On Monday I rode my bike to work, like I do on occasions that I wake up with enough time. For about half the trip I’m on a rec path, but then ultimately end up on the road (120th Ave) that has a nice wide shoulder. On my way home from work though, it didn’t go so well.
As I’ve posted before, I discovered Total Immersion a month or two ago. I felt it would be good to give the initial links on YouTube I watched before ultimately buying the book. If you’re not an elite swimmer and want to be able to swim long distance, you should watch these and give TI a try. I never considered myself a “bad” swimmer since I grew up on the water, but it definitely made me a much better swimmer.
With 1 month left, there’s really only 2 solid weeks of training left before my HIM. These are the workouts that will be the last to take effect on my body just before the event. So I’ve been trying to get some good mileage in and some great work. Saturday was a 6 mile run, at about a 9 minute mile pace. So slow, but some decent distance. I know it’s not as far as what those training for just a half marathon would be doing, but I still “feel good” at the end of 6 miles, so with some good mileage over the next 3 weeks I’ll be able to make the 13.1 with just some guts and motivation. Sunday was a big ride on the bike. I went out to do about 50 miles, rode from my house to work, up to Louisville Cyclery, out along Hwy 7, down Riverdale back to the house and ended up with 48 miles. That didn’t seem like enough so I then refilled the water and rode to REI downtown and back, ended up with a total of 72miles for the day. Monday I went out to ride with the Louisville Cycling Team. Expecting 24 miles, it ended up being 32 miles at around 20.5mph average. Definitely a hard push for me. The worst thing, one of my arm rests on my aerobars broke (I wasn’t even using them… it was a group ride after all). So now I’m stuck with some broken aerobars a month before my race and no money to replace them. Hopefully I’ll scrape together some money before the race and find similar bars to use and get them positioned how I like. Tuesday consisted of a nice 5.18 mile run in 45minutes, so just over an 8 1/2 minute mile pace. I’m hoping I can maintain a 9 minute mile pace during the entire 13.1 miles, which will give me a 1:58 half marathon, beating my 2003 half marathon time by 6 minutes, after having swam and biked. If I can even just match my 2:04 time I will consider it a major win.
As the time ticks away you start to get more nervous about your big race. Have you trained enough? are you read? can you finish it? So I looked back into my logs on here to see where I was and where I’m at. Two weeks ago I did the “My Way or the Tri Way” triathlon.
It’s a sprint tri, 750m swim, 14mile bike, 3.5mile run. I feel like I did pretty well though. Since others do different orders and such everyone starts in the transition area. It’s about 200m to the water before you start swimming. I didn’t know what I was going to be able to do, so I started at the back. Being at the back I basically walked all the way to the water, which probably took close to 2 minutes. But I finished the swim and got back to the transition area in about 18:45. So considering the distance and how slow I went to the water, I’d say my pace was right on target and what I had expected. The bike portion was the first 7 and last 7 miles of what I’ll have to do for the Harvest Moon HIM race. I was expecting to average about 18mph during the bike portion, but blew that away and my bike computer showed an 20.3mph average giving me a 42:17 split. So I was really excited about that pace. The 3.5mile run had me a little worried since my run training was slacking until then. But I finished that in 31:19, just under a 9 minute/mile pace. Considering I was expecting a 9.5 or 10 min/mile pace I’m definitely happy with that as well. So the Harvest Moon will be a 2.5x longer swim, 4x longer bike, and 3.75x longer run… definitely no joke, but at least I was still feeling really good after the sprint.
The day after the sprint, Jana an I did the New Belgium Urban Assault Ride here in Denver. A great time that was, we ended up doing about 25miles on the bikes, plus random other stuff like riding a roller coaster, swimming a lap in a pool, 3 legged race, etc. Definitely was a good time, but that night I basically crashed. I was pretty much useless after that and just laid around the house.