MightyMojoMentorGroup -- (Full House!) (Page 173)

I was kind of surprised myself, when I realized how long it has been since I have had pop.    Just don't have a taste for it anymore.   Originally got off of it though, because of the sugar (46gm in one small bottle!!!) and also it is really bad for leaching the minerals out of our bones.   Could be one of the contributors to the epidemic of osteoporosis in both men and women, young and old.     I have a few of my own character flaws!  

It was a gamble but I had a feeling my raw cake would work well.   I am going to play around with that and another raw truffle on my next few training runs when I am running all out.   I was going pretty slow on Saturday.   

Just before going out on the bike I took 8oz of a Pre-workout Energizer (Vega) which is 70 calories, 16g carbs, and 12g sugar.   Then I took  in 30gm (100 calories) of fluid (GU Brew electrolytes) in the first hour and then 58gm of carbs (fluid -30g plus solid - 28g) which was 300 calories,  and that seemed to be enough.     Split my Vega endurance bar into thirds and went through about 20 oz of fluid per hour.   Didn't get bloated or sloshy.  

Those gels  do make a sticky mess for sure.    I do like the taste of my chocolate one and they seem to agree with me, so I will just have to keep practicing. 

I came out of the weekend relatively unscathed - 2 small blisters - one on each little toe - have no idea why that is happening now - last 2-3 times out.    I used those shoes all winter including AtheBay and the Ottawa HM with no problem.   No muscle soreness but during Bikram this morning I found that my hamstrings were tight and my lower back was tight - camel and rabbit were a challenge.     Had planned to bike this aft but changed my mind and decided to let my body have another recovery day.    I feel quite strongly that is one of the reasons I am doing better this year - taking more recovery time.  

We really enjoyed the Jays game - Ken has never been to the dome.    We had great seats between home plate and 1st base about 20 rows back and I couldn't believe how SMALL the ball diamond looked.   On TV it looks SO big!    I will try to remember you are a Red Sox fan.      

ANNE -

Hmmm.  Don't know how I posted an empty box, but now I'm trying to "edit emptiness"; we'll see how that goes!

Mighty fine job of handling your hydration, and an even better job of chronicling it.  I really hope that in your next life you pursue a degree in sports nutrition, and then you'd have the creds to justify writing the book that's probably within your power to write!

Maybe from comments earlier about pop, but for whatever reason i had a fair bit of the stuff today.  My run was very hot and draining, and my swim, while only 20min, sapped me further, and in my myriad efforts to rehydrate, pop entered the scene.  My bad?

There are some groovy flavored waters out there, I have learned.  They must be fairly harmless, yes?

Yup, a lifelong red Sox fan.....but recent yars have seen some issues surface.  I won't list them, but they're enough to make me wonder if i will carry the Red sox to the grave with me.  It's questionable.  I periodically feel I should support any of the small-market teams that are operating on a fraction of the payroll that the Bosox and some of their swaggering, deep-pocketed brethren haveat their disposal.  Grrr!

DAVE -

Maybe it's your comment abbout savageman, or HOKIEJEFF'S comment about new challenges, but anyhow -- I went to the website just to see what fees are and if anything is full yet.  I learned that fees are slightly high, but not at all so given what they put on and the amount of support they have to offer.  i also learned that nothing is full yet.

Beyond that, I learned that one can spend a LOT of time watching those videos of the westernmost wall.  It makes for compelling viewing, and that includes the train wrecks you can see coming --- a rider wavering back and forth, and the one behind him getting sandwiched off his bike; stuff like that.  It is amazing to be focused on the topmost section, with the lousy pavement.......and then cast the gaze doooooooowwwwwwnnnnnnnthe long slope and see how much climbing they have done before hitting that steepest pitch.  it's also telling that when a rider falls or just runs out of steam, their on-foot movement up the grind is very labored; I guess many of them give up (or tumble) due to cramping.

I'm of two minds about it.  i am learning that with my torn labrum, if it starts to act up I can give it relief by getting out of the saddle for 15-20s.  Certainly Savageman would afford me that option over and over and over, but whether or not digging so deep and putting so much pressure on that area would make the problem bigger....I don't know.  It gave me cause for pause to read that the season of the Orioles' Brian Rioberts is over because he needs surgery on a torn labrum, so i guess my "complex degeneartve tear" is not so severe as to keep me out of action entirely.  WHEW!!!!!!!!

Check out Beach2Battleship, Wilmington NC in late October.  It's at www.beach2battleship.com.  i ahve looked at it for as long (4 years?) as it's been around.....and I'm looking again.  Quite seriously.  I'd been thinking of the half-iron that's near HOKIEJEFF, but seeing as he'sostponing it for a year, I guess I will, too.  But it's back to B2B, my shifty eyes travel.  Let me know what you think, seeing that you're thinking about a fall HIM.

DAVE again -

Very sorry about your Garmin, as you had used that to good advantage in your training thus far.  Are you heading right out to get another......or saving that money and investing it in a serious bike?   I could go into endless detail about the merits of a good bike, and a better bike, and a better still bike, but all I'll say for now is that a good bike carries huge benefits.

So.........???

DAVE -

Get used to that internal debate, cuz the longer you do this stuff, the more of them you will have.  And I don't want to discourage you in any way, and maybe we're different in this respect, but at least for me......those internal debates NEVER get resolved.  It is so easy to feel at my max while running in a race, and see things entirely differently within an hour or two post-race.  It is just real easy to imagine running faster, and having that twin oh-so-nicely with forgetting how taxed I felt during the run.

What you suggest -- HR maxed? Not wanting to push through pain? -- are very common responses in the heat of battle.  To those I will add feeling that I'm at my muscle endurance limits, and also a fear of putting myself so far into the red zone that I'm reduced to walking.  I should tell you, though, that in the past few years I have had some success with pushing through whatever in olys to surprise myself with how the run has gone.  I'm not necessarily talking about time here, but rather just facing up to the pain/discomfort.  Mostly the time that accompanies those efforts is very pleasing, but there hacve also been some very solid oly run times that has been established when I didn't have to push through this or that.

It's funny that I have that ability with olys and less so with sprints.  I keep thinking I can do a sub-21 sprint run at some point.....and it has yet to ahppen.  Ever, I do believe.  I managed a 21-something a year or two ago, and it might've been at the sprint part of the Fronhofer "Double" I am doing on Saturday.  I'll have to check that!  But anyhow, I have yet to push through the sub-21 barrier in a sprint.  Pity.

A final thought is that in the heat of a race finish, probably yopu do not want to be peaking at your watch.  doing so would add a second or so just by way of interrupting your flow, and I just think you're best off gauging your limits right then and there, and carrying on from that observation.  That WILL get easier for you, working form percieved exertion.  It was about the time I figured that out (sort of) that I began to abandon my own HRM.  RPE is not infallible.....but thenagain neither is following one's HR.  And for me (I'm sure I've said this before), I just learned that I alwys had more effort at my beck and call than was suggested by what my HR was.  So, had I religiously followed my HRM, I would've "waltzed" through too many of my races.  Not good at all!

ANT+ gear??

Oh, and by the way. Before you get all googly about the swim times, know that we had big rains over the weekend, so the rivers were swollen and running very fast. I think I saw 19,000 cubic feet / second around race time. Times were fast overall. My estimate from spot checking a couple of last year / this year people's times is about 2:00 faster for the 600M sprint (all downriver) and about the same for the 1,500M Olympic (sort of a shorter upriver, across, longer downriver, across rectangle).

Pouring through some pics and, seeing all of the wetsuits, I'm wondering if that would have been a good idea for me. What distance makes the cut for wetsuit / non-wetsuit?

ANT+ is the protocol used by many of the device manufacturers to have their devices talk to their accessories and USB sticks and whatnot. So, I'm the owner of an ANT+ cadence sensor, speed sensor, HR monitor, and two USB sticks. Maybe $100 worth of stuff. It's pretty widely used, so when new things come out (like power meter pedals) they're usually compatible to ANT+.

Polar, though, uses its own protocol (the latest is called WIND) which is not compatible with ANT+. Disadvantage is being locked into proprietary Polar technology. Advantage is that their protocol works to get HR info underwater whereas ANT+ does not.

RR:

http://www.beginnertriathlete.com/discussion/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=453471

Good race report and great race!   I saw your post on the river flowing fast but I still can't believe you swam that fast w/o a wetsuit.   It isn't the distance that dictates whether we can wear them, it's the water temp.    People wear them in tri-a-tri's but the bottom line is deciding how much, if any, gain you will get from it - specifically, how fast can you get it off.   I gain 17 seconds per hundred meters - that's a huge gain when it only takes me 20-25 seconds to get the suit off. 

Dave,

Rev3 Williamsburg.  June 23rd, 2013.  Olympic and HIM distances.  Let's see if we can convince Steve (and any other MightyMojers) to head to Williamsburg.

http://rev3tri.com/williamsburg/news-va/

When we lived in Virginia Sandbridge is where we vacationed almost every year.  Away from the rifraf of VA. Beach but close enough to take the kids one night during our visit.

Congrats Dave!

DAVE -

Very good question about distance and wetsuit use.  I have spent no small amount of time thinking about that over the years, and were I of a more analytical bent, I could probably do the math to put some numbers behind my gut feelings.  But I don't have that kind of mind, or that kind of ability with numbers, so.....

For me, it's pretty much anything, any distance.  At the super-sprint of Chicago Tri a few years ago I opted for just my swim-skin thing, which I'd bought the day before and wanted to try out.  Plus, I wanted to save the wetsuit for the following day (both sprint and oly).  BUT, really, i couldn't justify getting all gussied-up in my wetsuit for a 300y (I think that's it) swim.

To remove my wetsuit in T1 takes less than a minute, maybe more like less than 30s (I will test this tomorrow).  So if wearing it confers more than a minute of time gains, that's good enough for me!  I am currently playing around with the swim-skin (Blue Seventy Point Zero 3) at my swimming site, wearing it for an approxiamte 800m out-and-back (~400 each way), and comparing it to the same run of buoys in my wetsuit.  I will look at those data  later, but wearing the wetsuit saves me close to two minutes, i do believe. 

Now for you, I would guess things are radically different.  First and foremost, you have to have great form, and for many people who are fortunate that way, they find that a wetsuit inhibits their form somewhat.  My first thought would be that a sprint might be 50/50 for you, using a wetsuit, and that anything beyond that would probably see you enjoying benefits from using a wetsuit.

BUT ----- It's not many races of any distance in which I see the true swim studs go without a wetsuit, and that always tells me something.  But I also know that if a guy can beat me by nine minutes in a wetsuit oly swim, then in one without a wetsuit the diff might be 11-13 minutes.  This follows the belief that wetsuits confer a larger advantage to mediocre/poor swimmers than they do to good/great swimmers.

If one Patrick O'Keefe is at Fronhofer oly, and if it's non-wetsuit this year, I'll be able to tell you that with some precision.  He is one of the best tri swimmers in New York, I think, and after I finish here I will try to dig up the results from two years ago --- Patrick vs me.  YEAH!

DAVE again -

Okay, I lose -- but by much, mcuh more than I thought.  My time was 27:15.....Patrick's time was 17:33!!!!!!  The 2nd fastest swimmer was 17:46, and 3rd was 20:32, I think it was.  Now, I am sure the course was measured short, as I don't usually come close to even 29 in most olys, let alone a 27:15.  Another thing to know about this race is that it is two loops with a beach run between loops, and I'm sure that hurts him a bit more than it gurts me.  So, really, for any given 1500m, he's a whopping TEN MINUTES faster than I am -- wetsuited, that is.

Now, if Saturday is non-wetsuit, my prediction is for him to best me by 13 minutes.  (Wanna bet?  Wanna bet??)  How humbling for me.....but he really is highly gifted swimmer.

DAVE once more -

Onwards to your RR in a few minutes, but just want to thank you for the mini-tutorial on ANT+ and WIND.  Quite literally and 100% seriously, I have NEVER encountered either of those before.  I really am a Luddite, and so much of this brave new world is so far out of my own realm that it's not even funny.  I have, over the years, made half-hearted attempts to get kinda sorta up to speed......but I always get my comeuppance almost immediately.........and then I retreat back to my cave until I feel foolishly bold again.  And then it all happens again.  Sigh.

DAVE -

Fun report, and really fine job of deciding what you need to do differently next time/any time. 

I pay close attention to the "flow" in and out of transition, and after that there is only one thing that really matters --- the location of the dismount line (okay, the location of the mount line also matters quite a bit).  I work at committing to my mind's eye some landmarks so that i don't have it sneak up on me, and just to be sure i try to be far-sighted enough to have feet out extra early.  I too have been "ambushed" by dismount lines, and they so ruin my studly glory!

As for mount lines, remember that you can mount at any point beyond them.  So, if there is a logjam right near the mount line, you are perfectly okay to run another 15-20 feet before mounting where there is no other "traffic".  It is so instinctive to just mount at the mount line....but it is seldom as expeditious as mounting beyond it.

Being on one's feet the day before a race is murderously insidious.  You don't know the damage that is being done (think termites, quietly chewing away at the wood bases of your house) until your legs don't have the "kick" you expect from them.  And then it's Ooops!!!

Fine, fine race, Dave!

HOKIEJEFF -

Williamsburg, eh?  That's a pretty easy drive for me, kinda sorta.  So, let's keep it on the table!

Also on my table, but very unrealistically so, is the new race at Bone Island, FL, next January 12.  It's got half- and a full-iron options, and is put on by Set-Up, who do Beach2Battleship and a few dozen (literally) other races in MD, VA, NC, and SC.  Nifty time, a day before my birthday -- maybe something to celebrate when I wake up the day after the race??

But it's unrealistic for me because we will possibly be in California from early Nov until mid Dec, and the plan is that I will be bikeless.  So to then return home in hard winter and spend a feverish month on the bike on the trainer......probably wouldn't happen well enough.

BUT, if the CA trip falls through, it might work.  I normally carry decent remannts of my previous season into early December, anyhow, before starting to respect and honor the concept of "off-season", so......

All that said, working through a new injury worry has me contemplating my inevitibility once again, and so it's best not to get too frisky about future races --- as mouth-wateringly tempting as they might be!

CURT -

Yo!  Good to see you here, wish there was more of you! 

How is training going.....and what's next on the race scene?  And, are you figuring to be heading out to Stanford with dear daughter soon, or will she be doing that relocation on her own.  Just curious!

DAVE -

Yeah, those competitive juices......

See the post to HokieJeff two above, and that in a microcosm is how my brain works when confronted with race options.  It actually used to be much, much worse, but a combination of injuries over time and the fact of being retired and not being able to support this stuff as I used to has conspired to rein me in quite a bit.  But, if I were bionic enough to be injury-free and rich enough to be able to pay for triathlon without impunity.....that'd be a different story altogether!

In my heyday, I did some lunatic drives to get to desirable races.  (And that's a problem with the labrum, that it hurts when i drove too long at one time, so doing the big drives has far less appeal now than a few years ago.)  I have never flown me and my bike to a race, so to the above list I could add being mechanical enough and enjoying flying enough to make that mode of travel to distant races an ongoing consideration.  But I dislike flying, and I am scared to death of taking apart my bike and putting it back together again, so at least i never ran through money by flying to races!

Savageman probably won't happen this year, and a small injury screw-up a couple days ago likely seals that decision for me.  Heck, I'm even worried about Fronhofer Double in two days!  ??   (Probably more on that later.)

STEVE - Sorry it's taken me a while to get back with you. Work has been crazy this week. I totally forgot to tell you about my hydration! 

I drank about 24oz of ice water for every 10 miles, (so I drank that much over a 40 minute period x 5) while on the bike, then about another 12 oz at each rest stop. After the ride I drank about 48 oz of Powerade. I kid you not; I was dehydrated - the ride lived up to its name. I think it's important to remember that I have an incredibly high sweat rate, so I need to drink more than most people, including men. 

TRINA -

No apologies needed, ever --- but especially when I've owed you one for over a week now.  I haven't fogotten, and hopefully after the weekend I will get to it.

In recognition to your self-professsed high sweat rate, you did a terrific job of keeping yourself hydrated.  And while sweat is never something to can targted to be completely replenished during a race, what you did after the race is perfect.

It's important to remember that just about everything we lose during a race cannot be completely brought back to pre-race levels while the race is on.  (There is a key word here that I am struggling to remember, and it's NOT depleted or replenished; I will remember it in time.) 

So, with this in mind, be aware of bloating, which is one problem heavy-hydrators face.  the other problem is even potentially larger, nd it involves diluting your system so much that electrolytes lose their efficacy.  This wil never be a problem during a sprint, and probably not an oly, but for a half-iron it might be a factor to really work on in your training leading up to Redman.  So....

You want to make sure you don't get hydrated, of course, but your focus should be on satisfying your physical/physiologiacl need for fluids, as opposed to thinking about drinking to compensate for sweating.  And as you work on this in your training, be aware of what electrolytes you are taking in and, if you are drinking excessively, you might need to add better electrolyte sources to your nutritional protocol.  This is all kind of nebulous, and even many years and many long races into this, I still struggle some to establish balances that aren't readily observable and are hardly easily quantified.  But for you and Redman, it might be best to err (slightly....ever so slightly)  on the side of adequate electrolytes -- especially since on sept 22 in OK, it should still be plebty hot, yes?

G'night!

Just lurking in the background.  Still training steady, but have dropped the intensity / duration a bit -- body is tired and trying to let it rest.

Have a sprint this Sunday right here where I live.  Going to just enjoy it.  My wife and two daughters are also doing it as a relay.  Should be fun!  I'll post a RR afterwards.

Checking in and catching up

I'm been in a Ijustdontfeellikerunning mood. I ran with a friend last weekend which was fun and mixed it up but I'm just not feeling it this week. Getting it done but not happily.

On the other hand, I've had good swims this week.

I guess there are just weeks like that. I have a 4 hour ride this weekend with a 30 min brick run afterwards. Then a 1.5 hour run Sunday. That will be a tough one to get done.

On another note, my general nutrition has been really good. I switched to a good, healthy smoothie for breakfast and I'm limiting my wine to a glass or 2 on the weekend. We like our wine with dinner so this was a big sacrifice The big change is I pretty much cut out sugar. I feel really good and I'm losing a few pounds. I'm being careful though to eat enough for the training.

Now to get out and get my run done

Johanne