Category: Triathlon

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Ironman Lake Placid

Superbowl hangover?

I’ve never seen so few people at the pool as this morning. Usually there is at least three or four per the two lanes that we use. Today there were three total for the first half hour! After the normal warmup, pull, kick we started doing 100 pull on 1:30 and that was giving me about 5 seconds rest. We made it through eight of them and Karen decided that was enough and by that time some other people showed up. Ended up doing another 1200. A little bit shorter than normal, but not too bad.

700 warmup
500 pull
200 kick
800 – 100×8 on 1:30 pull
600 – 150×2 75×4
600 – 150×2 75×4
Total: 3400

Weight: 168

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

Categories
Ironman Lake Placid

Morning swim

Had a good swim workout at the pool this morning. The 500 hundred sets were tough, the first not too bad, but the next two were tough. The second and third were harder because I really pushed it on the 50 sprints. Even though we were doing the 50s on a minute I was getting them done right around 35 seconds. Unfortunately I’m not in good enough shape to recover from that and keep pace on the next 500. Oh well, it was fun doing the 50s hard.

500 warmup
500 pull
200 kick
500 5×100 on 1:30
200 4×50   on 1:00
500 5×100 on 1:45
200 4×50   on 1:00
500 5×100 on 1:30
200 4×50   on 1:00
500 cooldown
Total: 3800

Weight: 167.5

Categories
Ironman Lake Placid

Another Endurance Ride

Today was another Endurance ride on the CompuTrainer. This was the first ride with the new Heart Rate cable from CompuTrainer. I had been having problems with my HR disappearing during the ride or not even having one at all. After an e-mail to the folks at Racermate they sent me out one of the new cables that they just started getting in. This cable is a little bit thicker to help with interference from other wireless devices and also has an LED in line so you can see that it is working. Getting back to the ride, it was for two hours and my average HR was 155 and my average Watt output was 192. Since taking the Test a couple weeks ago the workouts have been much harder, I’m starting to wonder if I didn’t have the CompuTrainer calibrated right for the test. I’ll stick with the workouts through the next few weeks and we will find out at the next scheduled test.

On a nutritional note, I had a glass of milk mixed with Hammer Recoverite after my workout and felt much better. The strawberry flavor was pretty good. I’m thinking that I have been waiting too long to get some nutrients into my body. I had it right away today, didn’t wait until after the shower.

Weight: 168.2

Categories
Ironman Lake Placid

Back in the pool

Felt good to be back at the pool. Slow start on a Friday again, so I got a few extra yards in during the warmup as people slowly drifted in. The lane was packed though by the time we started the main set.

750 warmup
600 pull
250 kick
300
300 3×100
300 4×75
300 6×50
300 3×100
300 4×75
300 6×50
300 pull

Total : 4000

Weight: 168.75

Categories
Ironman Lake Placid

Vacations are bad

Yup, that’s right, vacations are bad. It doesn’t take much to lose any gains in fitness and vacations seem to accelerate those loses. Probably for two reasons, poor diet on vacation and less exercise. Sure, you will get physical activity in walking around Disney and you might even get out for a run, but most likely you will not put in the hours that you would have training if you were not on vacation. But hey, that is what vacations are for, being lazy.

I was on the CompuTrainer this morning for my Tempo ride. It was a much better ride than on Tuesday when I pretty much died on the thing. My heart rate was higher than it was two weeks ago when I did the same ride at pretty much the same power output. So, yeah, I’m still feeling the effects of vacation. It felt good to be able to sustain the effort for the entire workout today though and not have to back off. I can really feel it in my legs right now and since we had another 10 inches of snow drop last night I really felt it in my legs while snow blowing. After my rides now I’ve started taking a product from Hammer Nutrition called Recoverite. I will give it a try over the next month or two and see if I feel like it makes any difference in my recovery after my rides. During the rides I always use Perpetuem, another Hammer product, to keep hydrated and replace some of the calories being burned. I was going to use Gatorade but figured since I’m going to use Perpetuem on race day I might as well use it all through my training. Today I actually had two bottles of Perpetuem even though the ride was just over an hour, the second was after an hour of snow blowing. Maybe snow blowing will replace swimming as an event in Triathlon.

Weight: 168.8

Categories
Ironman Lake Placid

Can we get some more snow please?

This morning was a run day. I was seriously contemplating getting on the treadmill this morning when I looked at the temperature in my truck and it read 2 degrees. Thinking about how cold it was and how there isn’t much room to run because the sidewalks are not always cleared I was setting myself up to stay inside. I got to the Y though and figured it was only a 5 mile run, so I threw on my Yaktrax and went out. I’m pretty sure that at some point there was frost building up on my eye lashes and my face was pretty much frozen. I have to remember to bring a mask or something for a little more face protection when it is that cold, at least my ears were under my hat. Also had hand warmers to keep my fingers warm and they actually got kind of hot in my gloves. After the first mile I found a rythm and everything was fine, but that first mile in the cold really shocks the system! Here are the the results http://connect.garmin.com/activity/65214659.

Apparently there is more snow on the way later today into tomorrow. This really is not helping with the outdoor running! Back indoors on the CompuTrainer tomorrow 🙂

Weight: 170