With 4500 people in the race, it's tough to find a place to spectate.

 

The last two days have been rough training days, and Thurday tired me out for yesterday. Thursday was an 8 mile temp run, finishing at race pace. Yesterday was an early morning recovery run of 5 miles, a 2000 yard swim (and I didn't have any speed) and a 20 mile ride. Thankfully, none of Friday's training sessions involved speed work because I had none left after Thursday.

Today is just an easy 10 mile run.

 

wow ... now THAT brings some perspective to a lot of us here

 

The first 30 minutes were relaxed and at a slow recovery pace. The last 6.5 miles were at just below half-marathon pace, and the total run time was 1:31:45. Since my best half-marathon race in recent years a 1:38, I really backed off the tempo. The calories are really gettng burned. I used up 1150 calories on this run.

Today, I've got a 50 to 60 mile endurance pace bike ride with a 3.5 mile cool down run off the bike. I expect that this will be a drop of between 3500 and 4000 calories, depending on my pace.

 

The race is tomorrow and the final preparations are complete. I rode a portion of the bike course today and tried out a new wetsuit while swimming about 750 meters this afternoon. The weather conditions are breezy, and I expect that staying on course during he swim will be something of a challenge tomorrow morning.

 

so how did you do?

 

Yes! Updates please!

 

A bit better than middle of the pack which is about what I expected. The swim was choppy, and the bay had 5 foot swells. It was pretty interesting because this was the first year that I've seen divers in SCUBA gear prepositioned on the swim course in case anyone had any problems. Two people have died in the swim at St. Anthony's over the last 5 years, so the race organizers took no chances.

After my age group went out on the swim, the organizers even shortened the length of the swim by five hundred meters because the weather conditions had deteriorated. I had no problem on the swim, and I love my new full length ORCA wetsuit. The technology of suits has progressed. Now they are all body contoured to help glide the water of you as you swim. My swim leg was 35 minutes. T1 was just under 2 minutes.

I'm not a particularly fast swimmer, and for me the race starts on the bike. The wind picked up even more by the time I got out of T1 and on to the bike. I ride with Zipp 606 aero wheels, and when the gusts blew I got tossed around on the bike. But I planned the bike portion of the race well. I divided the course into two sections in my mind, a sub-anaerobic outward bound section, and an all out inward. The course was windy, but it was all at my back on the inward bound section. Checking my computer, I had a maximum speed of 27 miles per hour. My bike leg was 1:12. I had hoped to break 1:10, but realistically given how little I raced last year and the conditions, that was probably out of the cards. T2 was 1:20.

The run was through Shell Island, a up-scale residential neighborhood not far from the Vinoy. There is so much community support at St. Anthony's, and the spectators sit out on their front yards and spray water hoses on the athletes as they run by. Plus it's largely shaded, so even though it was getting hot by the time that I ran it wasn't oppressive.

A good rule of thumb in a tri is to do the run leg within ten to fifteen percent of your straight 10K running time. As I've gotten older, I've lost some speed in 5K and 10K races. In fact, I haven't even timed myself in a 10K in over a year. I did very little speed work for this race, but my long runs were around 12 miles, way more than I needed to complete a 10K. I would guess that now I might be able to run a 44 or 45 minute 10K. So using my rule of thumb, I was hoping for a 55 minute run leg which was pretty conservative. I split the run into 3 X 2 mile runs, and planned for negative splits. I must have lucked out because I did a 51:45 run leg.

So my time was right in the 2:40s which is much better than I had expected going into the race. I thought that it would be closer to 3 hours.

My next race is the Baldwin Park triathlon on May 23rd. The then I cruise, doing mostly sprints and Olympic distance races. I would like to do a Half-Iron the end of the season, but we'll see if my schedule works out.

The Spanish Navigator doesn't want to hear it, but I am using this year's training to ramp up for another marathon early next year. And then, after I got another marathon or two under my belt, why not do an Ironman? After all, in the words of Jeremy Clarkson, "How hard can it be?"

 

Congrats Jay ... sounds like you did better than expected.



How was the recovery afterwards? Did you feel as though you planned your diet and hydration properly?

 

Hydration wasn't a problem at all...as you can see by my pre-race liquid carbo loading...



The banana keeps you from cramping on the swim...