Category: Random

Tonight is a milestone of sorts. It was my last lengthy workout prior to my ironman. I was supposed to start tapering on Saturday last, but swimming isn’t high impact so I think I’m still safe.

From now until November 7, I’ll be doing some workouts, but they’ll be medium-intensity and short. Nothing to break down the muscles or wear out the system. This period of time is what’s called “overcompensation” in a periodization plan. It’s when the body rests and recovers from the stresses you’ve put on it and then goes a bit beyond what it had before you started.

If I’ve done everything right, I’ll be at peak fitness on race morning. That has been the thrust of the last twelve months. Did I do everything right? Frankly, no, but I’m at the point where I’m confident that I’ll complete the race and that has been the goal the whole time. I have time estimates but no time goals.

One week and three days.

I seem to be on a Youtube kick recently.

Watch out for the monkey.

How could I possibly change this setting?

Here I sit, procrastinating on some of the work I must do, and I find this. Much fun. Especially the animation. The robot is pretty cool, too.

Some weeks are better than others. This is true in all aspects of life, especially endurance race training.

The flipside of that statement is that some weeks are worse than others. Some weeks make you wonder what the hell you’re doing attempting something like this (where “this” can be defined by any sort of breakthrough activity). I had a bad week, training wise.

It’s only 34 days until the race as of me typing this. Two weeks of that will be a training taper which means I’m 20 days away from the peakiest of peak volume training in my Ironman schedule. I honestly don’t know if I’m going to be “ready” for this race, not after this last week.

I had three long-distance training activities on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday interspersed with other workouts. Tuesday I ran 13.5 miles and felt great! On Thursday I ran 3.3 miles and felt like crap. It was a painful run, and slow. Friday I swam a race-distance workout ~4,200 yards and it was all I could do not to throw up when I was done. If I’d had to get out of the water immediately and walk up to transition, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t have. Then on Saturday I went out for my long breakthrough ride of the week. 85 miles was the goal and 85 miles I did, but it was obviously too far given how I felt afterward and that I can feel a tweaked muscle/tendon/ligament in my knee right now.¹ Again—hearkening back to the swim—if I’d had to get off my bike and then go out onto the run course, it would have been unpleasant to say the least. Unpleasant is to say that I might have been walking or at least shuffling the marathon.

There is some upside to crappy weeks like this. A lot of the preparation for long-distance events like this is mental. You do the distance and the training so that you know that you can. You know what it feels like to be cold, and in pain, and having bowel distress yet still able to push through the rest of the course. Your body might be yelling at you, but you know through previous experience that you’re not going to die (probably). Some racers I talk with argue that it’s the horrible, gut-wrenching workouts that are the best for mental preparation. After all, it’s easy to feel good about a race if you’re flying along without a care in the world and cherubs are scattering rose buds in your path. It’s the painful ones that get you ready.

Still, as some of my friends received texts last night, I’m questioning the wisdom of this Ironman thing. A lot of body function is weather dependent. I’m hoping for good weather during the race and that it’s not 55 degrees when I start out on the bike course around 8:30 AM. I’ll definitely be including some warm clothes in my transition bag from swim to bike, just in case. If it’s cold, or wet, or cold and wet, I’m going to struggle through my seven hour bike ride.²

I’m sure I’ll do fine in this race. I’ll finish and I’ve got no time goal so I can’t disappoint myself by missing it, but right now I’m just wondering if on November 8 I’m going to think it was all worth the effort.

¹: My knee problem is probably because of the hills between mile 45 and 50 on the Silver Comet trail. This is between Fish and Cedartown in Polk County. At this point, the Silver Comet ceases to be a gently rolling trail and becomes steep and killer. The trail seems almost deliberately designed to piss off cyclists, too: You struggle up a hill and then want to use the downhill to make up some time but unfortunately the serious of sharp S-turns and numerous road crossings means you’re riding your brakes and wasting all that effort (I’m still mad about that). I was riding my triathlon bike and it has a 53/39 crankset with a 12-25 cassette. This was not enough to avoid having to stand up and mash to get up these hills. That’s probably where I tweaked my knee.
²: Don’t forget that bikers generate their own wind chill, which can be damn-stinkin’ chilly.

I’m not used to having this much rain come down around here. The forecast for the next week is more of the same. If this keeps up, we’ll have a foot of rain over two weeks.

Last weekend was the Faster Mustache 24 Hour Urban Bicycle Rally, of which I was a participant. I was introduced to this particular race last year by David Tyberg (a.k.a Professor Dimitri von Stadberg of The Extraordinary Contraptions, playing Thursday at the EARL!) and got roped into it this summer.

The race concept was simple. For 24 hours, from noon Saturday to noon Sunday, teams of riders biked a circuit through downtown Atlanta (and surroundings) making stops at five checkpoints each lap. Teams consisted of four to six people, or you could opt to go solo and be a crazy person. The checkpoints were, in order:

1. Elliot Street Pub (Home Base)
2. The Gear Revival
3. The Nook
4. Outback Bikes
5. No Brakes

Here’s a map of the Suggested Race Route™.

View Larger Map
The suggested race route was just that: a suggestion. You could feel free to use whatever roads/trails/sidewalks/MARTA you care to, as long as you did it with your bike. I deviated somewhat from this route, but not a whole lot. 14th Street was a popular choice, over 10th Street, and there were a lot of other ways to optimize the route.

At each checkpoint you swiped an RFID badge which was the confirmation that you’d been there. The organizers of the race had a sweetly tricked out setup for registering everyone’s laps in real time and posting to the race tracker.

The lap-basis of the race was easy in concept. The Missions were something else. Missions were new for this year and a part of their NINJA competition. A list of missions was published on Friday night before the race and include things like: Chug a Beer at The Gear Revival; Deliver the best breakfast to the race organizers; win the sprint competition; deliver a dead rat; deliver a bag full of dog poo; and numerous others.

We knew we weren’t going to be competitive on laps, so we headed out for points on the missions while teammates out of the course. I say “we” but I really should say, “David, Sharon and Patrick” who did the lion’s share of the mission tagging. Patrick contributed the most permanent points mission with a brand new FM 24 commemorative tattoo. I forgot to get a picture. David went all the way to Stone Mountain and climbed the rock to get a picture.

Through the fantastic effort by the team, we managed to come in fourth in points, only 12 points out of third. Next year we’re going to freaking stomp the points competition. We also completed 24 laps for an approximate distance of 300 miles (I’m figuring our average lap was 12.5 miles. I’m sure other people did it shorter or longer). I personally completed five laps before declaring a mechanical because of my rear wheel and deraileur. Sharon completed six laps making her the Queen of the Team for most laps completed.

There were numerous awards given out, but the ones that are the most bad-ass are:

• Most Laps: Smack That Ass with 40, which puts them at about 500 miles or 20.8 mph average
• Most Laps (solo man): Nathan Smith with 32. That’s 400 miles by himself! Averaging 16.7 mph. My best lap was about that.
• Most Laps (solo woman): Emily Brock with 26. That is 325 miles, solo, averaging 13.5 mph.

Those guys all rock.

Lessons: