Racing Manatees - Better Together in 2022 (Page 28)

Ann-Marie is out of the water.

Lisa is on the bike.

Go team, go!  Dooo eeetttt!!!!

Both Ann-Marie and Lisa are in the last five miles of the bike. 

Way to DOOOO EEEETTTT!!!!

Lisa is off the bike.

Ann-Marie is hot on her heels!

(The swim was a time trial start, they started about 13 minutes apart)

Ann-Marie is off the bike!

Lisa is through transition on the run!

You've got this!

Lisa is past mile nine on the run. Dooo eeeetttt!!!

Ann-Marie turned in her timing chip at T2 due to extreme nausea.

Congratulations Lisa! Woo hoo!!!! Way to dooo eeettt!!!

The stormy weather held off til close to the end of the race and then it moved through quickly. More rain to come supposedly. So, rather than rain we got heat and wind!

As Janyne posted I experienced nausea on the bike so that I really couldn’t stomach getting nutrition in. I’m not sure what the issue was bc it started very early so heat shouldn’t have been the issue. Plus, I train in Florida, so i should be used to that weather! Maybe I drank too much river water! Whatever, the cause I decided I couldn’t run so tapped out. Very disappointing of course. Other than a headache, I’m fine now.

A few thoughts about the parts of the race I did do- swim was an absolute cluster IMHO. They had signs up along the path we lined up on but they were really confusing as the first x number were from the full distance, so first one you saw said over 2 hours and then they went in 10 minute intervals, since you have 1:10 ( I think) to do the swim those signs made no sense and no one explained them. As you got closer they switched to 70.3 signs and made sense. Of course no one paid any attention to them and people pushed themselves to the front. I don’t know why they don’t put speakers down the path so we all could here all the stuff being said by the RD all morning. You had to be almost at the start before you could hear. Maybe it’s a noise issue for the neighborhood, but some sort of way to tell people what was going on and maybe explain the signs would be helpful. I started about an hour after the first AGer. I passed a lot of people and I’m a slow swimmer, so yeah, lots of dummies.  I also swam over 500 yards longer than the course bc I swam toward the middle of the river to get the current and I don’t swim straight! Worked well until I reached the first of 3 bridges and apparently hit some eddy or weird current that made it like an endless pool. I was NOT moving at all. Finally figured out I needed to move over and things picked up again! With my added yards my pace was 1:31/ 100. So definitely a current assist swim!

This race was the North American World Championship, so lots of pros here. On my way out on the bike, maybe mile 12 the lead men were going in! First place make finished in 3:37! First woman 4:02! Crazy fast even with a long course .

Lisa and I met in transition this morning. She noticed me as I walked by her completely oblivious. So a quick Manatee meetup! 

Agree - very smart decision but still sucks. Also glad to hear you're feeling okay now which is better than pushing too hard. 

I hope that you are feeling more yourself today.

I have a few questions for you to ponder. No need to reply in the forum!  I expect it was just a "thing" -- hopefully not a covid thing! -- but thought I'd throw some questions out there.

• What did you eat pre-race?  Was it your usual pre-race meal(s)? Did you practice this in for your long rides?
• Did you use your powermeter on the bike? Did you ride to your plan (Z2/Z3 NP?)?
• Was your fueling plan HIM-spcific? 

  If you apply an IM nutrition plan (~250cal/hr) to an HIM, you run the risk of having stomach problems because your intensity is much higher = your body is less able to process and absorb calories. For this reason

  If you apply an IM nutrition plan (~250cal/hr) to an HIM, you run the risk of having stomach problems because your intensity is much higher = your body is less able to process and absorb calories. For this reason, you should fuel less for an HIM than an IM.  

• When did you start eating/fueling on the bike? Did you give yourself 20-ish minutes at Z2 to settle down before trying to consume anything?
• Did you burp at any time on the bike? Burping = stop dial back the fueling
• Did you have anything while you were in line for the swim?  Banana? Gel? Water? Sports drink?
• What did you have on the bike?  And you practiced it?
• When did you prepare what you had on the bike? If it was bottles, where was it stored between prep and consumption (I had a teammate once who used UCAN, prepped it the night before, stored it in her car overnight (not in a cooler, either).  It did not go well the next day.)

Curtis - No Lable Sprint Triathlon Katy, TX

Anyone who is of my faith probably heard the October 2021 address at our World Wide General Conference that used “The Aggregation of Marginal Gains” method that turned around the British National Cycling program in 2003 as an example of how focusing on a whole bunch of little things can lead to big gains.  The address can be found HERE.  I haven't dug deeper, but the basics are that the British National Cycling Team was so bad that they couldn't even get sponsors.  Then in 2003 they got a new coach who broke down every aspect of cycling that could possibly measure and then focused on improving each area by 1%.  In a short amount of time the National Team became a powerhouse in the cycling world. 

Since I had done the No Lable Sprint Triathlon Last year I had a bit of a home course advantage.  I knew what went well last year and what didn't got well, or at least I thought I did. After looking at my numbers and comparing them with the number of other people at last year's race my idea of what had went well and had not were somewhat changed.  I made some adjustments to my race plan from last year with the following goals:

1) Improve the Swim by 30 seconds

2) Improve Transitions by 30 seconds

3) improve the Bike by 60 seconds

4) improve the Run by 60 seconds

5) beat the guy in my AG that beat me by 71 seconds last year.

I have got a lot of swim help this year.  Swimming has been a little inconsistent but I thought that I should see the improvements I needed there.  I could have just left it at that but if 1% better could live to big things I would going to dig deeper.  So I started to work on flip turns.  I have tried flip turns a few times in the past but since my focus in OWS races, I never stuck with it and never improved.  I worked on them for two weeks looking for that 2-3 second improvement.  I ultimately decided that I needed more practice and went back to the well polished touch turns for the race, but I was digging deep.

I looked at transitions and last year's race winner had an 11-second T1 whereas mine was 37 seconds.  Like flip turns, I have been resisting the shoes on the bike thing for years.  When I tried learning this before the non-tri-specific shoes that I had didn't have loops to do the rubber band trick to hold them up and they dragged on the ground tearing the leather all up and sticking and coming unclipped half the time.  Well, I thought I could least try to learn this again.  The shoes I have now are tri-specific and they have plastic on the heels so they were not getting scruffed up and damaged and they were self-adjusting to where they weren't hitting the ground and weren't coming unclipped.  After two weeks of training for the shoes on the pedals, I was confident enough to use that new skill on race day.  I also went sockless which is something I have only done in one previous race.  

The run and bike didn't have any new skills to learn.  I just had to do the skills I had been practicing for the 6-7years well but focus on the little things.  The results were pretty impressive.

Swim: 13' improvement

Transitions: 9' improvement

Bike: 54' improvement

Run: 52' improvement

Yes, I beat the guy in my AG that was ahead of me last year. I also beat the guy who is four cubicles away from me at the office who was 5th place overall at the race last year.  

I improve my overall finish from 9th place last year to 4th place this year.  1st place was a Junior Elite ranked 4th in the nation in his division who ran away with the win, but the separation from 2nd place to 10th place was just 75 seconds.  So every second counted. 

I think I could have easily improved 2 minutes on the bike.  If I had put all the eggs in one basket I think I would have still seen a 13' improvement on the swim, but I think I would have lost all that on transitions and if I had powered through the bike I think I would not have seen any improvement on the run and may have actually lost time on the run. 

I am pretty sure this is the first race I have done in my 7 years in the sport that I have improved in every area of a race.  I often will see a PR in 1-2 areas while other areas give up a little ground.  It then comes down to those long forum debates on what area of the triathlon is the most importaint to focus on with people siting example after example of people who won Kona with the fastest bike split stating that the bike is where it is at than other siting strong runners who come from the back to win it, and still others saying that their horse in the race hadn't trained enough for the swim and couldn't but the numbers in the bike or run because the swim was not taken seriously enough.    

Does Atomic Habits list the areas of Cycling that the British National Team were measuring and improving by 1%?  I was curious about what they were improving.  That must be the book that was the source of information for the address I heard in October.  If I dig deeper I will look it up. I won't get too hung up on how they did things and how it worked.  I did change my whole focus though for this one race and instead of focusing on seeing gains in the area with the lowest fruit I focus on finding small gains everywhere.  If I didn't have previous results to compare to I wouldn't have done this.

Thank you all for the encouragement and tracking yesterday! I have updated details on both my blog and in my race report - but bottom line is I have a new, serious knee pain issue/injury on the bike and it's to the point where I'm out of time for tweaks to my fit. There's no way I can do an Ironman in the condition I was in yesterday - the combination of pain between my knee, my hot foot and my shoulder is too much. 

So I've decided to withdraw from IM Des Moines. My sweet family was so supportive as I talked through it yesterday and today. I'm at peace with the decision and honestly relieved. I spent the afternoon cancelling all of my trip reservations (including the custom t-shirt order I just put in four days ago, ha! Luckily they hadn't made them yet and I got a full refund).

And yes I can't believe I recognized Ann Marie in transition yesterday! Totally by chance amongst 3,000 athletes I saw her walk by and was like WAIT! Is that Ann Marie! Sorry you had to turn in your chip but gosh you didn't miss much on the run. I looked today and saw the temps reached 90 degrees.

So, my plans for the near future are to mentally rest, nurse my knee, go on some long walks. I'm not sure I'll be doing triathlons again, but will be here cheering you all on - always!

Oh no! What a tough day for all the Manattees there.  I am so very sorry to hear this.

I decided to answer your good questions out loud. I've been trying to figure out what went wrong since it went wrong and really haven't come up with a clear answer. The ice cream jumps out at me though. That on top of my regular pre-race pizza could have been too much dairy. I also found out that PB&J is fine on training rides but even before I started feeling bad I did not want to eat it! So, I need to re-think that too.

Of course this had me questioning IM Choo!

Oh no, I'm sorry you developed that injury. Do you think it has anything to do with changing the type of cleats you use? Whatever the reason, it stinks! 

Long time, no post, but I've been following along on through email. Between Jim, Lisa and Anne-Marie, it sure looks like some tough going out there. I hope eveyrone takes a bit of time to get things worked through, mentally, physically, and emotionally.

Work has been a fecal festival and was supposed to ease up a bit but lo and behold, more changes and BS have hit, so I'll see how things shake out there. But I'll keep reading along, and please know that I am continuing to think about you all.