T Minus One Week

Today saw me actually make a group workout at the shop. Man, that is a much better workout place than my basement. When I rule the world, I will be able to make more of the group workouts. Anyway, as always, Coach Brent had a great set-up with Computrainers and all the fixings.

With less than a week until the Spring Training Races in Kenosha, it is just about time to put-up or shut-up. I have reason to believe that the team should be closer to the first rather than the second (nevermind we are seldom a quiet lot). We shall see. Stay tuned.

Be Proud of What You Do

Well.  This might be a little off.  But, it may be right on too.  You can be the judge.  In the end, I don't care.  Your, gentle reader, opinion matters little to me.  Some people's opinions matter more than others.  That is just the way it is.  That is the honest truth.  With that out of the way, on with the blog.

 

The following may have something to do with athletic endeavors, which is why it is here.  But, I am afraid that its ideas are much farther reaching than that.

 

On Tuesday night, last (I just love writing like that), my lovely and loving wife asked me, "Don't you ever get tired of being exceptional at everything?"  I, of course, said, "No."  I have found simple, one word answers the easiest and the most communicative.

 

The thing is, I said it as just a quick response.  Or so I thought.  But, the more I thought on it (you see, my iPod took a dump and I was forced to run with my own thoughts - THE HORROR!) the more I realized that I actually meant it.

 

What she was referring to at the time is not of consequence.  What is, is that I am proud of the things I have done (and do) well in my life.  I know that it is popular, and socially expected, to be ultra humble about most things and that putting one's self above society is not in vogue.  You know what?  Forget that!  Let's start celebrating the things we do well.  I am going to come out and say that it is OK to succeed.  It is OK to do something well.  It is also OK to do something better than someone else.  It happens.  That's a fact.

 

Somewhere in the not so distant past we stopped, or were told to stop, celebrating individual accomplishments.  Why?  I can guess.  But, I think that is my big question.  Where, and when, did the individual's accomplishment get vilified?  I know that is too deep of a question for most.  But, the next time you are without your iPod, give it a think.  Or, maybe throw away your iPod and just think about it.  This might just be that important.

 

Now, for the time being, be proud of what you have done.  Did you set a new PR?  Good for you.  Did you get yourself out of bed to train (on a treadmill or bike trainer even) when it was easier to push the snooze button and listen to the pitter pad of the rain?  Even better for you. 

 

Just because the rest of society puts no value in those things does not mean they have no value.  Heck, I would even argue, that because they do put no value upon those things is exactly why they have great value.

 

Summary:  Get out there and do what you want to.  Do what makes you happy.  Set a goal, believe in that goal, and work to achieve it.  No matter what others say or think of the goal, it is yours to have.  Remember it is you that places value on the things you do.  Do the things that have value to you (Not like the dishes.  Those have to be done so you don't live in a pig sty).  And, do them well.  You will be rewarded.  This I am sure of.

 

Don't apologize for your accomplishments, whatever they may be, and do not apologize for the rewards that your accomplishments reap.

A Pair of Dueces the Tri-ing for Children Tri

Again, sorry for not posting recently and for not returning any e-mails. I guess I've just been letting the real world get in the way of my play. I'll try to stop that in the future. We'll see how that works for me. I will get a few e-mails out tomorrow, but some will have to wait until Thursday evening. Sorry again.

Anyhow, here comes my Tri-ing for Children race report:

First off, how did I wind up doing this race that I was not planning on doing? Well, my wife, Julie, had planned on doing this race since the beginning of the year. I was going to bring the kids and cheer her on. A couple of weeks ago, my cousin volunteered to watch the monsters, err kids, get up really stupidly early in the morning, and allow me to race with Julie. So, onto the race calendar it went.

The morning came around bright and clear. I walked into transition with no real expectations other than to push myself past my comfort zone. I left the heart rate monitor, bike computer, and spare tubes at home. I was just going to go all in and see what the cards had in store. I was going off in wave eight which is not where I usually would want to start, but I had no expectations.

Prerace I saw a bunch of the local fast guys and figured, because they are real athletes, that they would be doing the Olympic distance race. That might just leave us mere mortals to race the sprint distance. As a side note, I saw Scott Bowe's new Trek Speed Concept that he got from Emery's. And, I have some serious bike envy going on. They have one just like his in my size at the shop now. Maybe Santa will find me on his nice list this year. A guy can dream you know.

The swim started and, like I usually don't do, I went out hard. I made no attempt to find anyone's feet. I just swam hard for the first buoy. That actually seemed to work. At the first buoy someone passed me, but for the rest of the swim I was just weaving though the previous wave's members. Whilst I was a weaving one of my competitors shucked when I thought they were going to jive. The result was a right goggle without a rubber gasket. Rather than fight trying to fix it in the water, I just did the last bit of the swim like Popeye. Note to self: sighting with one eye is harder than Popeye makes it look. Sorry to the lifeguard who asked if I needed a floaty thing after getting knocked in the face. I think I just backstroked over her. I really should have said, "No thank you." I don't really know because she approached from my, then, blind side. And, as soon as I felt I was alone in the water, I went back to freestyle.

Sidebar (OJ trial flashback): The guy (Paul) at Sable Water Optics is setting me up with new gaskets for my goggles. If you have not tried these goggles, you are missing it. I have been using this particular pair of 101's for more than three years. They are just the clearest goggles out there. And, as I just learned, their customer service is more than excellent. You can get them right over at Emery's (surprise, surprise). If you don't like them, I'll buy them from you. Really, they are that good. I have two pairs and Julie has a pair too.

T1 was a little slow. My helmet just did not want to go on, but on it went and off I went for a bike ride.

On the bike I usually wait to get my breathing under control before hitting it. This time I just went right from the mount line. Other than the larger than usual volume of snot on my face (haven't seen the pics yet, but they will be good) from the summer cold I seem to have found, I would say it only took another minute to a minute-and-a-half to get my heart rate down to biking levels. I proceeded to pass a lot of people on the bike. I thought I could see the guy in a blue tri top that passed me in the water, but I could not catch him. Overall, the bike was pretty good. The course is not as flat as some would have you believe, and the wind was definitely more than I would have expected standing on the beach. Anyhow, no one passed me on the bike and I only wondered what way to go once while on the course. I only had cadence information while I was riding. No clock, no speed, no average speed. I have to say it is nice to not have a computer sometimes.

T2 went well. Nothing to report other than running is my favorite thing to do, but is not what I do the best. I had run two miles on Saturday morning at 6:36min/mile pace. So, I had an idea what I wanted to feel like while running. The question remained whether I could do it for three miles.

I got on the run course and promised myself to not look at the Garmin until it told me I was at mile number one. I did that and was happy to see it saying that I was going at about a 6:30 pace. By then I was out on the nice flat and fast road. Other than being a little on the warm side, I felt pretty good going the speed I was. One nineteen-year-old passed me on the run, other than that I was just out there on my own. There were a lot of others on the road, but either I was passing them easily or they were going in the other direction. Before I knew it, the finish line was there. Who would have thought that running faster got it over with sooner? That must be science or something.

Swim came in at 6:29, T1 1:04, Bike at 38:14, T2 1:01, and the run at 20:04. Not too bad for an old guy. 2nd overall and 2nd in my age group. Unfortunately, the other old guy that beat me, beat me by 4 minutes. Translation: I need to go a mile-per-hour faster on the bike and a whole minute per mile faster on the run. Not bad goals to set for one's self. Again, we'll see.

After the race I was able to go cheer Julie on as she got off the bike and through her run. I have to say, as much as I liked racing, seeing Julie do her thing was a lot of fun. Cheering on all the triathletes that I don't know was really fun. I hope all those (other than the one crabby guy with some fracture excuse) that I convinced to stop walking and resume running were able to set PR's.

After Julie finished we had a nice lunch with the guy who beat me (maybe crushed my dreams is a better phrase, but he may have set a few dreams too) and his friends and family. Heck, maybe he'll let me tag along on some of his training so I can grow up to be as fast as he is. It turns out we have some mutual friends and our wives actually know each other. We'll see (that seems to be a motif).

While hanging out waiting for the awards (which were so big they don't fit on the shelf dedicated for such things) many new friends were made.

Overall, Julie and I had a great time. If anyone accidentally took a pair of 11.5 neon yellow Nike Lunar Racers, drop me an e-mail. They are mine.

Taking It Easy

So, a little background.  I've been seriously training for a half-ironman distance triathlon for the last 22 weeks.  For those of you a little slow on the math side that is five and a half months.  I started in earnest on January 18, 2010.  I picked a plan from a book that I thought was appropriate and pretty much stuck too it.  "Pretty much" means that I did almost all the bike and run workouts and a solid two-thirds of the swim workouts.  You see, I am a decent swimmer and am often not motivated to stare at the black line at the bottom of the pool any more than necessary.

 

Yeah, yeah.  What about taking it easy.  Well, the plan called for a half-taper week followed by a full taper week the week of the race.  I have to admit that I was leery of the taper from the start.  I put it in my calendar with an sense of unease for sure.  During my last few "work weeks" in training I was doing between thirteen and fourteen hours of training a week.  The half taper week had about eight hours and the full taper had a little over five hours scheduled.

 

Blah, blah.  Gez man, get to the point or at least a point.  OK.  During the half taper week I blogged that I had ants in my pants.  My wife will claim that the ants are always there, but that is a whole other discussion.  Let's agree that there were considerably more ants than normal.  Shall we?  During the full taper, the ants took over.  Sure, it was kind of nice to have a bunch of spare time.  Heck, I even slept past 5:30am a couple of times.  A forty-five minute run is easy to fit in.  Putting the bike on the trainer, setting up the TV, etc. takes just about as long as a twenty minute bike ride does.  Let's not even get into the fact that the same laundry is created with out said laundry creating the sweat puddle on the basement floor.  We all know that your physical condition can be tracked by the sweat stain on your basement floor.  Don't we?

 

But, there are a few things (in retrospect) I noticed.  Because my training level went way down by food and fluid consumption did too.

 

I usually take a little cooler filled with fruit and yogurt along with a water bottle filled with Gatorade/Cytomax/EFS/Rehydrate (I do tend to mix and match until about 2 weeks before a race.  Then I switch to whatever will be used for the race).  I also always have a Sam's Club size box of fig newtons and bag of raisin in my vehicle where ever I go (There is also a stash of Hammer gels and Cliff Bars too in case a little pick-up is needed during the lunch workout).  I sip the Gatorade before my noon workout and then fill the bottle with water afterwards.  At the end of the day, I am eating my last piece of fruit as I drive home while sipping what would usually be the second or third water bottle refill.  But, for the last two weeks, I got home and had to empty out my little cooler and dump out the water bottle.  I also didn't even have raisins or fig newtons in my truck.  The funny part about this is that I did not notice their absence.

 

A quick side note here.  I very rarely eat when I am not hungry.  Somehow, either through the way I was raised or through good luck, I just don't have the desire (I did not say ability.  Put a pan of fresh brownies in front of me and keep your fingers clear.  I think Julie does this to me just to mess with me) to eat when my body is not requiring nourishment.

 

Anyway, for a week and a half I was eating to fuel my taper training volume.  I have every reason to believe that amount of food I ate for a solid ten days was not enough to fuel a half-ironman race effort.  I also have to take the responsibility for not noticing what I was, in this case, not eating or drinking.  I should have taken notice when Julie asked me on race day morning, "You're not going to eat anything?"

 

The verdict: Chris does not taper well.  I should have kept the training time closer to what I had been doing for the better part of the year and just toned down the intensity.  I should have also really kept track of my diet and fluid intake better.

 

Now, finally dear reader, to the taking it easy part.  "Easy" is a relative term.  Like training data (which is still mine and should not matter one iota to you), rest and recuperation is an individual thing.  The body is a very interesting machine.  Training input matched with rest is required to promote increased fitness (Note I used the word fitness rather than health.  More on that in the future).  I guess all the preceding words are leading up the fact that my idea of taking it easy might just be an easy two hour bike ride or one hour run done with a stopwatch running.  I do like my chair in the family room, I just don't like being in it too much.

 

We will see.  Like most things in this world, there is no instruction manual.

Aero Bar Water Bottle Set-up

Again, for everyone that e-mailed me, thanks for the encouragement and your questions are always welcome. I think I responded to everyone individually, but incase others were wondering the same thing but were afraid to ask...

A number of you asked for a little better pictures of my front aero bar set-up well, here they are. The aero bars are Profile Design's ZBS bars and the base bar is an old T2 wing. The ZBS bars are 3cm lower in stack than the T2+ ones that I used last year. This allowed me to use a negative 17 degree (horizontal to the ground) stem rather than the negative 40 degree stem I was previously using.

The bottle cage is a Trek Bat Cage purchased because it was really cheap and allowed drilling of additional holes. The cord on the bottle cage is a piece of elastic shoe string that helps hold the on-course Gatorade bottles in place.

I have 20.0cm (200mm) of drop from my seat top to my arm rest pads. This is mainly due to the fact that I have gorilla length arms and that I do like to ride relatively steep.

Oh, and finally, the Cervelo S3 is Ben's, not mine. You'll have to ask him those questions. I just covet his bike from a wheel sucking position.

Ants Have Taken Over My Pants

Thanks to Ben and Steve for going on my hour long ride this morning. I would never have kept it at only an hour if I had not told them in advance that was all we were going to do. I have the bike all prepped with the race hydration set-up and the race wheels are installed. It is just really, really hard to not just start hammering when you here the sound of a disc wheel.

Here is the bike as it is ready to race a Half Iron distance. The only addition will be two gels taped to the top tube. I will toss the between the aero bars bottle at the first aide station and use at least one (two if the weather warrants) bottle of Gatorade off the course.

Don't Forget Why We Do This

This is how we do it... (sung to a hip-hop beat)

No, no. That will not do. You don't want to really know what is on my iPod. Maybe I'll post my play lists tomorrow.

Well, a tapering I go. The ants are building in my pants. They seem to be the little red ones. So, I'm going to type a little to let some of them out. Somewhere my life got skewed. An hour-and-a-half ride is now a "quick ride". And with a cup of coffee on board, I feel like I could take on the world. Maybe that is the point of tapering. Again, I'll let you know.

Anyhow, yesterday was the Milwaukee Air Show down at the lake front. Packed the clan into the family truckster along with three bikes and the bike trailer for a nice family afternoon. We parked down in the Menomonee Valley and rode the Hank Aaron State Trail to the Lake Front State Park on to McKinley Marina where we all met up with Ben, Kari, and a host of others.

My family was quite the procession. Me pulling the trailer with the brothers aboard, the girl, and finally momma bear. Here is what I noticed.

First off, the five or so miles that we biked in was not an effort, at all, for any of us. Because the girl, my wife, and I all "do" triathlons (we are an active sort). Obviously twenty or twenty-five minutes of riding our bikes was not going to impact us. The girl, like I did as a child, thinks of her bike as a mechanism of freedom and was enjoying propelling herself rather than being shuttled by an adult.

Second, that a lot of people down there watching the pretty airplanes looked at us like we were bad parents. Now, we were not going fast. We were going the pace that the girl set and that would keep our little group together in the crowds. What they seemed to look at was the girl (she is 7 riding a 20 inch mountain bike). The look was at her. It was like, "You are so mean making her keep up with you guys. You should be carrying her or at least not making her work on her own." Boy, would they be upset to know about the time I bet her she could not do the monkey bars in the back yard fifty times.

Third, when the rains started coming in and there was a mad rush out of the park, that little girl can hammer. She dropped her elbows on the hills, got out of the saddle for the bumps, and mashed the straights. She was following me on the grass, over the curbs (yes, the boys enjoyed the ride too. The cries of, "faster, faster" kept us going), down the paths, onto the roads, and around the crowds. I had actually forgotten that mountain bikes can be fun too. Heck, Mommy was in danger of getting dropped a couple of times (but don't tell her).

But, the biggest thing I noticed was that living a healthy lifestyle is the perfect example for my kids. You see, to them it is normal to ride your bike, go for a run, swim a little, and generally not sit still. You don't have to park within a block of an event, sweat profusely while dragging a bunch of junk food and beer, and then have to sit down when you get where you are going. A few bikes, a zip-loc bag of fish crackers, another of pretzels, three oranges, and three water bottles can be an afternoon.

Maybe some others saw us out there having a blast and will give it a try too. I can hope.

I know we talk about race results and training plans a lot. Well, at least I do. But, sometimes we should just look back at ourselves and see how much better our lives are because of the sports we choose. Motion breeds motion (the total amount of energy in this system is not fixed). An active, whether it is competitive or not, lifestyle is a good thing. It is to be enjoyed. It should not be taken for granted, but is should be a habit.

I'm going to go a taper now. This sitting still is going to kill me. Man I am looking forward to a swim. Did I just write that?

More Tempo (is that like cow bell?) and a Taper Please

First, thanks to all for the e-mails recently. I'm glad you enjoy the reading. Now that I am sure I'm not just typing for myself. Maybe I'll come up with some decent things to say.

Well, I'm currently in week 19 (after doing week 18 Version 3.0) of my 20 week plan to prepare for the High Cliff Half on June 19th. Why version 3.0 you ask? Well as I explained in an earlier post, I give myself a little "cushion" in my training plans to allow for those times when life interrupts my training. After all, I am a husband and father before a triathlete. Anyhow, I didn't have any weeks that required remedial work. Thus, week 18 got done three weeks in a row. Week 19 is a half taper and week 20 is a taper (full I guess). I'll talk about that in a bit.

Today was my last longish tempo ride. I have the race hydration system on the TT bike now and wanted to test it out. I was also trying to get a good feel for my RPE. Here's the data for those of you that like that stuff. See previous post about why it is mine and should not affect your training or life in any way.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/36029826

You'll see that the route is just an extension of the route done last week. It adds about 10 miles of rolling hills. This route is affectionately called The Jesus Route - The Director's Cut. Don't ask why and don't complain about the names. That would just waste valuable 1's and 0's.

Again, no fancy aero stuff, started with shoes clipped in, yadda, yadda, tried not to go slow. What is really interesting is the two spikes in my heart rate at the beginning of the ride. I almost plowed into a flock of deers not once but twice within a few minutes of starting. Such are the risks while doing a silent sport.

Now, about tapers. I have to admit that I don't like tapering. I have a theory that says, "A body in motion tends to stay in motion and a body at rest tends to stay at rest." Newton was a smart guy (he actually had to invent the math to prove his ideas-that is smart). Now, I'm not saying that human beings are like apples falling off trees or billiard balls on the proverbial frictionless pool table. But, I am saying that the more I keep moving the faster I seem to be able to move.

I do have ants in my pants more often than not. So, this idea of tapering is a little difficult for me. But, I do also understand that I've been working my body hard enough for the last five months and I can bet that going into the race well rested would be a good thing. So rather than just cutting my training going into the race, I'm going to just lessen the time spent training while keeping the intensity up there. As an example: A two hour ride will become an hour and fifteen minutes and an hour run will become a thirty-five minute run (that is the shortest run worth doing in my book).

My hope with this taper idea is to keep the ants in my pants at a minimum so I don't drive the people in my life completely nuts. And at the same time allow my body enough time to rest, recuperate, and replenish its energy stores for the race. I'll let you know how it works. I really have to admit to not completely buying into tapering. Maybe it is because I don't like them. I could be biased.

By the way, last year I did a really nice 40 mile tempo ride followed by a 40 minute run the Friday before the Spirit of Racine Half Ironman last year. I know my performance in that race minus a taper. We'll have to see what happens this year.