Share and Share Alike

128 Days

I like to think that my parents raised me well. I learned not to hit girls unless they're related to you or deserve it and that if I don't have anything nice to say not to say anything at all until the person you're going to talk bad about leaves. They also taught me to share. Now I think that I share pretty good but there are some things that I hate to share with anyone namely my 49ers mug, DVD's (these never come back in one piece if at all) and the Boston Cream Pie that Kati makes for me when I've been good (I rarely get this pie). But most of all I hate to share swim lanes. If you're at an official natatorium where actual swim metes take place then the lanes are usually pretty wide and are therefore more conducive to sharing. But at the local gym pool they tend to use cheap lane dividers and the lanes are only about 4 feet wide. What ends up happening is that when the person swimming in the next lane is bigger than you are your lane starts to shrink just from their waves pushing against the lane dividers. This makes doing your swim set difficult enough but throw another person in the lane and it becomes down right impossible.

Before we get into my story let's discuss pool etiquette.

1. Never just get into a lane that another person is using without asking them first even if you have to wait until they are done with their set.
2. If I didn't ask for your opinion about my stroke then I don't want to hear it.
3. I'm not here to coach you I'm here to swim my own set.
4. I have a hard enough time getting into the cold pool to start my set so please bring your kick turn down a notch so that I can get wet at my own pace.
5. Appropriate swim attire please. Not every one was meant to wear a Speedo.

So last week I had a simple swim workout that I had to do during lunch at the local 24 Hour Fitness. This is not the usual location that I use and didn't know that they only had three lanes to begin with and there were two of us going. Luckily while we were changing there were two lanes that opened up so we snagged them. Just as I was about to get in I saw a poacher that was about to get into my friends lane. I told him that I didn't think that was a great idea because it was the outside lane and had the ladder that one of them was sure to run into at some point. He asked if he could share my lane and reluctantly I agreed. Now that it's been established that we are going to be sharing a lane the question arises as to how we are going to swim, are we going to go with the whole I stay on the right side and he stays on the left or are we going to do it so that we always stay to our right so that one side ends up being the down lane and the other side is the back lane. The second system only works if both of you swim at approximately the same pace or after a while you end up on the other person's heels and you have to hope that the person is somewhat considerate to let you pass at the wall. Unfortunately we went with this system and about every 300 yards I was right up on him luckily he did let me pass.

The other problem with sharing a narrow lane is that you risk contact when passing. This could be a simple brush of shoulders, hitting hands when you both go to stroke at the same time or the worst is a meeting of the minds when one of you isn't paying attention and you run smack dap into each other. We had kind of a combination of both hitting hands and heads. I was doing one of my technique drills where you swim with your hands in fists to learn that your stroke consists of more than just your hands and that you can use your entire arm. So I'm making my way down the lane and am preparing for our pass by getting as far over as I can. when I go to stroke the timing was perfect and I punched to poor schmuck right in the head. We both popped up and did the obligatory "Are you OK?", "Fine, and you?"," Fine" and then we were on our way again. Now this made the rest of the workout awkward because now I'm concentrating on not colliding with the guy again instead of what I should be focusing on.

I guess the moral of this story is don't share a lane with me or you'll get out in worse shape than when you got in. Apparently I'm an abusive swimmer.

Easy Like Sunday Morning

This week has been the easiest week I have ever had during an actual training regimen. This is not because I am so insanely fit that the workout weeks have to be extremely difficult before I'll even break a sweat, believe me that is far from it. Nor is it that my coach is such a nice guy and throws multiple days off in a row at us just so that we continue sending him a check each month. No, the week has been so easy because I ended up getting sick on Monday afternoon. That will definitely put a kink in your plans.

Come Monday after lunch I was starting to get a scratchy throat and by that night I had quite a bit of congestion in my head and was starting to get ear aches in both ears. I went to bed that night thinking that I was not going to be waking up the next day. Luckily I felt quite a bit better in the morning. I still had some pretty serious congestion in my head, a stiff neck and a sore throat and even though I was feeling better thought it best to head to the doctor anyway. I was tested for Strep as well as Mono. Both came back negative so the doctor threw a Z-Pack at me and said if I wasn't better in a couple of days to come back. It's now Friday and my main complain is a persistent cough and pressure behind my ears.

I ended up taking Monday through Wednesday off completely and did an easy trainer ride last night and a short but brisk swim this morning. I'm hoping to be able to get out tomorrow for a 40 mile ride but will be waiting until it warms up a bit before I venture out.

I'm hoping that this oncoming illness has been the reason that my rides lately have been harder than they should've been but I'm not getting my hopes up that come next Saturday I'll be flying down the road like never before.

Pay Attention!

141 Days and counting.

Last night was my decoupling run. How this works is you run a loop of X distance twice trying to keep the same pace for each loop and see how much higher your average heart rate is on the second lap in comparison to your first lap. Naturally your second lap should have a higher average heart rate just due to fatigue but the lower the difference between the two is an indication of your overall fitness. The loop course is key. If you do an out and back then you run the risk of having the out leg being more or less hilly than the back leg thus your results are skewed. This is all besides the point as it is not the actual purpose of the workout that I wanted to talk about but the events during the workout.

Since it gets dark at about 5:00 these days and the sun doesn't come up until about 7:00 most of the runs that Kati and I do are in the dark. To make things a little safer as we run the dark trails just south of our house we purchased some ultra light weight head lamps so we can see variations in the sidewalks to avoid tripping as well as become more visible to others on the trails and to cars. Let me first note that I have never had any problems with cars in the past not seeing or yielding to me on a run. That being said let the story begin.

Last night was the first time that I have had a need to wear my headlamp since we just got them last week. This lamp has many different settings and degrees of brightness to choose from. I initially put it on the dimmest setting but switched to the brightest shortly into the run. Less than a mile in I see a car coming out of a side road. At first he slowed down but continued to inch forward into the road and right in front of me. Eventually I had to stop, throw my hands up and give a sturdy "What the hell?". He threw his hands up as well, surprisingly without the Texas Salute, and I went on by no worse for the wear. One accident avoided. On lap 2 at just a little over a mile in I was at a major intersection waiting for my green light. Once I got it I started south across the street and noticed a car coming north wanting to turn into the lane that I was crossing. Apparently he didn't see me either and had to make a wide last minute turn so as to not run me over.

C'mon people, pay attention!

I might have to stop wearing the headlamp because I think that I'm safer without it. It's just like those parents that put their kids in full pads to go place tennis, their kid is the only one that ends up with a broken arm.

What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

Saturday was my first "long" ride for the training. I put "long" in quotations because 50 miles has become the norm for Kati and I. We normally won't even venture out on a Saturday morning anymore for anything less than 50 miles. So heading up to Saturday we thought we had it made. We'd wake up, bang out 50 miles and then we would have the remainder of the day to get done what we needed to. The day didn't exactly go as planned.

As you may have heard, this week brought the first signs of winter to Texas. We had snow on Wednesday and the rest of the week was just bitterly cold. The Saturday morning temperature was being predicted at 21 degrees but showed that it would warm up to the mid 30's later in the day. So we waited. And while we waited the wind blew in. By the time we left the house at around 11:00 it was about 36 degrees with a 20mph wind coming out of the south.

While training for the Half Ironman we rode in some pretty crazy windy days. One day Kati even got blown over while waiting at a stop light. Pretty brutal winds. We just learned to deal with it. Kati, being the scientific minded person that she is, made peace with the wind by explaining to herself all the good things that the wind does and how important it is to the ecosystem. I just learned to laugh at it. What else can you do while your pedaling to keep a 15mph pace down a hill that you would normally be coast down at 25mph? It's either laugh or cry and I think I made the right choice. Little did I know that this mental training is something that could be lost as fast as muscular training. I just didn't have the mental strength to deal with the wind anymore.

If wind was the only problem we had to face that day then the ride wouldn't have been all that bad but there we extenuating circumstances.

Kati and I bought ourselves some early Christmas presents on Friday night. We ventured to REI and got each of us a Garmin Forerunner 305 and the cadence sensor to go along with it. A brief explanation on these is that they will give you all the information that you could ever want to know about your workout. Distance, elevation, gradient of the hill you're climbing, heart rate, speed and averages for all the above, just to name a few of it's features. It's truly insane just how much information it records. I told my coach that it gives more information than I want him to have. All that being said you can only imagine how complicated the thing could be to get to function properly and accurately. We spent most of Friday night and Saturday morning trying to get all the settings right and trying to decide what 12 pieces of information we wanted to see on the three screens that we could scroll through during the ride and run that morning.

At the beginning of the ride Kati caught up with me at a stoplight and said that here cadence and heart rate weren't working and that she hadn't set the Auto Pause (that makes it so that the watch automatically stops the timer when you stop instead of continuing the timer while your at a stoplight, thus, messing up all your averages). So we stopped and got that figured out. Or so we thought. It wasn't until I saw her at the end of the workout that I found out that neither her HR or cadence worked the entire time. Frustrating!

I read somewhere once that going into a 10mph headwind can take you from 20mph to 16mph with the same effort on your part. But not even this can explain my horrible ride that day. I have never averaged this bad of a speed. Ever! Some of it I will chalk up to the wind and some blame gets to go into the fatigue category from the week's workouts but I am praying that most of the fingers get pointed at the watch and to some setting that I don't have right. This average was so bad that I won't even put it down in text in hopes that by not doing so will make it so that it didn't really happen. If I had never done any other race or road rally before then I would have a much easier time thinking that the cyclometers that I've had in the past were really that off on their speed and distance. Considering that I have calibrated both our computers on a treadmill, they just can't be that off. But Kati and I have done too many races with set distances for this to be the case.

What I need now is a good ride day where there is very little wind. I need this for two reasons. One reason is because I really need a mental boost right now and the other is to see if this watch is really functioning correctly. On my way home from my Sunday morning ride I turned the watch on to see if it was reading the same speed that the speedometer in the car was reporting and they were nearly identical. So my thought is that either the average has some setting that is not right or that maybe the Auto Pause got turned off some how during my ride on Saturday but my average on Sunday was pretty crap also.

If nothing is malfunctioning other than me then you might as well put a toe tag on my foot because this race is going to kill me.

Bike LTHR

This week has been pretty light as far as workouts go with a grand total of 8:45 of training. I believe that this is mostly due to the fact that we have a few of the fitness tests to perform and you don't want to go into one of those already worn out from the previous days workout.

Monday was the swim fitness test that I already told you about and last night was the Bike Lactate Threshold Test. The way this test works is I had a 15 minute warm up followed by an 8 minute all out sprint, 10 minutes of recovery and then do it again. The purpose of this test is to see how high you can get you heart rate (HR) average during the 8 minutes. From there my coach will use my average HR and percentages of it to set up my HR zones for the duration of the training. The reason that we do this is so that you don't set out on a long ride with a HR higher than you can sustain for the duration of the ride just to burn out before the ride is complete. An Ironman is a long day so you have to learn to pace yourself and using your HR to judge your exertion works perfectly. If you want to get into the scientific side of Lactate Threshold you can read more here. But it gets pretty complicated and I don't understand it all.

For example here are my HR zones that we used during training for the Half Ironman
Z1 0-150bpm (Recovery spins)
Z2 151-163bpm (Normal rides)
Z3 164-170bpm (Tempo rides and long intervals)
Z4 171-182bpm (Short and fast intervals)
Z5a 183-192bpm (Sprints)

The coach and I headed out to the Texas Motor Speedway which has a 5 mile loop that goes around the perimeter of the grounds. For the most part it's flat, well lit and has light traffic on a weekday evening making it perfect for night time riding. Remember also that it snowed here yesterday morning so as dry as the streets were it was still really cold. By the time we were done for the night I believe that it was 40 degrees.

This test is most especially uncomfortable. Imagine getting your HR as high as possible and keeping it there for 8 minutes. That might not seem like a long time on the front end but try getting on the treadmill at your local gym, throw the speed up as high as you can manage and run a mile. Pretty tough huh? By the end of the first 8 minutes I was extremely light headed and was weaving all over my lane, for a reason that is still unknown to me I was salivating as if I was looking at a perfectly cooked steak after being on a week long fast and my chest felt as though my heart was going to burst out à la Aliens. Luckily I had a 10 minute rest in between these intervals and I needed all 10 minutes. Round 2 was just as bad and had the same final results at the end. But at least I could be happy that I didn't have to go for a third round. The other thing that is nice is that this time around as opposed to Half Ironman training was that the test only lasted a grand total of 16 minutes. When I did this test for Half Ironman training it was a half hour straight of bust your butt follow directly by passing out at your car.

So the test results are as follows. During the first 8 minute interval my max. HR was 184 with an avg. HR of 181. I got it down to 137 during the recovery and back up to 180 max. and 176 avg. on the second interval.

Only the run fitness test remains and then we can get on with our regular training weeks.