Month: February 2011

Categories
Ironman Lake Placid

Last 12 Miles of Lake Placid

I did my endurance ride this morning on the CompuTrainer and started the Lake Placid real course video in Keene, so about a 41.5 mile ride. It was the first time that I did the last 12 miles where the three bears are. The CompuTrainer said that the grade was between 2% and 6%. I think most of the time it was between 2-3%. I actually think the beginning of the course is harder than the ending, but I haven’t riden the actual course yet so I don’t know. My only reference is the CompuTrainer real course video. The reason I think it is easier is because while it is a hill, you tend to stay in the same gearing and spin. The hills or hill really is just very long and not extremely steep. I did ride the entire time in the big chainring, I will be curious to see if that is possible on the real course.

Weight: 167

Categories
Ironman Lake Placid

Lap Swim

Today was one of the easier swims. As I’ve said in the past it seems like friday is a lazy day at the pool. I did our standard warmup, pull, kick and was thinking are we ever going to start the main set today or am I just going to do laps. The first time through the main set we did free, so that was a pretty good workout. The next set they did stroke though, and since I just do free it was a bit easier for me. Maybe after Ironman I will start to become more proficient in the other strokes, but for now I’m sticking with free.

700 warmup
500 pull
200 kick
800 1×200 2×100 4×50 8×25
800 1×200 2×100 4×50 8×25
450 pull
500 cooldown
Total: 3950

Weight: 169

Categories
Ironman Lake Placid

Snow day

I didn’t make it out to run yesterday. The weather has not been very cooperative on my run days so far it is either zero out or snowing. Starting on Tuesday it pretty much snowed right through yesterday afternoon. I wouldn’t mind so much going out for a run in the snow, but I’m a littl leary of being hit by a car or snow plow. The only working out I ended up doing was snow blowing, shoveling and carrying wood from the wood pile over to my back deck. I think I did that for the majority of the day!

This morning I did get my workout in and it was a pretty good one. Spent an hour on the CompuTrainer using the 3D software. I road the Ironman Kona course, because it allows you to stay in one gear for longer periods of time as the grade changes or more gradual. It was good for the Tempo ride that I needed to do. I was able to keep a nice steady cadence. My average heart rate was 151 and never went over 160. After doing that for an hour I reset the course and then do a 15 minute cool down. I keep track of all my running and biking data in Training Peaks software. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to include the cooldown performance in with the other data or not. At this point I have just been putting everything in.

Weight: 168.8

Categories
Ironman Lake Placid

Are you mentally ready?

This morning I was on the CompuTrainer once again and doing intervals. If you recall from the last time I did this half way through the second set I just fell apart. The last 10 minute interval was even worse, probably made it 3 minutes into it before I just couldn’t keep pace. All week I’ve been thinking about that, a lot of thoughts running through my head. Was the CompuTrainer not calibrated right for the test that set the interval peaks? Did I really lose that much over vacation by not being on the bike and eating poorly? Was it just a bad day? Not hydrated?

Anyway, lots of things to think about over the course of the week. The one thing I wanted to be for this morning was mentally ready to ride. I kept going over the session in my head, thinking about the cadence I wanted to keep. I absolutely was not going to let my cadence drop because that would be sure failure, it is just to hard to bring it back up. Your mental attitude has a lot to do with what you are able to accomplish, if you don’t believe, it won’t happen for you.

I started out the session gradually building up to around a 65% effort and then there are 5 short intervals, 30 seconds hard, 30 seconds easy. Then the first 10 minute interval starts and I knew I would make it through it. It certainly wasn’t going to be easy, but I knew I could last 10 minutes and I watched my HR climb to 163 by the end of it. Then an easy 5 minutes and my HR recovered to 141 before the next interval started. Let me tell you, that was a long 10 minutes. I just kept thinking keep the cadence up. This time the HR climbed to 168 and the recovery 5 minutes had it back down to 145. Finally the last 10 minute interval, about 7 minutes in my legs were really starting to burn but I was keeping the cadence right around 88-90. I learned from the last time if I let it drop my legs wouldn’t have enough keep going. That last 3 minutes seemed to last forever, my HR went to 170 (Not sure what Coach/Nutritionist Melinda will think of that 🙂 ) and my legs were seriously hurting for the last minute. Never so happy to just spin my legs for 20 minutes after that.

So the difference between this week and last week was an average of 14 Watts or about 8%. Did my body change that much over the course of a week? I doubt it, I think I was just better mentally prepared for the session.

Weight: 169.2