Beer Drinkers Appreciation Society (BDAS) 2023 Mentor Group - ALWAYS OPEN (Page 132)

22’ Z1 ride and 11’ interval run (6x20” Z5) done. Going to the ows practice swim in a couple of hours. Need to take my bike to the bike support at packet pickup, as she is making a weird noise that may be something rubbing, or may just be my imagination. Who knows at this point!! Gonna get it checked out before I check her in for the night.

T-22:50!

Not me, on my way down to France, it’s HOT!

All checked in and bags are packed and ready to go! The race is using Sportstats . com. I'm bib number 8036. I also add the individual link in case BT lets these links through the messenger (I'm not sure)

https://track.rtrt.me/e/SS-MICHIGANTITANIUM24#/tracker/list/RBWRALVZ

In true Gretchen fashion, it wouldn't be a me race without a little drama. Let's see...after the chip seal debacle of Thursday/Friday (which is all over now and the road actually looks pretty good this morning!), there was my wife (a MAJOR animal lover) seeing a deer get hit by a car while she was driving (thankfully, not our car!), and then the "impending catastrophic tire failure" of my day. I took my bike out for a little shake out ride this morning just to make sure I had gotten everything back on in the correct place after the drive and it just sounded a bit off. I'm not sure what was wrong (at the time) but it didn't sound right, it didn't really feel right, and I wasn't liking how it was overall. So we decided to have it checked out by the bike support team. I AM SO THANKFUL I DID!!!! The mechanic found some issues with my front tire that he thought "might be fine for tomorrow, but would need replaced before my next ride". Ummm...I'm leaving Monday morning for my next race and I have no idea where the dang bike shop is! Anyway...long story short (which I occasionally do know how to do)...he put a new tire on the front, adjusted my rear breaks, adjusted my bent derailleur, adjusted the shifting that was a bit wonky (apparently it is supposed to change gears every time you move the lever?!?!?! who knew!), and oiled my shifter cables because they were a bit sticky. All totaled, we spent more than an hour at the bike shop today--not my plan, but I at least feel really confident that my bike is in top form for the race tomorrow.

Bike dropped off at the race sight, dinner eaten, gatorade on boarding as we speak, and just in for the rest of the night chilling. I have even remembered to charge my watch, my power meter, my goggles, and my phone. Lists...there are many, many lists.

Today's training was 22' bike, 11' run, 20' swim. All felt okay (other than the aforementioned bike issues)

Gretchen just finished the bike. 47th OA.

And she's done. Looks like 15 and a half hours.

Well done Gretchen, there are no easy days doing a full Iron distance triathlon. Whatever challenges the day threw at you, you made it to that finish line, which is cause for huge celebration.

Looking forward to your feature length race report. But in the meantime, enjoy a bit of a rest.

Well done Gretchen! Looking forward to reading about it!

Hello from the South of France, it’s hot (37C, about 98 F). Tried to run little bit this morning, very slowly and not too long, still resting my achilles. Felt OK. Then 100 laps in the pool at least.

More later…but 30mph gusting winds made for a rough day on the bike, which spilled into the run (still windy& overclocked the bike)

But…won the Athena national championship again…(don’t ask me why it shows me in my AG in the results, that’s not how I registered)

Happy Monday everyone, and welcome to a new week!

@Gretchen - great job on your race and your win! Much respect for anyone who takes on the challenges of a full Ironman. You're amazing!!!

Easy weekend for me, no running, though a group of us got together for some ultimate frisbee, so some different kind of running took place. And my Achilles is much unhappy. Massage scheduled for this afternoon. Strength training this morning, with a solid lift, and 3x10 Deadlifts at 115lbs. Feeling great with the DL weights.

Here's to a new week - let's go get it!!!

Ahh Gretchen, congrats on the Athena win! Sounds ROUGH, but so glad you pushed through and crushed it. Can't wait to read the full report!

Nat, glad you're having a good time in France, though hopefully the weather cools off a little for you!

Robert, ultimate frisbee sounds fun! I've never been great at throwing a frisbee. One of those weird things that I just never did enough to master I guess. But it looks like such a fun sport!

Re: Mike's comment about our DB coach and the breathing thing...so when I started masters years ago, I would practice breathing less, b/c that is how we always practiced when I was growing up, and it made sense to me to get practice breathing less since, you know, your face is in the water...
Our coach told me I need to breathe every other stroke. I mainly swim at masters, and he will not stop telling you until you do it, so I eventually gave in and just started doing it. I now have no stamina in terms of holding my breath, so when I come off the wall I basically immediately need to breathe.
He was railing into the ladies I was sharing a lane with on Saturday about it, who are new to the team and I think pretty fresh out of swimming competitively growing up, so were questioning it and he went into a whole speech about it. Usually he does not coach Saturdays, just covers for our other coach when she's out. So yeah, it's one of the many annoying things that he drills into people and they either leave b/c they don't agree with him or just do it. I'd love to see research though that disagrees and send that to him so maybe he'll stop making a big deal about it.

I've learned to just laugh him off b/c he is not someone to admit when he's wrong, and I also don't know enough about it so have never pushed too hard. I just go to get in a solid workout lol

As for me, I obviously went to masters practice on Saturday. Got in 3000 yards and was destroyed after, but in a good way. I was 40 minutes late, but timed it perfectly to miss the paddle work, which I am not a huge fan of, so I call that a win

Yesterday I did SUP Yoga, which is super challenging but always a nice excuse to get out on the water. Did some adulting too, so yay! Had a solid weekend and am holding steady with my weight loss (sometimes I lose it over the weekend), so looking forward to a solid week!

Since we lost at playoffs last week, my vball season is over, so I'm going to hit up masters practice tonight.

Oh! And I ran this morning! Did 6 sets of 3 minute run/1 minute walk. Felt pretty good overall. Definitely slow, but didn't feel my hip/groin too much. Gonna try to get 2 more runs in this week to really push it and see how it's doing.

@Nicole - while I am nowhere near a professional swimmer, nor have I done anything with Masters swimming or anything like that...I feel like breathing every other stroke would be hard. I breathe every third stroke normally. If I want to work on breathing in endurance, I'll go to breathing every 4th stroke. My last go-round with triathlon years ago, I got to where I could breathe every 5th stroke consistently for 1000-1500m. Anecdotally, I feel like it helped with my oxygen economy on the run, and I was running low 9:xx pace easily then. But that's just my personal experience, so take it with a grain of salt.

I completely agree! It's definitely beneficial to have the extra lung capacity, both in swimming and beyond.
If I swam more on my own I would probably try breathing less often, it's just not worth the battle at swim practice. You've also missed prior conversations where this person has made me cry on multiple occasions, and also asked me many times how my "MRS Degree" is going, aka, how am I doing finding a husband, as if that is my main goal in life (it's definitely not). I really love the people on the team so keep going, and he's surprisingly gotten significantly better than when I first started, but I've definitely questioned finding another team before. It's also why I mostly only go to Saturday practices, b/c it's normally a different coach...lol

That being said, I did go to practice last night, and SURPRISE! It was a time trial night Now, I get the point of time trials, I really do. But I feel like I didn't get nearly the workout I wanted to in. It'd be better to do it during a 2 hour practice, then have an hour to keep swimming, but all I got in was 1600 yds.
I did learn that next Monday's practice is outside though (usually only Saturday is), so looking forward to that, especially knowing I will definitely NOT be doing a time trial, lol.

Not of a fan of people in coaching positions making people cry and treating them like that. Not cool.

1000m swim today on lunch. Would have gone farther, but got a haircut before heading to the pool, so I was running out of time on my lunch break.

Achilles drama-related news: the massage last night was amazing, and the therapist did a great job of finding a TON of sore spots on both legs. I feel amazing today, and my Achille is pain free...except now the lower outside of my calf muscle is a bit sore. I also talked with the Race Director about the half marathon, and I have three options on the table: 1. try the half marathon; 2. defer the half marathon to 2025; 3. change my registration to the 10k. He also said no hurry on it since the race isn't until October. So, I'm taking two weeks from running this time, lots of stretching / foam rolling, and going to stick with lifting and swimming in the meantime.

Well, watching the recent olympic swimming, yeah, they do breath a heck of a lot. So I suppose (to play devils advocate) he's kind of right. BUT, most of the time we're not doing a 200m all out 100% effort sprint, so our oxygen needs aren't as high and we can/should take less breaths. Also, if I were a coach trying to force breathing patterns on people, I'd think every 3rd of 5th stroke would be the goal. Lots of people struggle breathing on both sides (I'm one) so taking breaths on opposite sides and developing/practising that skill is good thing, especially for us open water swimmers.

No excuse or justification for the attitude/aggression your coach has. I think I've said before, I'd find a different masters group or swim on my own if I were you. It's just not worth it to spend time with someone like that.

@Robert, good to hear that your achilles is feeling better. 2 weeks off sounds like a plan, do you have any strengthening exercises for it? Stretch/massage etc. are all good, but you might need some targeted strengthening work to stop it reoccuring once you are able to restart running.

@Nicole, Your swim coach continues to be a douche. Nice work with the SUP yoga (very impressive, I have no core strength so any yoga is impressive for me, on a SUP without swimming every pose doubly so) and running again. I think so long as you space the 2 more runs out you should be fine. 1 day between to recover.

@Gretchen, Congratulations on another division win! Epic. A windy bike sucks so much energy out of you, good job getting it done. Pacing the bike correctly so you run well (I've never done it in my 2 Ironmans) is one of the hardest things in long distance triathlon, doubly so when conditions don't play nice. You should be proud of yourself getting to that finish line.

So, after 2 weeks of hoping it'd go away on its own, I followed the advice I give everyone else and went to a physiotheripist to get my sore knee looked at. Long story short, Dr Mikes excellent internet diagnosis is correct and I've got patella tendonitis. (to be confirmed with a scan later this week). The good news is the physio thinks we've caught this at a relatively early stage, so hopefully won't be the end of the world to get treated.

I've got a selection of exercises to do, every day for the next 6 weeks. A selection of bridges/squats/lunges etc. and I'm to cycle 20 minutes before each workout.

For running, well that's not great but could be worse. He's happy for me to run 3 times a week, around my 'normal' duration. So about an hour each run. It's better than being told nothing, but 12 weeks out from a planned marathon that's not great. I'd say I'm probably now at 50:50 odds of actually doing the marathon. We'll see what the scan comes back with, If it's not too bad then we'll try to move through the rehab process faster, but I'm not banking on that.

The good news is the Physio is happy for me to substitute some of the 3-4 canceled runs a week with bike rides. So looks like zwift is going to get a hammering over the next couple of months.

Ultimately, I've always believed this is a long game. It's more important to me to be fit and healthy and able to go for a run 20-30 years down the track than it is to force myself through any specific training run or even a marathon this year. And if I had to choose a short term goal, Ironman NZ in march, out ranks the marathon in november. So on all counts it's better to take the step back now for a few months and get things right.

Bah Humbug.

@Andrew I do have some strength exercises for the calves from both my primary doctor as well as a close friend who is also a physiologist sports doctor.

Also, I'm with you that this is all a long game. While we enjoy the short term and love the short term goals, this is all about the long term goals of staying healthy and fit. The benefits of three sports is we have back up disciplines available if one goes down, such as running for us.

Good luck with your knee, and I hope you get back to full health soon!