Philly Tri: The ugly

5 Lessons Learned

1. Stay away from weird-strokers—breast strokers, side strokers, and other freak strokers with their frog kicking legs and flailing arms. Once you get caught behind one of these listing ships, you need a burst of speed and you need to give them wide berth to get around. I have one word for you weird-strokers: crawl baby crawl!

2. Swim straight, stupid: I zig zaged my way down the course. What’s that boat doing in my way—oops!

3. Tri does not recognize Indy cred: Riding a fixed gear bike in a Tri means the torturous drip of riders on bigger gears passing you by with occasional moments of glory as you muscle your way up steep hills because you have to keep your cranks moving. Everyone is too blinded by the latest Cervelo airfoil passing on the left to be impressed by your minimalist ride.

4. Not enough endurance training? You son are jogging the run—an ignominious end to a decent race. The wall came for me 2 miles early, run pace: 7:59. By comparison, my last mile in the MARATHON was a 7:20!

5. This bears repeating: If you spend the swim on your aerobic threshold, and repeatedly spike up to it on the bike, the run will suck.

Goals for the future

1. Have a strong all-around sprint tri. That means regularly training all three sports, including multi-sport days. I will emphasize open-water swimming skills, cardio endurance, some speed work and light weights.

2. Start training with a Tri-club.

3. Reward myself with a nice road bike.

Philly Tri: The bad

I got beat, roundly beat, by my training partner. It wasn’t luck or skill, he’s been serious about training and I haven’t. I paid for the two weeks where I didn’t train much for work and vacation—I simply didn’t give the Tri the same devotion I did the Marathon. The times tell the tale, although it could have been worse:

Total Time: 1:48:02

Place: 68/133 in my age bracket--just missed 50%

Swim	00:24:02
Trans1	00:03:21
Bike	00:54:43
Trans2	00:01:25
Run	00:24:29
Swimrank	927
Bikerank	767
Mph	16.4
Runrank	244
Pace	00:07:54

Training Partner Time: 1:41:59

A good training partner lets you know how much he could have beat you, by telling you after the race that he smoked a cigar and drank the night before the race—yeah that burns. My claim to fame, and only shred of dignity was a 15 second win on the bike, where my ride was clearly an advantage in the gimp race between my fixie and his alley salvage mountain bike. This close outcome insures an arms race going into our next Tri, and by my logic, the bike I buy has to (again) be faster than the bike he buys to have a chance to win at least one leg of the race.  

Philly Tri: The good

Mission accomplished: completed the 900m open water swim with enough left over to finish the bike and run. Five Eight months ago I couldn’t swim more than 50m without stopping, clinging, and gasping for breath. To the JCC enforcers who helped my swim cardio and rhythm, to the support staff who took the class with me and still swims faster with no training at all, and to my training partner who meets me out swimming 3 times a week, and got dared into the whole Tri thing in the first place, thank you! An open-water 900m in 24 minutes is an accomplishment, for me anyhow.

Good training plan: without my focus on the swim, I would not have made it out of the water let alone having anything left for the rest.

Good race plan: hydration and eating was great, my heart rate settled down on the bike, and transitions were quick and smooth. Except for the tired walk out of the water, I even jogged the transitions.

900m swim all at once! (April 18 retrospective)

Well today was finally the day, I have been feeling stronger in the swim and decided it was just plain time to go 900m without stopping. I started out just doing a warm-up, but felt good enough that I kept going and was even able to finish strong.  What a huge confidence booster!  It took about 24 minutes so my pace was somewhere in the slow 2min/100m pace.  After a break, I was able to do a celebratory 100m pursuit with my swim partner.  As the slower one, I start out and then he starts later and tries to track me down while I try to keep it interesting.  Something about the flight or fight aspect of it appeals and I keep thinking that someday I will give him a run for his money.

Having the 900m off my back means that I can turn my focusing on form and speed knowing.  A couple more long swims are in order, including one even longer one to make up for any water current and other complications in open water.

(April 25 retrospective)
Both the swim partner and I weren't feeling great today, so we did 5x100m sprints (with long breaks) instead of a longer workout.  My times were in the 2:40-2:07 range, whereas the beast in the lane with me managed one 1:45--wow.  Speed work is exciting after the grind of longer workouts.  At the same time, I am not sure how much I can translate that into faster speed over a longer distance.  Arm strength and technique seem to be limiting factors more than breathing at this point.  It is nice to see the cardio come along, or is it that the musculature and technique are better so I am not needing to breath as hard?  With swimming, it is hard to tell.

Well, the blog is all caught up now, apologies to my loyal followers for falling off the blogosphere into no-internet-at-home space.  Now that the semester is over, and the Philly Tri is coming up, I will try to do better.

Amazing 10K with Cousins (April 3rd Retrospective)

Consider this a (very delayed) echo of my cousin the Concerned Scientist about how amazing it was to meet up with them and run Hain's Point under a canopy of cherry blossoms at their peak.  $7 to run a race is so great compared to the $35, particularly when you can just ride your bike to and from the race, can we say multi-sport workout?

Never has a 10K been so celestial, running under an arch of dark limbs and fluffy white and pink puffs stretching from either side and nearly touching in the middle.  I was lucky to have Concerned Scientist there so I ran the first half a little slower with him, so I didn't overdo things.  At around 5K I picked it up a little and ended up around 48 minutes.  Given that I haven't been running much at all, I felt pretty good about that, and figure I can expect that to be my split at the end of the Olympic length triathlon at the end of the summer.

Florida = Tri-training Heaven

I am taking Spring Break every year!   Englewood, Florida is a beautiful gulf coast key with calm ocean beach on one side and docks and mangroves on the other, what better place to spend a few days.  Shall I go for a run among the live oaks with Spanish moss and palm tree estates?  No, I’d rather hike with armadillos.  But my dreams of an ocean swim were crushed by the freezing cold water temps.  But the support staff knows how to motivate; she waited until I was warmed up and dizzy from short-lapping it around the kiddy pool.  I made the mistake of mentioning the ocean again, “Well that’s why we came here isn’t it?” more laps, more grumbling, “Why don’t you just give it a try, you’re going to regret it if you don’t.”  I didn’t stand a chance.

Swimming in a cold ocean is really different.  In a lap pool all the focus is outward, looking through the water, avoiding the guy coming the other way, where’s the wall?  In the ocean, your senses close myopically, keeping your body moving, buoyancy means you don’t have to turn much to get a breath.  Then the focus turns to the thermodynamic battleground your body has become.  The cold seeps into the outer layer of flesh, held at bay by the furnace created by windmilling arms.  If you don’t kick much, the water seems warmed by the time it gets back there. 

I felt triumphant for my little 400m swim.  Then people on the beach kept commenting in hushed voices, “that’s the guy,” some even stood up from their chairs as I swam by.  I left the beach feeling like a real champ, like the harbinger of Spring—head on in, the water’s fine!

This motivational coup emboldened the support staff to ask for a promotion to trainer, but enthusiasm declined when responsibilities were outlined.  So, I am still looking for a roller-blading water carrier in a velour jumpsuit, any takers?  My one regret, that the current didn’t take me out to sea, so the support staff would have had to strip down to her bikini and save me...maybe next Spring Break!

Work week note: tri-training adds another layer of satisfaction to riding the fixie to work— a linen pant leg tucked into an argyle sox tucked into a brown suede shoe—if only all sport could be so dapper.

Long Time No Blog

Long gaps in blogging mean inconsistent training, but after being back at it a month I have the form I had prior to the snowpocalypse or powdermagedon thing. The (no longer) bearded training partner is a great motivation to get to the pool 2-3 times a week, and I am back to doing respectable workouts (3X300 or 2X400 yards or meters plus some shorter swims). Just this week, I seem to have found a rhythm that I can keep the whole way. When you are coordinating so many moving parts, it is a big help to have consistency and repeatability. I have a kicking rhythm that seems to work, two kicks on the non breathing side, one long/hard one on the breathing side. So it is lopsided, but seems to give me a little lift to get longer breaths prior to pushing the chest back into the water to lift the legs back up again. When I went for a 45min run last weekend, my body reminded me, for the rest of the week, never to take 3 months off running. I am tired enough from swimming, how are you supposed to train in multiple sports, seriously?

Next week it is off to FL where the support staff seems to think I should practice open water swims in the Gulf of Mexico. It sounds cold and scary but also a good idea. Mostly it is all about separating ourselves from our laptops and work—badly needed for state of mind and body.

I’ll give a serious try at a 900m swim when I get back. I almost felt like it today, but I didn’t want to practice bad form/frantic swimming toward the end. I have been mentally calming myself at the end of longer sets to stay in form and keep breathing steady. It is really good for your confidence to finish the last long set and not be out of breath.

This story of a tri-athlete resonated for me because the author also imagines the discipline of working out and success in racing will sort things out in other aspects of his life. I too thought the marathon was the key to resolving basic questions about myself, but as this author’s life shows, that is asking a bit too much of a race and perhaps not enough of yourself.