My First 1,000 Miles

I'm now in the midst of my fourth month of triathlon training. I've been running competitively for years and swam in high school. Swimming quickly has become my strongest sport, but cycling has been a completely new experience for me. I am now past 1,000 miles in biking and it has been quite an interesting journey. I had zero knowledge of the sport and even less experience. If you came to me four months ago and put me in front of a tri bike and a hybrid and told me to pick which was which, I'd have a 50/50 chance of guessing. Coming into this, I had a pretty good cardiovascular base built from the years of running. I was a regular AG placer, and generally top ten in most local races. Of coarse, going to a new sport, and training multi sports, is a whole new animal. I'm also an engineer (chemical) so I FREAKING LOVE DATA. I was really curious how my body would react to a new sport and a new type of training. Below is a graph of the data I've collected since I started. The blue graph is speed, and the red graph is distance. What I find interesting is that my speed is increasing, but it's doing so in "waves" so I see a bump, then is sort of drops a bit before getting the next bump again. There was an initial jump in speed that I attribute to simply figuring everything out. Learning about the bike, getting a proper fit, getting the right form, etc. Then you can see the wave type progression. I used a 6th degree polynomial to fit the speed data. I find using a high order polynomial works pretty good for trending data when you don't have a deep enough data set to use a running average. It tends to be a bit sensitive to changes at the end of the data set, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. If you have a good ride, it looks like you're trending towards being a pro a Kona and if you have a bad ride it looks like you might as well just give up and get a bike with a basket. I had a pretty rough ride yesterday, and for a 45 miler, it was the slowest I've been in a long time (ave 17 mph). This was due to crazy high winds and my ride took me through the islands of Islamorada and Marathon (in the Florida Keys). For those of you familiar with the area, it's more bridges than islands so I was really exposed to a 20+ mph wind the whole time.

I'm pretty happy with the progress so far. I'm averaging around 18-21 mph depending on the distance and weather conditions. I realize mph is a terrible metric, but I'm riding a very, very entry level aluminum road bike. Any power meter would be worth more than my bike, and if I'm making an investment, it certainly won't be in that!

http://img.dotphoto.com/i/m/A5A741B3-CB83-41B8-BF44-C152AE951AC6/27...