Trains, Travels

I’m typing this on a very British day in Port Macquarie. A nasty drizzle has descended and the skies are grey. My intentions of a 2 hour bike with a run off it have kind of gone out the window as it doesn’t look like a good day to be out there. Especially when in your packing you’ve neglected any kind of rain jacket. This pretty much sums up my week!

Training has not gone quite to schedule this week there have been a few lows both on a personal level and a physical level. The personal stuff won’t make it here I’m sorry to say, but it’s not that interesting anyway. However if I learnt anything from it it’s how even as a full-time athlete life can impact training. To be honest if I stick to my principles of training as my ‘job’ I shouldn’t have let things affect me as they did. I could go further than that and say I shouldn’t let a bit of damp stop me getting out there on my bike! Putting those issues aside, I’ll just add they are pretty rapidly coming to a very positive resolution.

Physically the week really has been up and down. Monday I struggled through workouts clearly fatigued from my effort at Noosa (still no results up for me!) Tuesday I had a fantastic day with a really solid long ride, run and swim combination. Wednesday it all went to pot, fatigue was heavy in my system and the other issues had cropped up. Then Thursday I was back on form again and had a respectable if unremarkable training day. Finally yesterday was largely lost to travel, it takes a long time to get here from the Gold Coast and driving all day takes its toll. In my case the toll is mainly knots in my glutes!

So it’s the day before the race, my training this week hasn’t gone to plan and today looks to be following that pattern. It’s too late to worry about the past though, just got to take what I can from it. There are positives amongst all this, from the very trivial fact I got a good long sleep last night through to feeling like fatigue is finally shifting. I can go into Sunday’s race a little fresher than I perhaps intended and finish the week really strongly. Sure I missed one or two key workouts this week, primarily my long run, but a solid Half-Ironman is worth more to me right now. If we went purely on hours then I am still within that target area for a basic weeks training anyway. I’m not losing condition that’s for sure.

The drizzle gets worse! My plan for today, roughly anyway, is to wander over to the race expo and sort out a few bits and pieces I need for race day. After that it’s back here and rain or shine an hours run, I figure a run in the rain is easier than a bike. After that it’s time to register and drop the bike into transition. I’ve opted to stick with the training set-up for this race too. With the weather not looking fantastic for race day I don’t really want to have all my best gear out there for a B race. Also it’s another opportunity to get some power data over a slightly more relevant distance. Sure the lesser aerodynamics might cut into my bike time a little, but I can cope with that.

I’ll try and find the local pool on my run as I want to get a swim in later today. Swimming has suffered a little this week in terms of volume, I’ll at least try and keep regularity up. Then with all that done it’s just a case of chilling out and relaxing till race morning. With a short walk to transition I shouldn’t need such an early start to get things ready this time.

That’s the end of this rambling post. The week has gone a bit off track, things have been missed out on and problems have been encountered. But I’ve dealt with them, moved things along and hopefully will be better for all this shortly. I’m less fatigued than I expected to be and can give a bit more to my race tomorrow. I’ve missed a workout or two, but put in some solid efforts in the week and still done some decent hours. I’ll go out there tomorrow and have a great race and that’ll be ample compensation for a few missed sessions. Then next week is my big week and I promise to be back on track because I know when it’s over it’s time to recover and taper!

• Tweet
• 1 Comment

I have some sponsorship! Yep, I’m now part of Jaggad’s Technical Development Team. I’ll be racing and training in their kit and providing feedback to help with future developments. I’ll have a profile page up on their site and be providing race reports to them too. I’m pretty excited to have my first ever sponsor, it’s another step in the journey!

I tried out Jaggad last year when I first came out to Australia. They’re an Aussie company and we don’t see them much back in the UK. Their kit quality is excellent, the shorts and top I bought last year have got a lot of use. They’re also a little bit different, quite distinctive in design and with a neat external leg gripper on the shorts. It is probably the most comfortable leg gripper I’ve tried, no marks or digging into my leg. Anyway, check out their site, they do ship worldwide if you want to try some. I think TriCentral in the UK stock Jaggad too.

I really need to get to the pool now, though the way it’s raining I’ll get wetter on the way there than in the pool itself. Going to be a fairly easy 3K session. Pretty tired after a 7 hour bike and 40 minute run off the back of it. The bike route was awesome, I extended where I went last week and had a more interesting start thanks to a guy called Brett I met on my way out. He showed me a few more hills on the way to Murwillumbah. I’ve also picked up a few more places to stop off on when I do the pictorial/coffee shop tour.

• Tweet
• Comment

It was only a training race, I know, but I’d like some results! It started off with simple frustration that the timing company didn’t have the servers to handle the results. Then today, growing impatient checking online (OK I was busted breaking the no morning internet rule!) I went out and bought the paper. Noosa is a big enough event to make the Queensland news, the Courier Times actually prints out a full list of results.

The only reason I bought the paper was because when I scanned the 2:15 region I wasn’t there. I needed more time to check and felt guilty reading the paper so thoroughly in the newsagents. To be honest it wasn’t a well thought out plan, my clock time says 2:15 and it’s not wrong. That’d put me respectably in the top 200 overall so top 10% which isn’t too shabby all things given. But I have no detailed splits, nor proof to back this one up! Unless I’ve miraculously been added onto the website I can only go from memory. So the following race report will rely on rough figures and you’re just going to have to trust me on this one.

I started the day early, really early, 3:50 in the morning. I’d done a reasonable job of getting to bed early the night before, though not a great one. At least it’s the night before the night before that’s the important sleep they say. Everything was planned and laid out for the morning so I could get through brekkie and getting ready quickly. All went pretty smoothly, except for hitting the alarm button on the car keys rather than the door unlock. I can only apologise to any motel residents who might have been woken by the horn honks.

The idea behind such an early start comes from getting to the Gold Coast Half with my mate. Being a race TO he had to be there before competitors, being my means of getting to that race meant so did I. As it was it made transition and prep a very relaxed experience that morning. I figured I’d repeat that here, especially when you take into account a few thousand competitors. My expectations were long traffic queues to park up and get to transition. Turns out most people prefer to sleep in a bit longer, I arrived at an empty car park, got the first bus to the transition area and joined a dozen people waiting for it to open.

After about 5, maybe 10 minutes at most I’d done all I could to set up my transition area. This left me with about an hour and a half till my race started. That’s a lot of time to mill about. I discovered that I’d wasted my time bringing the wetsuit, the water temperature was 24.9C so no wetsuits allowed. I did all the usual stuff, eventually got changed down to just my race kit and dumped my bag off for after the event. The beach area where the waves started from was nicely laid out with plenty of fluids available whilst you watched earlier waves head off. Whilst a lot of waiting around was involved at least my race morning wasn’t rushed or stressful so in that regards a big success.

After a few waves had gone off we get to mine and to the actual race report. I wasn’t too phased by a non-wetsuit swim, I’ll admit I’m used to European races where there’s little question about needing one. That said I’ve always felt far more comfortable swimming without so the opportunity to race without one was quite exciting. I placed myself up front but too far to the right so as we funnelled down towards the first buoy the typical swim melee took place. Two or three more buoys down the line and finally people were spaced out enough to get into a good rhythm. I never feel I come off to well in the initial bun fight of the swim, but once the waters open up a bit I seem to move quite well through the field. I got out of the water in about 25 minutes, not spectacular, but not bad for me without a wetsuit.

The plan for the bike was to ride as hard as I could and gather up some good power data. The course is roughly 20k out and 20k back with a tough little climb in the middle of the first half. I knew what to expect from the climb, what I didn’t know about was the 8k of undulations that followed it. I was an early enough wave that I was lucky to avoid the famous Noosa drafting and never really had any run ins with any bunches. Come the turn around and it was straight into a head wind. The return journey is where you have the most to gain if you’re lucky enough to have the wind behind you. But not today, it was firmly in my face the whole way back so the pace dropped whilst the effort remained roughly the same. In the last 5K I did pick up a couple of guys who felt that it was easier to ride in my slipstream. Bike time was roughly 1:05 for 40K which given the 20km into a headwind, the climb and the only aero equipment on my bike being aerobars I’m pretty pleased with.

After a pretty messy T2, I really need to work on these, it was out on the run in my new Zoot shoes. It’s the first time I’ve run more than 5K in them and the first race. Unfortunately there were issues, the tight fitting size seems to lead to the front of my big toes rubbing after a while. I am going to experiment with the lace tightness to see if I can get my shoes snugly held at my heel as part of the problem is that being a forefoot runner I’m pushing my toes towards the front of the shoe. Currently though it doesn’t look promising for the longer distance events. Alternately a larger size may be the solution, but right now that’s not in the budget.

Along with the shoe issues my legs felt pretty dead for the first 5k of the run. I didn’t seem to be able to pick up the pace and had one or two twinges hinting at calf cramps (no compression socks this time). I suspect this was shoe related as I tensed my right foot before striking if I wasn’t careful. At 5K I decided enough was enough and just picked up the pace and held it through to the end. I remember reading some advice from Daniels that if you’re not feeling comfortable try going faster first as sometimes it works. This time it definitely did and I pushed the whole way home, really going for it in the last 1Km. That said I think the run time was disappointingly close to 40 minutes, quite slow for me. Perhaps the harder than normal bike slowed me, but I suspect it’s simply cumulative run fatigue.

Race done with a watch saying 2:15:18 whatever happens about official results! I had no idea then if that was any good, or any way to find out. Watermelon was on offer in the recovery area, otherwise you were limited to greasy food outside. Watermelon is pretty refreshing after a race, but something more substantial to go with it would have been nice. Generally triathletes are pretty friendly and so are Aussies so it wasn’t long before I’d chatted with a few others. I ended up spending the next 2 hours chatting with another guy from the Gold Coast whilst we waited for transition to open up. Long discussions about training approaches, thoughts on swimming, and possibly a lead or two to some good swimming coaches to contact round here.

Looking at the results in the paper my watch time puts me somewhere around the 182nd place, not sure of where in my age, but I think in both cases comfortably in the top 10%. Can’t claim it’s my best result, though there were a fair few elites and pros ahead of me. Still I’m not going to make excuses I would have liked to have been racing better, but hardly put myself in a position to race fast by training through it. You can’t have everything and my focus is maintaining a consistent training regime. Part of the expense of that is I’m not going to get to race every race fresh and ready to really go for it. However it’s amazing to see how being in a race so drastically impacts your performance over training. It would be hard to just go out and train like that on my own at the end of a big week’s training. Clearly it’s physically possible though.

• Tweet
• 2 Comments