SBR "U" (Page 55)

I'll believe that when hell freezes over.

(I trust you see what I did there.)

I love this, Salty! I will never forget the summer day in 1993 when I was sitting on a boat after a long bike ride watching my triathlete friends swim off to an island in the distance and thinking to myself, "Wow! how awesome would that be to actually be able to SWIM somewhere?!?" The next week I joined a gym with a pool and started to learn how to swim. That is really the thing that does it for me: being prepared enough (mentally, physically, skillfully) to actually travel someplace under your own power. That is what is really awesome about your #2! I guess that is why I am not so whiled about races or events with loops or laps, and really like the rare point-to-point events that I have been able to participate in.

Jason - you still have the 975, right? I would on infrequent occasions get weird stuff like that happening with mine when it would rain. Never happens with my Riken.

I actually thought Quarq did issue a firmware update to do this, but I just checked and it seems I imagined it. I am not exactly sure how they would do this though. It is easy to do with a power tap for instance, as it resets the zero offset whenever it gets rpms but no force (i.e.: coasting). Quarq (and Vectors, for that matter) do the same thing, but you have to turn the pedals backwards to get RPMs with no force applied. Vectors supposedly handled the drift better than Quarq with better temperature compensation, but now the newest Quarqs claim to even BETTER compensation, so in a way I suppose it is just an arms race of accuracy, or at least consistency.

I see that the Canadian Alcatraz sandbagging effort continues......  

Hey - thanks a million fro the translation, Marc - I honestly cannot even make out many of the letters, much less the words! II have to admit that I was hoping it was some sort of description to the location of buried treasure.

Now that I really think about it, I suppose maybe it really is, but you are just not telling me.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

You're right.  I'm not stopping until all this bloody white stuff is gone!

And you'll still beat me out of the water (and off the bike and run!)

You got it way worse than the rest of us - but I own a treadmill now.  By next year I'm going to be like Lionel Sanders and Cody Beals and completely forego the outdoors (no not really).  But I do admit to skipping an hour run this past weekend and choosing the treamdill instead.  I'm a little under the weather and didn't fancy running when it was a little overcast and windy, so I stayed in the basement, put on a cycling video from Youtube and ran...and liked it.

As another aside, one of the best purchases I made was a Roku stick.  I stream Youtube onto the basement TV, and watch all the Spring Classics while on the trainer or treadmill.  Seems EuroSport is okay with their HD versions being available on Youtube - love it.

How do you guys all manage frequent racing?

Marc, you touched on your percentages in your RR  a little. 

Have you all just done a little trial and error about how hard to go in each race, how much recovery then how much of a cut-down leading into the next one? 

I feel a little overwhelmed by the amount of variables. I don't really know what is working and what is not. I am doing well in my races relative to the other competitors but that isn't exactly telling. It's such a hard thing about trail racing. The numbers just don't mean much so it's really all about feel. But how the heck do you measure progress on feel? It all feels hard lol. 

RR from Galveston is up here.

Note that this is, by far, the longest one I've written.  Maybe the longest one written.    But, after the discussion here on for what RR's are useful, I thought through what I'd learned and just put it all to (electronic) paper.  Lots (and lots) of learnings for me.

Moliere (and Rusty) are safe from feeling any competition for turn of phrase, but it was fun to reflect upon and write up.

You might, however, want to already be one beer in before you start reading...

Matt

I've done it by treating them as hard workouts. Day before and after has tended to be really easy (sometimes off) as races seem to take more out of me than a hard workout would even though stats from the race performance say it should be otherwise.

For off-road and especially hilly stuff I tend to look at HR more for the effort. For pacing and watching what it does to get the size of it. With the increased skill needed for the more technical running it is a bit harder to tell about execution, but at least this helps with effort. If you don't want to add that in then you might still get a reasonable estimate just based on the overall time to complete the race and figure the drain sorta close to a road race of similar duration. (We'll get you to understand Normalized Power one way or other!  

You can still keep track of your fitness by how well your normal workouts are going. The technical skills of running the trails can be a bit tougher. At the moment I'm only thinking of vague notions of things like seeing how good you're doing compared to others. It is a series, so maybe you'll see some people again.

I'm exhausted and just looked for pictures, so was rather disappointed. 

Another long-winded Galveston 70.3 RR: http://www.beginnertriathlete.com/discussion/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=531563&posts=1#M5112183 

I wish that I could be respected for my mind instead of JUST my body.  

Hehe.

If it makes you feel better, I'd be fine if none of the pics had you in them.

Normalized whaaaa? The fuuuuuuu??

Nah, I see what you are saying. HR actually would be really interesting. I'm super reluctant to add any kind of tech to the mix (I forget my watch 90% of the time for my workouts) But man, that data would actually be really fun to look at with these big mountain ascents. Hmmmmm....

I'm concerned about my heart exploding on the Pikes Peak Ascent. At least if/when it does, there would be a digital evidence. 

I find this really insightful - most of us have no clue what's going on internally, but I've read in the past that recovery from a marathon can take up to 3-5 weeks, even though we "feel" recovered and are again actively training.

Marc/Matt - both of you followed HR numbers closely during your races.  Curious what your individual bpm's equate to in terms of HR zones.  Were you targetting starting out in Z1/2, drift to Z3 by 3/4 of the race and then hold Z4 or higher for the last portion - stuff along those lines.  I've yet to have a really good run in a HIM and part of that I put down to believing my abilities extend beyond reality come race day.  I'd like my strategy to be as realistic as possible this time round - even if that doesn't fit with the pace I would "like" to hold.

Neil, I watch HR a lot too. For a HIM run, it's going to start out higher as you've been rather active coming into it from the swim & biking done. It's been a few years since I've done one, but in a good one before I started solidly in Z3 and over the first mile it rose up about the edge of Z3/Z4 which is right around where I wanted it to be. In the late parts of the run it went up a bit into Z4, but still off threshold. I didn't have the run base to try pushing harder for that one with some injuries in the earlier parts of the year. So HR may go up some, but not really lots.

I also find zones to sometimes be difficult to use for discussion, as there are a few methods or ways of understanding them.  So, here's how I go at it and you can fit the percentages into your zone method of choice.  I should also say that some of the target LTHR numbers are a combination of previous testing and how I feel, rather than a recent test (so they could be off a bit, but based on experience, not by a lot).

My LTHR is ~164-165 on the run (maybe a couple beats higher?) and ~160-161 on the bike.  My max on the run is 179 (seen only once or twice in the last several years during a sprint at the line in a hard 5k). 

I targeted 140-145 with a 150 do not exceed on the bike, so about 87-90% of LTHR.  My average was 141 with only one excursion over 150 (to stay legal, which sometimes you can't help).

I targeted 155 or so for the first 10 miles of the run and then wanted to see if I could hold closer to 165 for the last 5k.  My last two HIMs, I was so muscularly fatigued that I couldn't "pick 'em up and put 'em down" fast enough to drive my HR up.  It was a max effort just to hold to a slight decline over the last couple miles, so I wanted to see if I could do it differently this time (was thinking all my running slow when I wasn't supposed to run fast - which I had not done in previous training where I ran either medium or fast-ish - would help, but wanted to test it).  So, ~93-94% of LTHR for 10 miles and then at threshold for the last 5k.

In the event, I managed a 154 average HR.  It was a couple beats higher through mile seven, when I decided to walk the aid stations.  Then it was a few to 10 beats higher over the last mile and a half.  Not sure if the slower middle miles allowed me to finish strong, or if the difference in run training method (slow unless you're supposed to be going fast) made the difference, but I was able to push the pace and HR at the end - which I could not do the previous 2 HIMs (a side note to your question, but it impacted my HR).

I paid no attention to my per mile pace or my overall time on this race, given my ingoing goals.  That actually made the HR piece even more interesting to me during the race (and after).  In the heat that developed on the run, I think this actually was to my great advantage, as I suspect that keeping from blowing up probably allowed me an overall faster pace than if I'd held to a specific mile pace.

Makes me think about target paces (and power) for specific course and weather conditions and the HR that would result - and the overall stress, too.  I'm pretty sure there is a killer excel model to be made here, but I'm tired and need a beer. 

Matt