back to bike racing
well a little change of pace today. did a bike race in and around warren ma. when i signed up a bikereg.com there was a course profile that seemed pretty hilly. i thought i had done this race before and but the profile seemed different so i thought they changed up the course or something. well, i was wrong, it was the same course. so, on the agenda today was 3 loops of 21 miles per lap with about 1100ft of climbing per lap. so for you non-math majors that's 63 miles and 3300ft of climbing. since i knew the course and knew what to expect, i thought no problem because in the past, this course was always good to me. but, i guess the problem is, bike racing is way different than ironman training. so, i was chilling near the front to begin with when a group rolled off and i was just following wheels and then i was in a breakaway with 7 other guys. i'm thinking, this is not good. my hr rate is in the the 160's which for me is pretty high and i knew i couldn't sustain this for the whole race. i was just rotating through, not doing anymore work than i needed to. thankfully, we got caught after 5-6 miles than hopefully i could get some recovery in the pack. i could tell i wasn't having the best of days so after that my mission was to just chill and see if the legs would come back to me. felt fine for the rest of the first lap. the 2nd lap i had to dig a little deeper on the tough sections to stay up. then on the final lap, i knew this especially tough climb was coming up again, but there was a lot of attacking before it and the pack was virtually single file coming into this section. the writing was on the wall and i got popped along with a bunch of other dudes. i ended up riding with a group of 6 guys the rest of the way. once my hr settled down, i actually felt better than the rest of the people i was with. so, i worked with them pulling a lot of the time. actually one of the guys i was with is doing ironman lake placid. his first ironman too. i guess he was in the same boat as i was. being able to maintain a sustained, but not faring too well in responding to repeated attacks. overall, it was good interval training for this part of the season and a little break from the usual routine.
later,
d
in the thick of it
With less than two and a half months left till my first iron distance race (tick-tock-tick-tock), the mega workouts are finally here. The meat and potatoes, the beef, the goods. The 4000-plus yard sessions of marinating in chlorine, soul-searching six hour big ring solo missions, and last but not least, the 3 hour death-marches in mountain lion habitat (here kitty kitty).
It's hard to believe that your body and mind can adapt to this sorta stuff, but it happens.
Here I am, five months into my plan looking forward to the next few weeks of getting out and doing it, just thinking about the next big sesh, and finally beginning to wrap my thoughts around the iron distance.
jrod
what's up w/ swimming - by d
swimming in new england is a total racket. yeah, there are a fair amount of pools, but each have their own crazy schedule and ticks. the jfk pool in somerville is where i do master swimming w/ coach p tuesdays and thursdays. other than those times you almost never know when this pool will be open. a couple saturdays ago after i had a good ride i was going to go swimming that afternoon where their schedule said they would be open. it was closed, maybe it was too nice of a day and the lifeguards wanted to enjoy the weather. the past 2 saturdays the pool have been closed as well. it seems like whenever there is any holiday that week, the pool seemed to be closed randomly. i meet up with coach p this past wednesday after he was planning on having a coaching session, but the night before he realized it was a spring break and the pool was supposed to be closed. as we meet their, you guessed it, it's open. you have the bargain of the mit pool which is 12 bucks a pop. yeah it's nice, but who has $12 to pay every-time you go swimming. there is arlington boys & girls club, brookline, watertown all have their pools, but you need to be a rocket scientist to figure when they are open for regular lap swimming. i was visiting my friend ken in austin and there was a pool about a quarter a mile away that was totally nice and totally free - why are there no free pools w/ laps in taxachusetts?
dL
my boys - by d
as i was running with one of my old riding buddies this past friday who i hadn't seen in months, i wonder where all my boys have gone because it seems like they have all gone away one way or the other:( first off there is t-dog who i was running with. he has a 1.5 yr old, going to school full time during the week combined with studying and takin care of the little dude, plus he works a crazy weekend schedule which starts friday afternoon and goes through sunday afternoon. in a 48 hour time period, he works for 32 hours. he's a waiter in which he is pretty much on his feet the whole time. ouch. so, obviously there isn't a lot of time for much else. thankfully though, he has a little over a semester to go and then he should have a little more time. there's dille who last spring moved back to austin, tx where he had gone to school. texas john bolted after the force wanted to transfer him to some shi&*y location. hoon who still lives locally has gone off the deep end. he was always very black and white on every issue got this girl knocked up and i really haven't seen him around in some time. i don't think he's really riding the bike at all. i'm really not sure why this happened, but it did.
so now, since i'm not really training for bike racing this year, have the big ironman this summer as the goal, i have been doing a lot of my riding hans solo. i ride with p and coach p from time to time which is always much more enjoybale, but for the ironman you must get used to lot of riding alone, because when you are out there on race day, there is no one but yourself.
dL
A Few Small Bumps in the Road (by P)
Nah, I don't mean the crater-sized potholes found in New England roads every spring that we all love.
The past few weeks have been a bit challenging - not only did my training volume go up, so has work volume. Not that it's a bad thing, just that the timing of these two changes happened to conincide this time around which is not conducive to high energy levels. In addition, part of my work involves a new role in an agency doing creative a few days a week. It's great, but the pace is fast, and a lot of the work involves things I haven't done in a few years, so there's a bit of a re-learning curve. I also have a lot of other work to catch up on the days I'm not at the agency - I do the catching-up in the evenings after I get home, sometimes weekends and on the one day I work from home. Anywho, at the end of the day, especially during the week, I've been sapped of energy. It's taken a bit of a toll on my workouts (not to mention my sanity hehe).
My mantra this year has been "don't let last year happen to me again" (my race results last year left much to be desired due to lack of preparation). Although there are things one cannot control in a race (IM New Zealand for instance), as for the things I can control, preparation is pretty high on the scale. At the beginning of the year, I committed to being consistent with my workouts. After all, I'm training for an iron-distance event - can't exactly take my bike out for a leisurely ride, jump in the water to splash around a few times, take a leisurely jog around Fresh Pond and expect to do well. Well, maybe some Ironman Veteran with 20 years experience can get away with doing that one season and still get by but certainly not a long-time couch potato like me!
So I gotta do what I gotta do to get out there. I'm lucky to have family and friends who also happen to be training partners :)
Daniel is great - he feeds me coffee in the morning - especially on the days of early morning swims. Gave me a good swift kick in the a** to get out and run with him the other day. He's also very patient with me on the bike - he can totally go much faster and drop me in, like, half a second whenever he comes out riding with me, we have a great time and he waits for me if I fall back.
My favorite part of triathlon training is the bike training. Even when I'm not too motivated, I can always look forward to rides. No matter how I feel before, after I go out and ride my bike, I usually feel much better. Nothing beats going for a ride with friends who also happen to be training partners. Not only do you get a great workout and explore new routes, but it's nice to chit-chat at the same time. Learned a new way to get back form Concord when I went on a ride with Carrie and Rebecca last week. Saturday, when I rode with Daniel, I finally felt comfortable going out towards Sterling without having to look at a map and I lasted 4.5 hours without crapping out :) Yesterday morning, I wasn't the happiest camper, but in the afternoon I rode with
Patrick and felt much better after (and learned a new loop too!). Already looking forward to my next 2 long rides - tomorrow I'm riding with Nisha and Nancy - and next Saturday is a six-hour ride to Wa-Wa-chusett with my friend
Beth - I'm already determined to make it up that hill in Princeton Center without crapping out! Just gotta remember to slap the 25 on my bike and bring a few extra Lara Bars :)
riding around w/ d & p
let's see. me and p went for a 4.5 hour ride this past saturday. just steady, to get the miles and time in the legs. we headed out toward sterling mass but in a roundabout way. the turnaround point ended up being in lancaster mass. it was a good ride and felt pretty good afterwards. the training has been going well. recovery quickly after workouts and feeling nice and fresh the next day. ran 2 hours on sunday and really only in the last 15 minutes did my legs feel beat. so... that's it for now, sorry it was so boring. i promise next time will be better.
later,
d
P's VO2max test
When I started exercising 4 years ago after many years of sitting on my a** and fourteen years of smoking cigarettes (DON'T try this at home!), I knew I was making a healthy desicion. What I was unsure of, though, is whether or not my not-too-healthy lifestyle had left me with the aerobic capacity of a sewer rat.
Recently, my triathlon coach got some cool new equipment to measure metabolic info including aerobic capacity (VO2max) and other neat things like resting metabolic rate. Being a numbers geek, I decided to be a guinea pig for the VO2max test, which involved me pedaling my bike on a computrainer hooked up to a heartrate monitor and a breathing tube. I started off at a low resistance, and the wattage would be increased every 15 seconds until I reached a hard effort, at which time I had to sprint all-out for 30 seconds. All this equipment was hooked up to a computer which plotted different charts explaining heartrate, fat burning, carb burning, and finally AT and VO2max. AT (point at which your body can no longer intake enough oxygen to supply the muscles) is a number that influences what heartrate I should be training in - turns out on the bike mine is 158 beats per minute. The number I got for VO2max was 70.8 which is supposedly high for a woman of my age - so I guess I was happy to find out that I could take in more oxygen pipe-dwelling rodent. I must say that during the test I was making an effort to breathe like they teach in Bikram yoga (to expel all the "toxins" by fully exhaling before taking in fresh oxygen) - I think that has helped me in general since I started doing it while cycling, running, swimming etc.
Overall, the test was quite helpful and I feel it's motivated me to train diligently now that I realize I have physiological potential in endurance sports.
J's 100-mile TT
Am morphing the body from climber mode to TT mode. Did a 100 mile TT today in 4:21 - the legs are good and I feel like I could run now. There was some wind but not too bad. 2800 feet of climbing. Felt it was key that I never stopped eating or drinking the whole time.
