some 100's with and w/o pull buoy to try to hold the memory of what good body position feels like
I had a great dive, and strong first 100. After that, I settled into what felt like steady pacing. My splits agree with that with 1 second between the fastest and slowest 50's for the main part of the race. I was able to kick it up for the last 50 (probably should've tried harder for last 100) and got my fastest non-dive split for the finish.
The end result of this steady, pushing swim was a 15 second PR and a pace of 1:32/100y

In the grand scheme of triathlon-ing, swimming faster won't affect my day much, but it's my favorite part, and seeing improvement at something I've been doing for so many years now is lovely.

Data nerding: