Thursday, July 15, 2010

Something New out of Something Old



While my super girlfriend Anne is cooking dinner, I thought I'd take the chance to be a good boyfriend and write my blog for the day:).

So yesterday got done. It was busy with the trip to the city, but I still managed to get in some decent training and am happy that my legs came around so quickly from this past weekend's Rhode Island 70.3. In speaking with my coach and looking at my power numbers, I could have gone a bit harder on the bike. I'm happy to see that my pacing was my downfall and not my ability. I did feel like I was holding back quite a bit, but this was my first race using my power meter so I guess I'll just have to get used to it. I thought it would have been fool-proof but I'll have to think again. Any time you race with something for the first time you'll have to get used to it. I'm just glad that I had the chance to get a bit of a feel for it before IM Louisville.

On the run side of things I know that my downfall was nutrition. Again, I felt great, but didn't have that extra kick needed in the final 10k. In my previous best half iron distance race, I was able to ingest approx 600 cals on the run and set a personal best. For Rhode Island I only ingested 240 cals and was stuck at Ironman pace for the entire run. I never bonked, I just didn't have the "go" that I needed. Also, another indication that I was a bit low on fuel was the fact that I wanted to eat my own arm in the final parts of the run. As I told my coach, I would have eaten a cheeseburger if someone had offered it to me out on the course!

So for the pic of my mountain bike up top, I've decided to do some Xterra races in the future. Nothing "technically" on the schedule for right now, but it's something I can't wait to do in the future! While my focus is totally on Ironman Louisville for the next month and a half, I think the mountain biking will be a great release from triathlon once the race is over. So basically what I did was take my singlespeed setup, replaced the fork with a RockShox REBA shock, and threw some gears and shifters on it and created a proper 29er racing bike. It's still relatively light and hopefully fast. I've never ridden with gears or any suspension so that should be a lot of fun. Since I was keeping up with my buddies on my singlespeed I'm excited to see how fast I can go now that I've got some extra fire power! Should be interesting.

As for training today, things went smoothly with an open water swim and an interval session on the bike. Power on the bike is good and I've made a breakthrough in my swimming. I guess when you've done something (swimming) badly for a while you're bound to make some improvements somewhere! Tomorrow is another swim (back to the pool-yuck!) and threshold bike session. Looking forward to the bike, but not the swim. Why can't all swim sessions be open water swims!!!???

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