GrooveTime!group - CLOSED!!! (Page 210)

THANK YOU SO MUCH!     I have put it in a top secret place.       Ken and I usually stay at Comfort Inn and he always does for business.   We collect the points and end up getting a 4 or 5 'free' nights each year.

Anne:

I think I recall from your older posts relating to the neuroma and other injuries that you tend to stay away from the medications, but I would recommend that if you ever want to open up that possibility again, you might want to try what my podiatrist prescribed to me (Relafen, or nabumetone). I too was skeptical about it, seeing that it was my 3rd medication we were trying and I had no improvement from previous meds or anything else we tried. I took a 10-day course and the pain subsided within about 2 days, and I have been off the med for about 3 weeks with no return of any symptoms. I know not all medications work for everyone, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention it to you because I know how much you have struggled with your neruoma!

Good luck.

Tracey

TRACEY -

I fully advocate seeing ANY course beforehand, and you are fortunate that your frist two traithlons have been on courses you not only can view, but can actually do workouts on/at. For Whaling City, now that you've described the run it sounds even more user-friendly. I'm sure all of this has gone a long way towards easing your troubled mind! Yippee!

I talked to a woman today who also got relief for her neuroma by using Newtons, and I'd love to know how much of your relief is due to the meds, and how much to the shoes. But maybe it doesn't matter much right now, as all that really matters is that you are running pain-free. Double yippee!

ANNE -

As a follow-up to the M-dot expo comments last night, it's even gotten worse! Inside-Out is no longer there, replaced by a bike tent that carries few non-bike-related supplies. To get those you have to go to the mammoth Ironman tent, where along with all of the branded gear they carry........next to nothing.

The ONLY nutritionals they had were Powerbar and Powerbar stuff. THAT'S IT!!

If an athlete wears stuff from Tyr, Zoot, and 2XU, they are in luck; if not, they're SOL.

This is a situation that needs to be protested loudly and widely, i think! GRRR!

LISA!


I'm telling on you!





(Seriously, thank you for that!)

RACING THIS WEEKEND --- JULY 24 and 25


TRACEY - Saturday!

Whaling City Triathlon
0.25miles/11.4miles/~3miles
8:14am, Wave 4
New Bedford, Massachusetts



ANNE - Sunday!

Muskoka Long Course Triathlon (Swim/Bike Division)
2km/55km (or 1.2miles/33.55miles)
8:00am, Wave 1
Huntsville, Ontario

GOOD LUCK TO TRACEY & ANNE!!!!

ANNE, hope the secret code comes in handy ... we've had good luck staying at the Comfort Suites when we've been traveling.  Good luck on your race this weekend!

TRACEY, glad to hear that you are neuroma pain free at this point.  I was wondering as well, if it the pain relief could be related to the Newtons.

DENISE, hope things work out well with trying to find a place for your mother and that everyone will be happy with the decision.

I FINALLY got around to working on one of my goals for this year, and made it to my first masters swim meeting on Wednesday night.  They swim in two locations and this was at a school district's natatorium that is fairly newly built and quite a complex.  I was in heaven ... the water was cool (perfect temp) and clear, felt almost "crisp"; absolutely beautiful 50 meter pool with about 8 lanes.  Very enjoyable.  AND I got up twice this week before I went to work to get my runs in.  I run early on Saturday mornings, but haven't been able to drag myself up during the week to run before work.  Actually

worked out well, and about 10 degrees cooler than running in the evening after the sun goes down. 

More good news, my husband called me yesterday morning to tell me he got a raise.  Yes a 3% raise across the entire company ... and just in time for his to be tacked on to his severance whenever that happens. 

Hope everyone has had a good week and is looking forward to the weekend.  I know I'm glad it's Friday!

LISA

LISA -

A hat trick of happiness -- new great pool, two early runs, 3% raise. Cool beans!

It's been such a nice week for you, it's hard to imagine the weekend being any better. You might well be antsy on Sunday for Monday to hurry up and arrive so the good stuff can start happening again!

Regardless of all that, have a good weekend!

SteveB,

Was great meeting up with you and doing the SBR we did!

Thank you for the compliments on my swimming, biking and running!

You're hill climbing skills on the bike are something else. On the rollers and some short steeps around here I'm usually catching people but you my friend seem to be part mountain goat!! My fragile male ego was  pounced upon when you'd disappear 2 corners ahead and when you would come back and check on me. I would imagine you would be the same way on the run.

As for my fit, I don't know how I really did it. The previous owner was about my size so that was a big first step. Then from there it was getting the saddle height and angle comfortable and then stretching out the handlebars. That's all I've done other than experiment with a few other saddles. I do plan on getting Zinn and the Triathlon Bike. His books are very highly recommended and for the engineer in me, this would be a great read. Like we discussed, it would be great to get tested on a computrainer or other device and then get fit to a 'properly' fit bike to see the difference in power generation. For me, the whole desire to even get fit to another bike is due to the 650c wheels. Many more options for wheels and tires. If this bike were on 700's I'd probably ride it until the frame broke.

For descending, I would imagine my 25lbs or so of extra body weight I have over you probably helps. I wasn't paying much attention to if I was pulling away from you or not, but I was not pedaling and I usually am on descents. I don't hammer down them but I do keep the tempo up and moderate pressure on the pedals.

Re: my swim kick, don't know what to tell you here bud. It is what it is. I don't think about it, I just do it.

Other than the ride with Anne and Ken I had not done any training until last night. Did 32 minutes on a treadmill. Running for 10 minutes with a 2 minute break then another 10 minutes. Then I swam 1100m after that. Easy pace for 500, 3x100 sprints, 300 cool down. My left calf (same one as before) was stiff this morning and a bit achey. May have been the 8:30 pace I had the treadmill at. Overall, not a great work out. Not into it mentally or physically. Wanted to lift some weights instead but know that will not help with a tri in late August. With the trip to Milwaukee though, I think the race I was planning for late August would fall 1 weeks later and its an Oly or sprint distance. I'm not at oly distance right now. So if I do that one, I'll drop to the sprint and do an Oly in Sept. For training and participating in tri's I think that 2 weeks off killed me. My desire to train has waned HUGE. Maybe I was getting mentally burned out from it a bit. I don't know but the desire to exercise isn't really there right now. Maybe summer's being busy is part of it too.

So not only did I break a pedal (cleats for my other style expected in any day) but I left my floor pump in m parents garage. DOH!!!! So another reason I have not ridden this week. Additionally the weather is not nice here this weekend.

Am thinking that I'll see how the shoes fair in machine washing and if it really is that bad, I'll go get a pair of the Nike Free's. Not exaclty what I am looking for but very close. Next step would probably be the Zoot's which are just about as much as the Newton's.

Anne,

Was great meeting up with you and Ken! Thank you for the drinks, treats and conversation. Thanks for calling me a nice young man! I certainly don't feel that young at times and nice isn't the general way I get described (sh*t disturber is closer to it). You and Ken are definitely young at heart I would say!

I was definitely not at my best with the broken pedal and being on all the allergy medication I was. Not to mention still recovering from the trip to Ottawa and my moms cooking. I certainly put on a few pounds from the trip.

That is quite the nice area you guys have to ride in. I am certainly jealous and understand why you can hammer up some hills. The one thing that sticks out in my head still is that you'd take off from me at the start of the climb and then I'd reel you in getting close to the peak. Really stood out how I tend to hammer a bit before I'll shift gears to spin easy circles.

The rides you can do out your door are great. Seemed every intersection you and Ken could debate on which way to go. That is a thing I wish I could do.

Thanks for this info Tracey.   I have put it in a safe place and will try it if the neuroma is still there.   As much as I stay away from meds, I think I would try it for 10 days before buying new shoes.   I have SO many shoes and don't know what to do with them. 

Good luck this weekend.

TRACEY -

Have a blast at Whaling City, with its various desirables -- bay swim, closed bike course, flat run. Wheeeeeee!

ANNE -

Ride safely today --- and definitely tomorrow! I missed the notification of the bad road; I'll have to go back to the pre-race newletter to see what they say about it.

Given how my back has been the past few days, I'm VERY glad I didn't sign up for Muskoka; I would not be looking forward to it at all. I'm thinking now it is piriformis, which might be impinging some on the sciatic. If this is the case then it's something that ART works well on, and I can see Tina when she returns in a couple of days from spectating at IMLP. It's a bummer (as it were....), but I'm betwixt and between races now, so.....

Put in your travel plans, when you visit Lake Placid, a stop at The Fallen Arch -- the local specialty running store. They carry Newtons, and I really think you should at least try on a pair and see how they feel, just padding around the store. And then if you like their potential for you and your neuroma, you could order a pair when you're home and be better able to take advantage of the 30-day trial period. I now know a few folks who have found their neuroma issues resolved when in Newtons, and I really think the arrangements of those "lugs" on the bottom serve well to separate the metatarsals. They sure did the trick for me!

Have fun in Muskoka --- and I hope it is nicer there than it is here!

Hi all.

Well I survived my second race! I did so-so on the swim, pretty good on the bike, and crappy on the run.

I actually don't have a good estimate of my time, because a) I forgot to bring my watch and b) I didn't look at the time on the clock when I crossed the finish line. (D'oh...)

However, my friend Donna finished maybe 5 or so minutes after me, and she finished with the clock at 2:04. If the race started on time, and the waves went every 4 minutes as they were supposed to, then that would put me around 1:47-ish.

Details to come later...

That's great Tracey.   Looking forward to hearing all about it.

TRACEY -

Finding the results for W.C. is difficult -- like, they're impossible to find! I couldn't find a direct results link on the W.C. page, but saw that timing was done by BSRS. So, I went there, dug around a bit, found their '10 schedule.....and no results yet for W.C. This has to be a record for slow results for a small event; the site says it was limted to 300 people. Um, maybe tomorrow, then!

Was it wetsuit-legal? I saw the red-print line that said that on Thursday it was 78, but maybe some of the weather you have been having kept it from creeping up that one more fateful degree. We can only hope!

So, "pretty good" on the bike sounds ---- pretty good! I imagine you are quite pleased with that, and I'm guessing that you really enjoyed tooling around on a closed course. Those are few and far between, but SOOOO fun when they happen!

Any reason for the "crappy" run?

But if it was 1:47 for that distance, I think that's a good result for you! How did the overall effect of it feel, compared with Escape?

Can hardly wait for your longer report!

SHAUN -

Thank you for the "mountain goat" comparison -- I'll take it!

But as I said at the time, "home-field" advantage counts for something, you know? And beyond that, there's just years and years and years and years in the saddle, which makes for lots of time to work on getting better at something. I swear by the "spinning small circles" technique, and while it still doesn't make things like the Gats truly easy, it makes them as easy as they can probably be.

Your comment about "fragile male ego" reminds me of a story that I told both TRACEY and KASIA that I would tell, but never got around to. But maybe now is a good time, so.....

I started being coached by Erik Cagnina in early '03, and we arranged to meet at the Muncie Endurathon in Muncie, IN, in mid-July of that year. That race is a half-iron, and of course I really wanted to do well with Erik there and all. I met him the day before, and he had already collected a group of friends for a pre-race ride of the run course, so off we went. This particular group made cycling look really easy, and I was a bit intimidated by them all. Then along came race day, and I had a so-so performance, maybe about 5:47 or so, and by the time I finished ALL of Erik's friends were lounging around looking fresh as daisies. In time I learned their times -- things like 4:38, 4:52, 5:04, in that range. I leeft there feeling wquite low and very inadequate, and a day or two later I mebntioned this in an email to Erik. He gotr right back to me, telling me to NEVER compare myself with others, especially ones that had been doing triathlon for many years; all of that crew had been at it from 5-10 years, whereas I was early in full-season three.

He also pointed out to me that most of them were indeed truly talented, but that it took each of them several years to realize their potential. He ventured that in time I too would realize my potential, but that I couldn't expect it to happen at that stage of my own triathlon career. I had a bit of trouble processing all of this (somehow it was easier to just feel hopelessly inadequate..... ), but in time I took his point.

So for you, you are soooooo relatively new at this stuff that you can only do yourself a big disservice by comparing your (in this case) climbing skills with someone who's been at it for so long -- AND who enjoyed that not-insignificant home-field advantage! Another thing Erik once told me is that it takes about 5-7 years of serious cycling before someone gets truly proficient at it, and that was pretty clsoe to the timeline for me. And there you are, only about four months into serious road/tri cycling......and I hope I can see what you can do on the Gats in 2014 or 2015!

Moving on.....

Vacations can be real killers for training consistency! Even with the realization that training will take a back seat to the priorities of the vacation, it still usaully turns out worse than expected. Some fitness is lost, as is the "roll" that comes with working out on a regualr basis. It helps some if there is something on the immediate horizon in terms of racing, and more so if what is there is fairly important; for you, there was neither. Nobody's fault there, that's just the way it all shook down!

The idea of lifting weights, but not doing it because it wouldn't help with a tri in August ----- you probably should've just done it because it seemed like a good idea at the time! View it like reading a book, taking a nap......if it feels good, do it! There hjave been many times I have used a lifting session as a "bridge" between one workout and another, when I was otherwise feeling unmotivated. It just might work that way for you, too.

Are you tempted to sign up for one of the September races? That might help, just to get it on the schedule and use it to get motivated again. But there I go, trying to separate you from your money once again!

Speaking of which, i have about 16 minutes to sign up for the Double Tri at Fronhofer Tool Triathlon before ther's a price increase, so I'm off to do that now. Have a good rest of the weekend!

ANNE -

Oh, I hope you've had an okay day on the bike! I went out at about 10 for a 40km ride, and the winds were tough from the NW and maybe north. I just checked the Ottawa weather and it says it is 22km/h with gusts to 31km/h, from the NW........and then decided to brace myself for the Huntsville conditions. Whew??? Currently it is 10km/h from the N, and I can only hope it was not much worse than that earlier. I guess that would've made the ride back up, all along Brunel, a bit of a slog though. Yes?

Anyhow, i hope it's a fine day for you in the water and on the bike!

Tracey,

Congrats on your 2nd tri!  As for having a lousy run - that just means you can get better and better - especially without the neuroma.

Anne,

Oh, I hope you didn't have wind.

Denise

Hi all. Here’s my race report for Whaling City sprint on Saturday.

So, having had a look at the final results, I didn’t do quite as well as I thought I did. I was surprised to see my swim time at 15:26, given that this was (supposedly) only 1/4 of a mile. My last race was 1/3 of a mile, and I finished it in 14:24. I strongly suspect though that the swim was longer than 1/4 of a mile. More on that later...

Prep:

I arrived at the race area around 6:30, which gave me plenty of time to set up. The grass in the transition area was wet and soggy due to the thunderstorms we had gotten the night before, so that was kind of a bummer. I was lucky enough to have a slot right at the end of the bike rack, which gave me some extra space for my stuff. The water temp was 78 degrees, and they were permitting wet suits.

At 7:30 we all headed down to the beach for the pre-race meeting. The distance from the transition area to swim start was pretty long (about 300 to 400 meters).

It was still overcast and the water was looking pretty nasty from all the rain the night before. And there is a waste refinement facility down the street from the beach. (Not the nicest of areas...) I heard more than one joke about the E. coli in the water. Yuck!

There was lots of talk among the racers before the start that the swim course looked much longer than 1/4 of a mile. The buoys were set up so that you swam out straight, turned right, then swam straight, then another right to swim to the finish at the shore. (Like a squared-off upside down U). I had to agree - the buoys looked really far away and it was hard to imagine that the course was only 440 meters. But I assumed they must have known what they were doing and figured it was an optical illusion.

Swim:

I was in wave 4. Being less nervous about the swim this time than I was for my first race, I wasn’t so worried about positioning myself in the back of the wave. I had maybe 10 or 12 swimmers enter in the water behind me. There was LOTS of knocking and hitting and churning. And in addition to that, the water was choppy. At one point it almost felt like we were in the wake of a speedboat, with the swimmers rolling up and down, up and down. I swallowed a good amount of the water...

For some reason I just never really got into my “groove” in the swim until after the final turn around the last buoy. I wasn’t sighting all that well either. I would lift my head and instead of putting it right back down, I tended to stroke 4 or 5 times with my head out of the water. It wasn’t until the very end that I was really keeping it down. By the time I rounded the first buoy, it was becoming obvious that the distance was more than 1/4 of a mile. The 5th and final wave that went after mine were males 45+, clydesdales and male paratriathletes. Toward the end of the swim I had a few of them gain on me and I had one guy like half-way swim over me, then just sort of stay there. I was like, Dude, this isn’t going to work, so I had to give him a little friendly push to get him off me.
Coming out of the water I was quite sure it had been more than 1/4 of a mile. My swim time was 15:26, 219 out of 257 overall. (3:30/100 yards if we assume 1/4 of a mile). At my last race my pace was 2:26/100 yards, and I really don’t think I was that much slower on Saturday. Further evidence that the swim was longer than 1/4 of a mile is that the top finishers’ times were around 8 or 9 minutes. That seems really long for a 1/4 mile swim if we’re talking top swimmers.


T1:

At my last race I made the mistake of running across the sand to get to T1, which totally exhausted me. So this time I just walked it and saved the jog until I got to the sidewalk. As I mentioned earlier it was 300-400 meters to transition, so my transition time was quite long (6:31). I had a much easier time getting my wet suit off this time though because I wisely greased up the legs with Pam before hand.

Bike:

About 20 seconds into my ride, I realized that I had forgotten to take my race belt off the handlebars, so I had to stop and take care of that. The bike course was a 3.8 mile loop done 3 times for a total of 11.4 miles. It was really flat. I finished it thinking that I had done better than I actually did, because I was in the range of 17.5 to 18 mph for some good stretches. Occasionally I would drop down to 16.5 mph, but I was mostly in the higher range. There was a short stretch of incline that dropped me down to 10 - 12 mph. That must have done the damage because I ended up averaging only 15.7 mph (same as for last race). By the third loop there were hardly any other riders around, but I was passing lots of runners who had already started the run leg on the part of the path that went along the shoreline. My time was 43:29, 219 out of 257 overall.

T2:

Pretty uneventful for T2. My time was 2:34.

Run:

I was really tired on the run. After the cinderblock feeling in the legs went away, I was doing okay. The first 1.2 miles of the run followed a nice walking path along the shore. At 1.2 miles, the course did a U-turn back, and then at around mile 2 it entered into Fort Tabor Park, which is a grassy area that winds along the shore. Very pretty. I made it to 1.5 miles and had to take a walking break. I’ve come to realize that I’m just not cut out for hot/humid weather running, at least not yet. It just seems to suck all the energy out of me. I realize it does this to other runners too, but the difference is that others have trained in this kind of weather! I’ve been treadmilling it all throughout this heat wave so I’m just simply not fit enough. I managed to drag myself through the last half of the course by taking walking breaks here and there. I had envisioned pushing myself during the run to see if I could beat my pace from the last race of 12:08 min/mile, but I just didn’t have it in me. Near the very end of the course, I came around a bend and saw the tents and was SO relieved. So it was quite a bummer to discover that the course took a right hand turn down a long pier and back before it headed to the finish line at the tents. D’oh! My run time was 40:33, 248 out of 257. My pace was 13:04. (There was no sign of the neuroma so I can't blame that.)

So my final race time was 1:48:31, 244 out of 257 overall and 14 out of 15 for females 35-39. Not great, but not the last to finish. I’d be interested to find out what the real swim distance was, so I can get a better estimate of my pace.

Race results are here:

http://www.coolrunning.com/results/10/ma/Jul24_Whalin_set1.shtml

Oh, and I also discovered that had I registered as an Athena, I would have won 3rd place in that category. Maybe I need to embrace my body weight and start registering as Athena to improve my chances of awards!