I’ve been bitching here about winter, cold weather, rain, etc. for months now and we finally get some hot weather here and what do I do? I melt on a couple of workouts in the heat and hide inside where there is air conditioning for the rest of the day. Nothing pleases me, I suppose!

I was going to do a long ride of four hours on Saturday. My neighbor and I pushed off at 8:30 am and we rode straight into some 20 MPH winds (gusting to 30) - not the most pleasant way to start a Saturday long ride. The winds were relentless and brutal on the way out, and while it was nice having a good tailwind all the way back it started to heat up. I swear it felt like it was over 90 out, but I think it was only in the low 80s. I dropped my neighbor off at three hours (he had already run 13 miles before we started riding) and went on my way to do the last hour solo. But by then, the winds had just mentally crushed me and with the heat kicking up, I tucked my tail between my legs and called the ride rolling into my driveway with just 3:30 of riding time. Bleh.

I took Sunday off and went out for a run yesterday. For whatever dumb reason, I started my run at high noon and this time, temperatures were actually in the 90s this time. Despite being slathered with sunblock, I swear I could smell my own flesh frying in the sun. My HRs slowly kept creeping upwards and go to the point where I was pushing 165 beats just shuffling my feet. As reference, my HR averaged 165 for my run portions of the duathlon and I wasn’t going anywhere near as fast. So yeah. I ended up running for about 40 minutes, and then ran/walk the rest of the way home. I have this thing about not liking to run with a fuel belt and carry water with me. But either someone is going to have to setup aid stations for me every mile for my training runs or I’m going to have to suck it up and learn to like it. Or die, I guess. I don’t see any other options.

So… the weather got the better of me not once, but twice. Pretty much, it was a miserable weekend of workouts. But I guess it reinforced the idea that I really don’t want to be carrying around any extra fat come race day. “Ten pound lipid blanket? No thanks. I’ll do without.” I have no idea how I managed Wisconsin last year. I think it was about as hot and as windy as it was this weekend? I really hope is cooler this year.

OK, enough whining. So yeah… I have this whole wedding thing coming up here in a couple of days. Man, that went by quickly! It was something that was way far away and all of the sudden, it’s right around the corner! So, sorry if I haven’t been checking in or around as much as I’d like to be. It’s been a wee bit busy here, especially this past week. Hopefully, next week my life will resume some sort of normality. Until then, I’ll try and throw up some pre-wedding and wedding pictures when I get a chance. :)

Just four more days as a bachelor…

Damn wind…

Damn heat…

I’m not in Ironman shape.

For those that were wondering why Flatman was suddenly promoting “30 Income Streams Free”, his site was accidentally deleted and his domain was hijacked.

His new blog can be found at: http://fl4tm4n.blogspot.com

We’re glad to have you back!

As a former swimmer and someone who is (relative to the other two sports) a poor runner, I don’t know why I signed up for a race where I had to run not once but twice! But alas, this is my write-up of my first ever duathlon.

Pre-Race:

I’ve been quite the fair weather athlete this Spring, and while I’m happy with my current fitness given my training volume (or lack there of) this year, I knew that this wasn’t going to be a speedy day. That in conjunction with the fact that I don’t really enjoy running that much and that I really don’t like running hard, I honestly wasn’t really looking forward to the race.

It was a little chilly when I arrived. I had on warm up pants, a long sleeve fleece jacket, and even brought gloves so my hands weren’t too cold. I got my bike racked and transition area setup. By the way, packing for a duathlon is so much nicer than packing for a tri - no wetsuit, goggles, swim cap, body glide, towel, etc. to have to pack. Two pairs of shoes and a helmet and that’s more less it. Anyway, I stood around and chatted and soon we were on our way to the starting area. I would be in the third of four waves to start behind the elite wave and the women’s wave respectively. All the men 39 and under were going in this wave, so it was fairly crowded. My friend was wearing a yellow, long sleeve jersey and jokingly said something to the effect of, “Just so you know, I’m wearing yellow for a reason today.” That got a pretty good laugh from folks around us.

First Run (5k):

My goal here was to start out slowly and to not ruin my day by going too hard too soon in the beginning. Ideally, I wanted to negative split my run paces between the first and second runs. The starter yelled go and the race was underway. I settled in running easy for the first 1/2 mile or so. I started near the back and stayed there to ensure that I didn’t get caught up in race day madness and push too hard too soon. But after about 3-4 minutes, I opened it up a little and got settled into a steady rhythm. I soon started passing some folks in the waves in front of me and was getting passed fairly consistently too, so there was a decent mix of scenery.

The run course had a lot of up and down and was primarily held on grassy paths where there was one lawn mower width strip that you were supposed to follow. Having such a narrow path did make it harder to pass folks, but it wasn’t too bad. I stayed steady for the remainder of the run telling myself to keep it easy as there was still a bike leg and another run to come later. The end of the course has you run up a short but really steep hill which they so labelled “fun hill” on the course map. There wasn’t really anything fun about it, except that the finish line was soon after that hill.

Time: 23:45 - 7:55 pace - 214/355 (ack!) overall

T1:

Uneventful. Bike shoes on. Helmet on. Go.

Time: 0:59

Bike (17 miles)

This was the leg that I was going to work at. I figured I’d coast the first run, bike hard, and run with whatever I had left. So off I went onto the bike course. I managed to go at a pretty good clip and felt really good initially. The course was a little more rolling than I expected it to be and the wind always seemed to be in my face (but isn’t that always the case :) ).

I started getting a little tired after pushing for a while so checked my odometer on my watch to see how far along I was. It read “4.0″.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

I thought for sure I was farther along than that. I’m already getting tired and I still have 13 more miles here?! I’m not even 1/4 of the way there. Oh well. I throttled back a little bit because going on that clip that I was riding at for the first four miles would have totally caused me to blow up. I probably slowed down a little too much, but I didn’t want to roll into T2 totally exhausted. I played cat and mouse with a bunch of folks - I passed a ton of folks on road bikes going downhill and on the flats and most of them passed me going up hill. Tri bikes just don’t make very good climbing bikes.

Oh, and I guess I should mention the rather poor bike “etiquette” that was out there. I didn’t see any drafting really, but there were a ton of people riding in the middle of the road and riding on the left. So I ended up passing a bunch of folks on the right side and even crossed over the center line to pass folks who were riding side by side. Once, I even threaded the needle and passed right between two folks because I couldn’t go around - that was a little scary.

Pedal, pedal, pedal and I approached T2.

Time: 46:14 - 22.1 MPH - 56/355 overall.

T2:

Also uneventful. I changed shoes again and took off my arm warmers because it was starting to warm up (finally).

Time: 0:54

Second Run (4k):

“Why am I doing something where I have to run twice again? Tough. Suck it up and deal.” I headed out on the run course and realized that I have to run more less the same loop that I did for the first leg of the run. Ugh. It was like bad deja vu.

I pushed on, trying to focus on keeping my cadence high. My legs felt fine, but my body was starting to tire. By the start of the second run, I was already at it for over an hour and I hadn’t done anything intensive for that long yet this year. I kept plodding and telling myself that I was almost done and that in a few more minutes, I’d be able to finally stop moving.

More narrow paths and more hills. That “fun hill” was still not fun. Not even the second time through.

Time: 20:55 - 7:54 pace - 154/355 overall.

Summary:

I ended with an overall time of 1:32:45. 116/355 overall and 22/44 for my AG. I negative split my paces for my run, although barely. Looking back, I could have pushed a bit harder for both runs, but I doubt it would have changed that much. I probably could have run 7:30s if I wanted to, but 7:50 pace while cruising vs. 7:30 pace while suffering… I opted for the non-suffering. Yeah, I’m a wuss. :)

Sascha did the race, but signed up all stealth like so I didn’t get to plan ahead of time to meet her in person. She claims to have seen me there, but I think when she saw that I was wearing a tri outfit with arm warmers she decided not to associate with me. I don’t blame her at all - I felt pretty stupid, but it was cold! ;)

My “friend in yellow” ended up getting 3rd place in his AG. He missed first place by about 1:30 but beat the guy in fourth by just eight seconds.

The course was well organized and the volunteers were great, giving up their Sunday morning to direct traffic and cheer. All in all, it was a good day. I don’t foresee any other duathlons in my near future. I like having a swim and having a leg that I can feel good about. :) But I’m glad to have done the race.

It dawned on me Monday afternoon when I got back from my run that I really wasn’t enjoying my run workouts in any shape or form. In fact, I’ll take it a step further in that I’ve been dreading having to go out and run lately. I see guys out there like Steven, qcmier, and Mike and wonder, “What’s wrong with me? Why am I running so slow?” And as such, I made a commitment to myself earlier this Spring to get faster. I’ve been running harder and faster in an attempt to get faster and while my times did rapidly improve from where I started, they’ve plateaued quite a bit since then. But along with that, my aches and pains haven’t completely gone away and my motivation and drive to get out there and run hard every workout is starting to die.

I get the whole “you have to run fast to run fast” saying. But in my particular case, I think that’s putting the cart in front of the horse. This is my third triathlon season and my “A” race for the past two years have been such that I’ve had to hobble through the run leg and deal with ITB issues for months afterwards.

So, it’s textbook time and time for a review of Going Long. In the four stages of running development, I’m clearly not past stage two (Building Endurance) yet.

“The goal of Stage 2 is to build the endurance necessary to complete (rather than compete) the run portion of your event… The duration of your workout is more important than the overall intensity… You should stay in Stage 2 until you have been running for at least two years. You will benefit from building your endurance base for up to five years before starting focused ME work. The body adapts slowly, and the deeper the base that you create, the harder you can work when the time is right.”

For a recap:

• I’ve never run the entire run at Ironman. I’ve given it a good try to the half way point before I really felt like death, but I wouldn’t call what I do “completing the run”.
• Duration over intensity. It was clear on my long run today (100 minutes) that I don’t have the base to run 150 minutes yet. Lets first get back to that point and then establish another medium length run before we even begin to think about building intensity.
• I haven’t run for two years straight yet. I’ve sort of faked it through two seasons, but my rather lengthy off-season don’t count as time towards two years, IMO.

There are no shortcuts. There’s no easy way. I don’t run fast because I don’t run a lot. I hereby dedicate myself to running consistently, running “easy” (zone 1-2, AeT-AeT+10), not worrying about pace, and building my overall endurance. If I can do that, maybe I can run most of that damn death march at Wisconsin this year.

“It’s not about who goes the fastest, but who slows down the least.”

Keep your eyes on the prize…

Here’s a picture standing in my driveway looking down the street.

Pretty much a gorgeous, sunny day right? Well, what the heck is up with this:

Clearly, it’s Mother Nature up to her trickery again. I just know that she’s going to wait for me to get half way out on my bike, and then bring in the storm clouds and let me have it. I might just take the bait, though. It’s almost too perfect out not to.

And I guess since I’m feeling all picture posty again, here’s a recent snapshot of my nieces. Clearly, they are sisters from the way that they sleep.

I don’t know why I love that picture, but I do. :)

It’s been in my head the past couple of days about how all the Ironman courses differ from each other. And further, how competitors’ paces, splits, and overall times vary from race to race. So I decided to pull some stats and gather some numbers for my own interest. I figured I’d share them with you all in case you’re interested.

The following numbers were only gathered for the 2005 year. I might go back further to see how things vary from previous years. Surely a one year comparison leads to generalizations drawn from the data being less accurate as weather conditions can potentially vary from year to year. You will notice that I didn’t do swim splits. I chose not to since the swim times should vary the least of the three in all the venues, but mostly because IMNA’s display of swim data sucks. A sub-hour swim time is represented as 59:59:00 while an hour swim time is represented as 1:00:00, which messes up my auto-tabulations and I’m too lazy to go fix the sub-hour entries. :P In any case:

Some interesting notes:

• Yes, Wisconsin did suck last year - a lot. :(
• IMFL(at), as probably expected, did indeed yield the fastest bike splits.
• Suprisingly, Placid with the second slowest overall bike split had the fastest run splits overall. I wouldn’t have expected that!
• Coeur d’Alene yielded the highest percentage of finishers.

Hmmm. Maybe I’ll pull stats from the previous years. But only if I can put them into some kind of database so I can more easily query this information. I did the above using Excel, and despite being a Systems Engineer, I suck at Excel. :P

Yep, things are slowly but surely coming together. My fitness is slowly improving and this winter weight seems to be finally starting to come off. I still need to make a strong push on my nutrition before I tie the knot next month (a month from today, actually - ack!). I’d like to get down another five pounds or so before then. The official morning weigh in had me at 159.0. That’s the first time I’ve been under 160 this year, so I was all sorts of happy with that! What a great way to start the day! :)

Lets see… training wise, things have been going pretty well. I tried escaping the rain on Monday to get a quick run in, but that damn Mother Nature hates me and decided to drench me instead. I turned around at about the two mile mark and ran my butt off trying to eliminate the time I was outside in the rain. The good news is that I got home before my shoes were sponges. The bad news is that I think I’m realistically only capable of running low seven minute pace when I’m going all out. My last mile was something like 7:20, but my HR at the end was up in the lower 170s. And I don’t think I can hold that sort of pace for any significant length of time - maybe a 10k tops? I don’t know how the super runners like Steven and qcmier do it. They must have rockets strapped to their shoes or something?!

I had a really good bike ride yesterday. It was supposed to be a gorgeous day, but as soon as I got home it started getting cloudy. I thought for sure that MN was going to have her way with me again, but I didn’t care. I was so fed up with the crappy weather that we’ve been having here this past week and I just wanted to be outside doing something. Originally, I was going to ride 50-60 miles nice and easy, but instead decided to ride 30 miles at a harder pace. I felt good throughout and came home to find that I averaged 20.2 MPH for the ride! My average HR was pretty high so I was definitely working harder than I normally do, but it was good to see an average speed starting with a “two”. It gives me all sorts of warm and fuzzies like that. :) I’d like to really start averaging 20 MPH for my longer training rides and feeling like I don’t have to “push” to maintain that pace. Maybe by the end of the summer, I can get there?

My Hed Stingers arrived today (shortly after finally deciding what I wanted)! They’re all kinds of sexy cool and I can’t wait to try them out! Even she (I still haven’t named her, although it’s decided that she is female) is starting to come together:

As you can see, there are no tires for the wheels yet and there are no decals for the bike. I wrote to the LBS earlier this morning to find out what the hold up is there on those decals. How can it take two weeks to ship some stickers? I’m guessing someone forgot to drop them in the mail?

All for now. Have a great hump day, everyone! :)

First, I’m sorry if my last post about my weight loss offended anyone. That wasn’t my intention at all. If it’s any consolation, the weight that I’m losing right now is all weight that I’ve gained since last Fall. In the past six months or so, I’ve put on… oh, about 15 pounds? So I go up and down like a yo-yo and that’s normal for me throughout the year (albeit probably not the healthiest thing to do). I just happen to be in the downward trend, at the moment. And it’s not like I’m eating whatever I want. I just try and eat a little better - maybe doing Chipotle for dinner instead of a large pizza? Or having a bowl of sweetened cereal at home instead of going out for a DQ Blizzard? And working out again I’m sure helps quite a bit. So it’s not like the weight is just coming off without any struggle at all. I’d probably eat in excess of 5,000 calories a day if I wasn’t watching my intake. :P

The wheels… ahhh, the wheels. Well, it looks like I’m back with the Stingers. My friend was going to (well, actually did) sell me his Zipp 999 wheelset at a pretty good price because he was going to use that money to help offset the cost of buying his Litespeed Blade. Well, he bought the Blade, but really I don’t think was happy afterwards that he sold his wheels to do it. So, I’m just going to sell his wheels right back to him. It’s probably more fitting that way. He always manages top 10 bike splits in all the local races here so he’ll look less silly riding them. Plus, I’ll probably feel better when I get passed by someone with Stingers on my bike than with a 999 set on. :) So we’re back to square one.

It’s still rainy here today, but I think we’re going to have a gorgeous day here tomorrow! I can’t wait!! Hope you all are having a great Monday!