Yesterday morning, I raced in the Columbia Triathlon as a relay with my wife for the second year in a row. Just like last year, I took the swim and bike legs of the relay and my wife acted as the pinch runner. We had a great time at the race and ended up improving our times in each of the three legs. The field at this race is pretty competitive, so even with our improved times, we only improved a little in overall place and came 6th out of the mixed relays with a time of 2:31:28.
Swim Training/Prep
I've now discussed it in a couple blog entries, but I'll mention it one more time. This winter I increased my swim volume by quite a lot and saw some nice gains in my pool times and a good result last week in an open water swim. This last week, some online friends suggested experimenting with various breathing patterns to increase the amount of oxygen you get during the swim. I tried this out a few times this week during swim workouts and planned to give it a shot during the race.
Cycling Training/Prep
Last year, my goal race was Eagleman Aquavelo, a distance that I had not done well on previously on the bike and thus felt the need to have a lot of cycling volume. This year, I didn't sign up for Eagleman or any other longer races in the spring and was focusing on increasing my speed on shorter races. For me, this meant working on my FTP (functional threshold power) during the early season. The reading I've done on some online resources such as Slowtwitch and the wattage forums suggested some workout (e.g. 2x20s) that were fairly time efficient on the indoor trainer. I also started using some workout videos from "Sufferfest", which helped tremendously with the motivation to go hard when training inside. As I did last year, I continued to track my progress using my power meter and GoldenCheetah's performance manager which was again helpful for tracking fatigue and tapering for events. The reduced volume meant a lower total CTL, but I did see some FTP gains and felt faster on less total bike training time.
Weight
First, a little background story. After doing well last year, quite a number of people said to me something to the effect of, "Wow, if you could only run...". This got me thinking that maybe after 15 years of not running and being pretty healthy that maybe a little running wouldn't hurt. Perhaps I could do a sprint with a 5K run and limit my run training volume (aquarunning?). If I was going to run, I decided I would try to get as light as I could to limit any stress on my back and picked a 140 lbs as a goal. In the past I had always raced at about 150 lbs, but I'd been below 140 lbs back when I played soccer in college. In parallel, I hunted down a good neurosurgeon and setup an appointment to ask a professional how dangerous it would be for me to run. The busy appointment schedule for the neurosurgeon meant I would have some time to work on the weight before getting his opinion. In my normal analytical style, I went to work losing the weight by using a spreadsheet to track daily calorie deficits based loosely on the Hacker's Diet. Here's a nice little plot showing my progress:
As a sort of proof that the world has an ironic sense of humor, I hit my goal weight of 140 lbs on the morning I had the follow up appointment with my neurosurgeon after getting an MRI of my back. The MRI showed that my L5-S1 disc that I had surgery on twice was probably in ok shape, but that L4-L5 had a minor tear in the annulus and a herniation. Fortunately, I was asymptomatic, but was told I'd be a fool to run and that my previous regime of avoiding running had probably saved me from additional issues so far. Oh well, guess I'm not going to run! On the plus side, being lighter should help my cycling speed on hilly courses like the Columbia Triathlon course.
Race Morning
I'm happy to report that finally my wave didn't go last. Thank you race organizers. This year they decided to put the relay wave start roughly in the middle, behind most of the age group men and before the age group women. I was looking forward to not having to wait so long between transition setup and getting into the water. I had a pretty good night's sleep and got up at about 5:40, made a cup of coffee to go and drove over to my standard "secret" local spot and walked the couple minutes to transition. I had the pleasure of seeing some pros run by doing their warmups and gave a little shout out to Yoder, asking if he was going to win again and telling him I was routing for him. I got to the transition area with plenty of time and did my standard setup: pump up the tires, tape up the holes on the aero wheels, attach the shoes to the bike, etc. Given my earlier start time, I went over to the swim start early and watched the pros start. I then had the first of many trips to the portajohn. I got a bit worried by the third trip, remembering that my son had some GI issues at a party the night before. It took till about midway into the swim before my stomach had completely settled down.
Swim: 21:34
I mentally had a stretch goal for the swim of 20:00, but thought that sub 21:00 was more realistic (last year I did 22:36). My masters swimming friend Reg, who is a great open water swimmer, did about 20:00 last year, so my hope was to try to hang with him and see if I could do some drafting. This worked great for the first few hundred yards. We started the swim looking directly into the sun and I found sighting the buoys to be really difficult. I somehow got confused for a short stretch and convinced myself that Reg was going offline. No surprise, I was the one heading toward the wrong buoy and by the time I corrected, I had lost time and lost sight of Reg. At that point I just got into a rhythm and tried to race at my own pace. Once we hit the first turn and weren't looking into the sun, I managed to avoid any other navigation problems and swam the rest of the way uneventful. I did make use of some of my new experimental breathing patterns (2:3 or 3:4 breathing) and felt pretty good by the end of the swim. I didn't hit my goal time, but I was told that the course was probably a little longer this year, so it is more reasonable to look at overall place. The online results don't make it especially easy to figure out, but I think I was roughly 70th out of 1700 vs 130th last year (and 5th out of the water for the relay teams).
T1: 1:39
I felt a little wobbly coming out of the water, but managed to trot over to my bike at a decent clip while taking off the top of my wetsuit. As usual, I had to yell a bit at the crowd of people in transition to make some room, but this didn't really slow me down. I had a touch of trouble getting the wetsuit off and had to sit down for a second. Then I grabbed my helmet, put it on and ran off.
Bike: 1:03:20 (http://app.strava.com/rides/8931934)
The first minor challenge on the bike is to get my shoes on. I admit that I didn't practice that much this year. I practiced flying mounts with my shoes already clipped in four times the day before the race, even trying to pick the right spot on the course to start putting my feet in the shoes. As usual, race day was slightly more difficult. Maybe I should practice when my heart rate is 170+. I waited for the first minor downhill section to start and managed to get my right foot in fine. My left foot I managed to unclip my shoe with my foot barely in the shoe. Fortunately, the shoe stayed with me and I managed to clip it back in and finally get the thing on my foot. With that finally out of the way, I was ready to hammer. I was feeling really good through the whole bike and feel like I made some improvements on my pacing. In the past, I have had a habit of going too hard on the hills and "burning matches", which I've been advised is not the right strategy for even a hilly time trial. While it makes sense to go a little harder up the steep sections, you want to keep your effort within a pretty narrow band. I think this probably cost me a few strava KOMs up the climbs, but gave me a better overall time. One other change I tried out was to use a hand over hand position based on DZ's position in the Tour of California time trial. I had briefly experimented with this the day before the race and felt immediately comfortable doing it. I'm sure I looked exactly like this:
I beat my previous year's time by about 1:30 and ended up with the 19th best bike split. I was beaten by 12 of the 16 pro men, 5 of the 27 "open elite" division and one 40-44 age group athlete. Not too shabby!
T2: 0:36
The bike to run transition is pretty easy for a relay. I ran down the hill into transition, saw my wife waiting for me and ran to her. She took the timing chip off my leg, put it on hers and ran off.
Fetching the Kids
My job after the bike is to go fetch my kids so we can all see my wife finish. We live close enough to the race that this is a surprisingly easy thing to do. I grabbed my backpack of our stuff so that we wouldn't have to come back to transition, walked my bike out of transition and hoped on for the short ride to our minivan parked just outside of the park. I think I got to our house about 10 minutes after finishing the bike. When I got home, I noticed two police cruisers parked outside the neighbor's house; apparently someone had tried to break into their place. After a brief chit-chat about that, I took all my bike stuff inside, uploaded my ride to strava (KOM!), took a shower and gathered the kids into the car. We drove the baby sitter home on the way to the park and made our way to the finish line with 10-15 minutes to spare! With all that time to spare, I managed to forget the camera.
Run: 1:04:21
During my wife's training, she asked me one day to tell her a bit about "working through the pain". I asked a bit more about what kind of pain; working through some muscle soreness or feeling a stitch in your side is what I assumed she was talking about. Unfortunately, she said it was some knee and back pain. We don't work through that kind of pain. She was able to do some short or slower training runs without problems and thought she could make it through the race. As we waited near the finish and she came into sight, I could see that she was in pain. She had a grimace on her face and a limp to her stride that told me her knee was bothering her. I was just hoping she hadn't hurt herself too badly. Even with the injury issue, she managed to beat her time from last year by three minutes!
Post Race
After the race, we walked (my wife limped) up to the post race food and we found a nice shady spot to camp out for a bit while she recuperated. I acted as gopher and got her and the kids food and drink. As usual, the kids loved the treat of getting some chips and other snack food that they usually don't get. After saying hello to a couple dozen friends who passed by, including an online friend who recognized me from my blog, I realized just how many friends I've made doing triathlons. There was a variety of emotions, from the friends who were disappointed with their races, to those who had placed in their divisions. Overall, everyone seems to have enjoyed the beautiful weather we had and the well run race.
Summary
I managed to improve my swim, not quite to top 50 overall, but still clearly making strides, and I couldn't be happier with my bike. As usual, I will compare myself with my 35-39 age group with the caveat that I didn't have to save anything for the run. The guy who won my division (and has won the overall Celebration sprint that I had been targeting for my hypothetical run debut two years in a row) had the best swim+T1+bike time at about 1:27. My swim+T1+bike time was about 1:26. As one of my friends said post race (over and over), "...if only you could run...".
A friend who was describing his climbing adventure once told me a story about Ed Viesturs turning around within a few hundred meters of the peak of Everest because he had reached his turn around time limit for a safe decent. My friend thought this was one of the bravest and smartest things he had ever heard about; to put off your year long goal within sight for safety sake. I guess I have to be brave and smart like Ed and not do something stupid like run in a race just for some foolish pride...
EDIT: A Few Bike Shots
Someone asked about my bike setup, so here are a few shots, focusing a bit on the front end setup.
Swim Training/Prep
I've now discussed it in a couple blog entries, but I'll mention it one more time. This winter I increased my swim volume by quite a lot and saw some nice gains in my pool times and a good result last week in an open water swim. This last week, some online friends suggested experimenting with various breathing patterns to increase the amount of oxygen you get during the swim. I tried this out a few times this week during swim workouts and planned to give it a shot during the race.
Cycling Training/Prep
Last year, my goal race was Eagleman Aquavelo, a distance that I had not done well on previously on the bike and thus felt the need to have a lot of cycling volume. This year, I didn't sign up for Eagleman or any other longer races in the spring and was focusing on increasing my speed on shorter races. For me, this meant working on my FTP (functional threshold power) during the early season. The reading I've done on some online resources such as Slowtwitch and the wattage forums suggested some workout (e.g. 2x20s) that were fairly time efficient on the indoor trainer. I also started using some workout videos from "Sufferfest", which helped tremendously with the motivation to go hard when training inside. As I did last year, I continued to track my progress using my power meter and GoldenCheetah's performance manager which was again helpful for tracking fatigue and tapering for events. The reduced volume meant a lower total CTL, but I did see some FTP gains and felt faster on less total bike training time.
First, a little background story. After doing well last year, quite a number of people said to me something to the effect of, "Wow, if you could only run...". This got me thinking that maybe after 15 years of not running and being pretty healthy that maybe a little running wouldn't hurt. Perhaps I could do a sprint with a 5K run and limit my run training volume (aquarunning?). If I was going to run, I decided I would try to get as light as I could to limit any stress on my back and picked a 140 lbs as a goal. In the past I had always raced at about 150 lbs, but I'd been below 140 lbs back when I played soccer in college. In parallel, I hunted down a good neurosurgeon and setup an appointment to ask a professional how dangerous it would be for me to run. The busy appointment schedule for the neurosurgeon meant I would have some time to work on the weight before getting his opinion. In my normal analytical style, I went to work losing the weight by using a spreadsheet to track daily calorie deficits based loosely on the Hacker's Diet. Here's a nice little plot showing my progress:
Race Morning
I'm happy to report that finally my wave didn't go last. Thank you race organizers. This year they decided to put the relay wave start roughly in the middle, behind most of the age group men and before the age group women. I was looking forward to not having to wait so long between transition setup and getting into the water. I had a pretty good night's sleep and got up at about 5:40, made a cup of coffee to go and drove over to my standard "secret" local spot and walked the couple minutes to transition. I had the pleasure of seeing some pros run by doing their warmups and gave a little shout out to Yoder, asking if he was going to win again and telling him I was routing for him. I got to the transition area with plenty of time and did my standard setup: pump up the tires, tape up the holes on the aero wheels, attach the shoes to the bike, etc. Given my earlier start time, I went over to the swim start early and watched the pros start. I then had the first of many trips to the portajohn. I got a bit worried by the third trip, remembering that my son had some GI issues at a party the night before. It took till about midway into the swim before my stomach had completely settled down.
Swim: 21:34
I mentally had a stretch goal for the swim of 20:00, but thought that sub 21:00 was more realistic (last year I did 22:36). My masters swimming friend Reg, who is a great open water swimmer, did about 20:00 last year, so my hope was to try to hang with him and see if I could do some drafting. This worked great for the first few hundred yards. We started the swim looking directly into the sun and I found sighting the buoys to be really difficult. I somehow got confused for a short stretch and convinced myself that Reg was going offline. No surprise, I was the one heading toward the wrong buoy and by the time I corrected, I had lost time and lost sight of Reg. At that point I just got into a rhythm and tried to race at my own pace. Once we hit the first turn and weren't looking into the sun, I managed to avoid any other navigation problems and swam the rest of the way uneventful. I did make use of some of my new experimental breathing patterns (2:3 or 3:4 breathing) and felt pretty good by the end of the swim. I didn't hit my goal time, but I was told that the course was probably a little longer this year, so it is more reasonable to look at overall place. The online results don't make it especially easy to figure out, but I think I was roughly 70th out of 1700 vs 130th last year (and 5th out of the water for the relay teams).
T1: 1:39
I felt a little wobbly coming out of the water, but managed to trot over to my bike at a decent clip while taking off the top of my wetsuit. As usual, I had to yell a bit at the crowd of people in transition to make some room, but this didn't really slow me down. I had a touch of trouble getting the wetsuit off and had to sit down for a second. Then I grabbed my helmet, put it on and ran off.
Bike: 1:03:20 (http://app.strava.com/rides/8931934)
The first minor challenge on the bike is to get my shoes on. I admit that I didn't practice that much this year. I practiced flying mounts with my shoes already clipped in four times the day before the race, even trying to pick the right spot on the course to start putting my feet in the shoes. As usual, race day was slightly more difficult. Maybe I should practice when my heart rate is 170+. I waited for the first minor downhill section to start and managed to get my right foot in fine. My left foot I managed to unclip my shoe with my foot barely in the shoe. Fortunately, the shoe stayed with me and I managed to clip it back in and finally get the thing on my foot. With that finally out of the way, I was ready to hammer. I was feeling really good through the whole bike and feel like I made some improvements on my pacing. In the past, I have had a habit of going too hard on the hills and "burning matches", which I've been advised is not the right strategy for even a hilly time trial. While it makes sense to go a little harder up the steep sections, you want to keep your effort within a pretty narrow band. I think this probably cost me a few strava KOMs up the climbs, but gave me a better overall time. One other change I tried out was to use a hand over hand position based on DZ's position in the Tour of California time trial. I had briefly experimented with this the day before the race and felt immediately comfortable doing it. I'm sure I looked exactly like this:
T2: 0:36
The bike to run transition is pretty easy for a relay. I ran down the hill into transition, saw my wife waiting for me and ran to her. She took the timing chip off my leg, put it on hers and ran off.
Fetching the Kids
My job after the bike is to go fetch my kids so we can all see my wife finish. We live close enough to the race that this is a surprisingly easy thing to do. I grabbed my backpack of our stuff so that we wouldn't have to come back to transition, walked my bike out of transition and hoped on for the short ride to our minivan parked just outside of the park. I think I got to our house about 10 minutes after finishing the bike. When I got home, I noticed two police cruisers parked outside the neighbor's house; apparently someone had tried to break into their place. After a brief chit-chat about that, I took all my bike stuff inside, uploaded my ride to strava (KOM!), took a shower and gathered the kids into the car. We drove the baby sitter home on the way to the park and made our way to the finish line with 10-15 minutes to spare! With all that time to spare, I managed to forget the camera.
Run: 1:04:21
During my wife's training, she asked me one day to tell her a bit about "working through the pain". I asked a bit more about what kind of pain; working through some muscle soreness or feeling a stitch in your side is what I assumed she was talking about. Unfortunately, she said it was some knee and back pain. We don't work through that kind of pain. She was able to do some short or slower training runs without problems and thought she could make it through the race. As we waited near the finish and she came into sight, I could see that she was in pain. She had a grimace on her face and a limp to her stride that told me her knee was bothering her. I was just hoping she hadn't hurt herself too badly. Even with the injury issue, she managed to beat her time from last year by three minutes!
Post Race
After the race, we walked (my wife limped) up to the post race food and we found a nice shady spot to camp out for a bit while she recuperated. I acted as gopher and got her and the kids food and drink. As usual, the kids loved the treat of getting some chips and other snack food that they usually don't get. After saying hello to a couple dozen friends who passed by, including an online friend who recognized me from my blog, I realized just how many friends I've made doing triathlons. There was a variety of emotions, from the friends who were disappointed with their races, to those who had placed in their divisions. Overall, everyone seems to have enjoyed the beautiful weather we had and the well run race.
Summary
I managed to improve my swim, not quite to top 50 overall, but still clearly making strides, and I couldn't be happier with my bike. As usual, I will compare myself with my 35-39 age group with the caveat that I didn't have to save anything for the run. The guy who won my division (and has won the overall Celebration sprint that I had been targeting for my hypothetical run debut two years in a row) had the best swim+T1+bike time at about 1:27. My swim+T1+bike time was about 1:26. As one of my friends said post race (over and over), "...if only you could run...".
A friend who was describing his climbing adventure once told me a story about Ed Viesturs turning around within a few hundred meters of the peak of Everest because he had reached his turn around time limit for a safe decent. My friend thought this was one of the bravest and smartest things he had ever heard about; to put off your year long goal within sight for safety sake. I guess I have to be brave and smart like Ed and not do something stupid like run in a race just for some foolish pride...
EDIT: A Few Bike Shots
Someone asked about my bike setup, so here are a few shots, focusing a bit on the front end setup.
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