Ernesto's group (4th season) - Closed (Page 20)

No interim races before the big one - 7 weeks from Sunday.  I cured my need to swim today and had to HTFU by swimming 3600 yds.  Solid dose of swimming has me back on track.  Appreciate the advice and will use it accordingly. 

We have a major anticipated change in our budget for the next 12 to 24 months.  We will be sending one of our sons to boarding school.  He has struggled for a long time and i really think this is the right decision.  My plan until the last 2 weeks was to go to several early out of state triathlons, a triathlon camp in Vermont in June, and then Burlington Vermont for Age Group Nationals in August.  Now i have to come up with plan B without going into an amotivational mode.  My travel money will have to go to visiting Benjamin while he is in boarding school.  I still will plan on qualifying for Nationals in 2013.  If I choose my races carefully and keep training i hopefully can remain on track.

I am now even more thankful for our mentoring group to keep me motivated.  The extra year of training will be good, and will take some pressure off having to be ready for this August.

I'm in for the May challenge. 

Sprint Tri Question:

I started clipping in on my bike a couple of months ago.  I am comfortable with them (i.e. have no issues getting in/out, etc.) but I haven't seen any noticeable improvement in speed.  Should I switch back to the platforms for a Sprint since I really haven't seen a difference in speed and save the time of switching shoes in T2?

David, the pedals themselves will not make you go faster, they simply allow you to change your pedalling style to be more 'rotational' than simply up and down effort you can do with the old pedals.
Try using this pull and push part of 'rotational' pedalling more and you will see gradual improvement.
Again, don't expect miracles, but just the fact the you can use different group of leg muscles is an advantage as you can rest your quads more.  Whether it is worth the lost time changing shoes in your sprint tri is up to you of course.

Just my $0.02.

We had a beautiful morning here and I went for a 3 hr MTB ride along the ocean.

The learning curve for Aerobars is really short. I had them on my old bike and it literally took a couple of rides to figure them out. I found it more comfortable than a traditional road bike set up. It is a more relaxed position and puts less strain on my back and neck.

Mark

Your pictures are always incredible. What beautiful place to live!

Honey Badger: feel better!

I'm in for the May challenge as well. I just got clip-in pedals for the bike, and had my rite-of-passage fall yesterday at a red light which resulted in some scrapes and big bruises on both knees. Surprisingly they did not hurt running at all, and I got my 10K PR today at 8:40 pace.

Question on swimming: I just learned to swim, and at the moment have to stop every lap to rest for a few second at the pool end before I could keep going. I'm starting the "swim focused" training plan suggested by this site. Any tip on swim training?

Very curious to hear feedbacks on the carb test from those who are trying it! 

Ouch...! Hope you recover quickly!

Picture - thanks guys! This is a beautiful place indeed.

lost a pound and weighed in at 168, I have to admit I was nervous after last night. We had a typical weekend buffet at a friends house consisting of Indian, Phillipino, and American food, and my wife made my favorite Key Lime pie. I just applied the philoosy behind the "Don't Eat Like a Pig Diet," and didn't eat like a pig.

This morning I am watching the bike run transition of IM South Africa. I'm tracking a guy I know named Ken Krell. Its pretty cool.

Gabe, next month its you!

Mae - my tip for swimming is dont give up!! I started just like you and could barely manage to complete 250 yds with rest each length. Over time it gets better and better - now I comfortably swim 1200 yds 3x a week.

Yesterday I rode the full bike course for next w/ends tri - 14.1 miles in 52:22 - improvement on last week and on a hardtail MTB - cant wait for saturday!!

 Its hard to lose weight when you already hit your all time low at 171 :-)

Breakthrough day for me today, best long run performance to date, 9 miles average 8:46.  I just started a little over a year ago and have had a terrible time running fast.  I have the perfect body type for it (long legs and very lean) I just can't do it, yet.  Breaking 2:00 in a half marathon is a big goal for me, and I'm really amped up to do it May 19 in Fargo.  Today's run was a confidence boost in that at the 9 mile mark I knew that I'd only have to do 4 more, and I could slow them all the way down to upper 9's and still come in under 2:00.  Maybe I ought to up the ante a bit, see if I could pound out 4 more at that 8:46ish pace and come in at 1:55?

While running I spent quite some time considering the whole long slow run idea, and wondering in my head if I were to do my long runs slower than today, will the speed/endurance fairly really come visit me on race day and allow me to run 13 at 8:45 when I either A) do alot of shorter 3-5 mile runs closer to 8 and/or B) do my long 10-13 mile runs at 9:30's.  The other time during my run I spent thinking about how awesome it would be to write an arrangement of Fistful of Steel by Rage Against the Machine for marching band.

Honey Badger - I hope you take time to recover adequately before getting back to training.  The silver lining is that once you have an appendectomy you never have to worry about appendicitis again ... kind of lame silver lining ... but true.

Finally had a Sunday where my weight didn't jump back up...

I've been doing the MAF/slow training since January and the improvements have been huge.  Once you get over the mental part of it, it is kinda liberating to go long and not feel like your heart wants to jump out of your chest.  What happens in the interim is that get faster without noticing it.  

The 11 mile run I did this morning was easy as could be and just for fun, ran the second half on negative splits with each mile faster than the next.  The final mile was +8 MAF - a year ago it would have been +25 MAF.