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Yeah the physio knows her stuff.. She sorted out an IT band injury last year within a month so there's enough trust there. I've continued with the exercises.. no point going if I'm not going to do what she says!
I'm actually trying an hour on an underwater treadmill this weekend. Fingers crossed that will go well. Thankfully i've stopped cramping in the pool. That used to be a big problem.
Eccentric raises certainly helped my achilles issues last year. YMMV of course...
Good progress Eng - as you say - it's only a case of maintaining for 4h30. Simples!
Along those lines I moved from being a sprint monkey to completing PowermanUK's 10k/60k/10k duathlon last Sunday. I hung back on the first run to keep something in the legs for later. The bike was hilly and brutally windy. Front end on the bike might be low enough for 10mi TTs but it's way too low for a 60km bike leg and within minutes I knew it would be a struggle. Plus eating/drinking at pace was pretty hard, something I'm really not used to.
Still, a great introduction to the distance and certainly an eye opener on what else is needed beyond a bowl of porridge in the morning. I take my hat off to you that juggle nutrition & pace successfully to meet the needs of longer distance racing.
End result is that I had just enough energy in my legs to complete the second run, adding 10mins on to my first run time!
Plan now is to get fitness back to the same level as last November, then take things from there.
Probably not this year. I do not have the time to be mediocre at 3 sports. Plus it would take at least a year to get my swimming up to the low standard it was at Outlaw.
Can someone remind me to HTFU and JFDI please? I'm farked.
One week of hard training left then I'm having a few days easy before Outlaw Half. It's not an A race, but I need the recovery and I think with a bit of rest I'll be in PB shape. If I can go 4:xx I'll be happy
have an easy week
I've been backing off on the commute as I have been seriously screwed / no legs at all
An easy week brought me right back
Bit of a rest and I'm swimming 27:35 for 1830m. I'll take that.... not sure I could bike after it though just yet
thats pretty quick
I do 1550m on a T30 - I am quicker in a wet suite tho
That probably means I won't pass you on the bike at the Outlaw
Cracking swimming TE! 24:40 for 1500m for me this morning which is a pool PB... I'll take that. 5 x 400m afterwards hurt though and were significantly slower than normal!
Heron Lake tomorrow morning? I need to see how well pool speed converts to OW...
...and if my wetsuit still fits...
...and push myself over 12km of swimming this week
Woo hoo! 30 miles running this week and no (or not much anyway) trouble from the knee / itb! 14 miles this mornings a planned race pace of 7:30 to 7:40 pace which felt super easy. Let's see how it feels after the bike leg though.....
swimming is is going ok though I am beginning to wonder about how swim times in the pool translate to ow? Last year I did much better the I expected coming out of the water in 1:08. I was nowhere near as good a swimmer the as I am now as I'd only started to swim in the January with any regularity at all after basically not swimming for 20 years!
Im hoping for a 1:05 swim this year but was a bit disappointed to do a swim session yesterday where I only covered 3200 metres in an hour, those extra 600 meters are going to take at least another 9 or so minutes so slower than last years outlaw time!!!!
so, can anyone put my mind at ease that a combination of wetsuit and drafting is going to find me 4-5 minutes faster in ow compared to the pool? Only other mitigating factor could be the fact that I kept getting cramp in my feet after a long brick on Friday (2:30 wattbike at 'race pace' then 1 hour run),suspect I wasn't properly hydrated so that won't have helped. That said my times yesterday were consistent with other recent sessions.
so, do I need to:
a) accept I will not be going 1:05 this year and get over it
b) rest easy knowing that drafting plus wetsuit will get back the time
c) panic and smash myself silly in the pool between now and race day?
hope you're all training well!
You also have turns to consider as well. There are 128 lengths so if each turn takes 1.8 seconds that is 4 minutes which you won't have to do in OW
*cough* bollocks *cough*
Rocco - you also get pushes though, and if you're any good at turning 1.8s is a massive overestimate. The short course swim records are faster than the long course ones.
Nicco - I've always been similar in a pool compared to open water. But then I know others who are way faster open water than the pool as they don't seem to be able to swim very well without a wetsuit.
In terms of your options a) to c), I would say just stick to your plan and the result will be whatever it will be. Option c) seems a bad idea to me - I've always found that the "payback" with swim training is much smaller than bike/run (as long as you're not a 1:30+ type swimmer, which you're not), so over the last couple of IM blocks I've reduced the swimming and replaced it with cycling (my weakness).
Might as well post this here for the benefit of myself and anyone else who is either interested or wishes to give constructive criticism...
Race Report
Outlaw Half
1st June 2014
Result: 4:41:38
CTL/ATL/TSB/Race TSS: 82.7/57/25.7/348.8
Prep: All according to plan, nothing really worthy of note that I’ve not done before apart from tattoos. If we’re still going to have to wear a number, I’d rather not bother…
Swim 28:46 (37th OA/2nd in M25-29): Cold but to be expected. First OWS of the year so very happy to come close to pool swim times by finding good feet and swimming well within myself. Positioned myself quite far forward and went hard from the gun. Didn't catch too much violence, but left goggle was filling slowly with water. Stopped a couple of times to drain it but this wasn't a major cost. Certainly could have gone harder, but whether this would have had a return on investment is debateable. Got into T1 just as 1st/2nd were leaving; so certainly in the mix and set myself up to have a good day.
T1 3:24 (dropped to 57th OA/4th AG): A poorly executed transition partly owing to cold, but mostly due to lack of prep. Couldn't strip the wetsuit off properly, then faffed a bit with socks and generally was unhappy with my speed!
Bike 2:36:15 (dropped to 73rd OA/ 10th AG): Cold out of the swim, I found it hard to get into a rhythm for a long time. Think I erred to far towards riding on power – I would have been better and more consistent having ridden to feel and checking myself against the PM regularly. It frustrated me immensely that I couldn’t hit my numbers at times without feeling like I was overcooking it. Given the threshold values were set at a recent 10M and on the same bike in the same position, I was concerned that if even 75% of FTP was feeling hard, I was going to have a tough day out there. That said, after about 45 mins on the bike I started settling into a better groove and felt my riding was improving. From here through to the tail end of the second loop I felt like I was ‘going’ much better, though an early look at the data shows this was higher VI than the early part of the ride. The last 30 minutes was alright from a riding perspective and though there was a nagging worry that I was going to have a tough run, I felt generally pretty good.
VI: 1.02
IF: 0.71 (NP 195W vs. FTP 277W)
TSS: 128.1
T2 1:46 (remained 73rd OA/ 10th AG): Not much to say here, was happier than with my T1, but didn’t even use lock laces, so didn’t lace my right shoe correctly (that was a stop on the run course!).
Run 1:31:27 (ran through to 45th OA/ 7th AG): Took a while for the Garmin to lock on and as expected, when it did, I was going off way too quickly. Fairly sure the first km was sub 4:00 and subsequent early kms were covered at only slightly slower. Enforced walking breaks through all the aid stations which was a sensible choice. I really don’t think that you lose much time and the payback of easier hydration is probably key to a strong back half. Reminded myself that the first lap was a formality, and the second lap was where I needed to mentally “clock in”. I felt a tight left ankle and was careful to monitor – this wasn’t getting much worse so I just cracked on. Thought I may cramp towards the 16km mark but I didn’t – pace dropped a little for the last 1/3 but I’d put a lot of time in the bank to get towards a great run split. Last km I knew I had a little bit left so picked up the pace again, good to know there was a bit in the tank.
Pace: 4:20/km
TSS: 156.7
Nutrition: Lesson I learned was that I can’t put salt tabs in my gel bottle – this was fizzing in my stomach and making it very hard to get anything down for the first half of the bike. After switching to High 5 at the second aid station I went well and backed off on the bottle of gels. Two gels at 25 and 45 mins on the run, supplemented with water at aid stations to thirst. I switched to coke for the second lap, which worked well. I didn’t cramp which has been an issue in previous races. Simple energy with a caffeine kick up the arse to boot. Noticed a noisy back end in later kms, so maybe in an IM I wouldn’t start coke any further out from the finish (though I finished and didn’t have any problems at all.
Overall: A hugely pleasing result. Considering I felt I had a bad day on the bike and was projecting similar misery for the run, I was really happy to have a race in which I ran back through the field somewhat.
So I guess I've also given a bit of an answer to your question Nicco - I swim 1:30/100 in the pool and swam 1:31/100 in OW - but I did come out fresh as a daisy (in fact my legs were COLD and I should probably have worked harder
)
I always find it easier to swim fast in a wetsuit. Dont neccessarily go loads faster but just find it takes less out of me due to buoyancy...
I wouldnt panic though. Stick to your plan.
Well done Eng!
Assuming Threshold = FTP (above) what effect do you think setting your threshold from a recent 10mi TT had in terms of your target power and overall performance?
Regardless, whatever you did seemed to work and allowed you to run off the bike very well.
The 10M TT provides a reasonably good analogue for a 20 minute test, and has the added benefit of being a race environment. If I follow a similar warm up protocol to a conventional 20 minute test, then the fact it's longer than 20 minutes is only likely to reduce my reported FTP. As the race gave a higher value than the previous FTP test, I'm happy to use it as a credible basis for racing threshold.
0.71 is the low end of what one would expect to aim at for bike IF over the distance, and that reflects in the run. Have another half at the end of the month which I'll try and push the IF up. Should be interesting to see the tradeoff in run split - though it's definitely a B/C race for me so I have the option of canning the run if needs be.
Great racing TE. Way too many numbers and decimal places for me but sounds like you're in a good position this year - be interesting to see how you get on at the outlaw in 8 weeks (?).
Another 17+ hour week training for me... one last big week before a gradual 3 week taper before IM Nice... getting keen to just go now!
Regarding OW/Wetsuit swimming... I used to swim much faster OW due to the better body position... but after getting better in the pool this year, and only swimming OW twice thus far.. I've found I seem to be swimming faster in the pool now than OW.
Ditto that, I used to be faster with the wetsuit but now closer to parity.
As annoying as it is... probably just a sign that I've improved my body position in the pool and as such is something I should be happy to achieve
GB, how is the body holding up with that load?
That was my line of thinking - Evidence of 20min testing over-estimating FTP cf. 1hr testing, plus Allen et al's estimation of 0.83-0.87 IF for HIM suggested that perhaps 0.71 may have been something higher in reality.
Though as you've said, you've a demonstrably higher FTP from a longer 10mi TT than a 20min test.
Balancing things like bike vs run is one of the things that I like about tri/du - the race being more than just the sum of its parts
What do you think you could do a 50mi TT in?
tbh the first week was simply because I moved my long bike from the weekend before and took a day off work on the Monday to get +6 hours of training in.... but managed the second week as a proper 17.5 hour week OK with no niggles... including a sprint triathlon on the Monday. Sunday was a swim only day and didnt plan to have a rest day for the week, but then got on the turbo yesterday morning and was half asleep / legs were dead, so canned it and went back to bed for 90 minutes. Looking forward to a sports massage this afternoon
If the testing basis is consistent (I have a few more 10's in the pipeline) then I think the numbers hold water, provided target zones are set based on experience and not plucked out of one's arse. Bear in mind ultimately I was aiming for .75 with a view to riding conservatively - I rode .71 and was fresh enough to smoke the run (:06/km outside my PB set in April!!).
As for the TT... Fresh, rested and giving it everything, I don't think I'd trouble the hour mark yet. Maybe by the end of the year. Right now I'm realistically a 1:04 guy at best. Oddly pleased that my bike is becoming a limiter again... I like the methodical approach of the training and putting myself in the hurtbox. And I see Wattbike are offering 0% finance.........