• No internet connection
• A lake that would be warm enough to swim in with a wetsuit at any time of day or night without getting swimmers itch
• Good roads for cycling with some real hills when compared to the ‘fake hills’ around Edmonton
• Trails to run that would be easy on my feet and knees compared to running on asphalt
• No need to drive for hours on end to get there and back

I planned to station myself at the lake from Sunday afternoon through ’till Friday evening and basically do five things… swim, bike, run, eat and sleep. It worked pretty good. I led into it with one of the toughest rides of the year so far, an overdistance ride with Stefan at approximately race effort on Saturday followed by a brick run. Sunday morning I snuck in another easy 3.5 hours ride and then headed to the lake where I rode again and ran for an hour. Monday I logged an hour in the lake, four and half on the bike including quite a bit of IMeffort intensity, and a brick run. Tuesday kicked off with another hour in the lake, six on the bike and an hour transition run. Wednesday I took easy in the lake with a half hour splash, then ran a challenging 3×10km workout aiming to run race-pace for the final 10kms and see how it felt. I had been pretty scared of doing this workout while tired during my rides and runs on Monday and Tuesday and had gotten nice and nervous about it while I anticipated it and while I ran the first two 10km loops getting ready to unleash “IMpace” at the end of it. In the end it felt great and so did the 2hours aboard the bike afterwards to loosen up the running muscles. I had crossed halfway mentally in the week and had a couple tough rides left before I’d have to tackle another IMpace run on Friday. Thursday was to be a big day, I logged an hour of IMeffort swimming, hopped aboard the bike quickly and logged an hour of IMeffort riding and then continued on to net 190kms on the day including a little race against an impending thunderstorm placing another hour of IMeffort in at the end between 4.5 and 5.5 hours as though I were finishing off my ride into Penticton in four weeks time. I finished the day off off with an easy half hour jog after supper to make sure I hit all three sports in the day. Friday started out in the lake for an hour and then I netted four and a half pretty hilly hours on the bike with the last two at IMeffort where I racked up a total of 74.8kms when riding my rather tired body down the road. My heart rate wouldn’t come up like it should, an indicator that I had successfully tired myself out, but the speed was still good so I kept at it and hyped myself up on cola to keep trucking along. When I hit the transition run I sucked back some more coke for another caffeine boost and ran 12.4 kms in 60 minutes, a goal IM effort brick to wrap up the week. Pheuff, it’s tiring just typing it!

The effect of all these shenanigans was that I reached the highest Acute Training Load I’ve ever done in my life (50 units). I also got my 7day volume up to 45.5 hours at one point (shy of my 51.5 hour record). I also got my 7day bike distance over 1000kms which is a good confidence booster as well, I managed to ride my rear tyre all the way down through the rubber to the bare casing while I was at it. Somewhere along the way, I’m not certain exactly where, I acquired the confidence that I’m getting ready to race in Penticton and I think that’s really the main point of this blog post. I’ve got another couple weeks of working hard but I feel like I’m ready for them and then things are starting to back off as I taper for race-day.

Here are some cool graphs – the first is a meteoric rise in training stress (purple-acute, red-chronic) indicating I will race in Penticton in the best racing shape of my entire life (green-race readiness):

Thursday’s ride: (T=(0->1hour and 4.5->5.5hours at IMeffort)

Friday’s confidence boosting 1 hour brick run at IMpace after 2 hours IMeffort on bike:

So, to introduce, I’ll start by sticking with the input/output comparison in the pool. I’ve learned pretty well how hard I can go for a 25m sprint, a 50m sprint, a 100m sprint, a 200m sprint, a 400m swim, a 750m swim, a 2000m swim and a 4000m swim. The keen observer here will note that along the way I switched from sprint to swim, that’s a mental input. Do I think I’m sprinting or do I think I’m swimming? I also have a pretty good idea of how fast I can go for each one of these efforts… read the other blog posts on swimming if you’re keen to find that out. The result in swimming is that the inputs are tied to the outputs. In basically all circumstances with a few exceptions, really choppy water, really cold water, wearing a wetsuit, etc. I know what effort-input it takes to result in what kind of pace-output.

In cycling the effort levels are generally not tied to the outputs via much of any calculation. For example. I did a 20km TT two weeks ago during training at an average HR of 154bpm (input) and netted an average speed of 40.94 kph (output). The next weekend I did a 40kmTT, and for the sake of comparison, I’ll just compare the halves, also each 20km efforts. I averaged a HR of 173bpm (input) and only netted myself 31.76 kph (output). In the second half. I netted myself 46.01kph (output) for 169bpm (input) during the second half. Now, there’s a few things to note here:

1. The wind was headwind for the first half and tailwind for the second half, lending to the obvious discrepancy between speeds. The input was similar on both halves of the ride but the output was very different.
2. The net result of the 40kmTT was a 171 bpm average giving me only ~37.6 kph. Does that seem right? Well, maybe the hills make me work harder and the wind makes me go slower. But really? an extra 15bpm of input and I get a massive 4kph slash in output? Something is wrong… it’s called riding with a flat tyre. Once again, inputs are not tied to outputs.
3. Both of these inputs come in the thick of training. The resulting output is less than it would be if I were to apply the same input when freshened up. Arguably this is a modification of input levels between heavy training and fresh racing, I’ll accept that, but when the indicators of effort are generally perceived with the exception of heart-rate (which is only an indicative variable), then you’re best to work with the shifting perceptions as your inputs.

All this being said, the point isn’t really so much that I could have been a lot faster in the 40kmTT as it is that how fast you go in a 40kmTT is unfortunately pretty arbitrary. The inputs and outputs in cycling are kinda bunk, but that’s OK so long as you don’t use outputs all the time to train and race. If we go back to the “Swim, Fly, Run” strategy for triathlon, there’s still a matter of how hard you’re flying, and that should be something that’s dependent on distance and the demands of the race. So here’s my breakdown, perhaps you find the markers to be similar, perhaps you find them to be different:

• Racing cyclocross I often could average 176-178 bpm for a 40-55 minute race. Cyclocross is a rather full-body version of cycling with lots of punchy-climbs out of the saddle and run ups off the bike etc. Doing that kind of HR on the bike when just using legs is more like a 5-10 minute best effort. If I can average above 170bpm while on a bike, I’m likely climbing out of the saddle at a HARD pace or really killing myself on the bike in an interval set, or drilling myself into oblivion in a TT. I usually can get it to spike up to there on almost any given day if I decide I really need to. I basically never can get it above 185bpm, although when doing VO2 testing I have managed to break 200bpm each time I’m on the bike, and have two people yelling in each ear not to quit yet.
• The following are Triathlon specific intensity zones. What’s appropriate for road racing is generally what it takes to do what you want to do with the peloton. You don’t get to decide, and as such I don’t need to describe.
• I treat Olympic effort as, mouth open breathing hard, need mental reminders more than every minute to keep the pace up. I also feel like I can taste it when I’m going hard enough. Perhaps this is psychosomatic, it might also be that once the blood lactate level gets up your taste and smell receptors do indeed start to pick up on it. It could also be that you’re breathing out a high concentration of CO2 and somehow you pick that up. In any case, I do use that taste marker as well. When TTing at that kind of effort it’s all upper leg limited strength it seems, and glutes, if I really go hard towards the end of the hour I can get a bit tight in my lower back. Calves always feel like they’re getting a free ride when going this hard. Observed HRs are 160-165bpm.
• Half Ironman effort is basically where I’m at if I decide to go hard but don’t feed myself those mental reminders every 30seconds to keep pushing the pace. It’s a focused effort, I like to mentally focus on trying to ride as though I’m trying to maintain momentum at this pace. Keep the hard pressure on the pedals so there are no lapses in putting out the good power but I don’t need to be trying to incessantly accelerate. Last summer during my HIM races I made a point of taking note of how I felt at halfway, if I was on schedule with nutrition I gave myself permission to work a bit harder on the second half so long as I didn’t get a sore back. HIM effort for me is an eating threshold: meaning I can put stuff down my esophagus and it gets digested, or at least it definitely doesn’t come back up. I could maybe eat stuff when going at Oly effort if chewing it didn’t disrupt my breathing ability. When at the training camp in Penticton this spring I was often heckled for getting to the top of a climb and starting to peel a banana or open a bar to eat before we went down the other side. They thought I was showing off that I wasn’t going hard, I was just generally hungry. Some people will put their eating threshold down at a lower effort level than this, but this is where mine is. Just like the taste marker I use for Olympic type effort, the eating threshold is a personal preference of mine for Half Ironman effort. It works well for me so I use it. Observed HRs are usually around 150, capped at 155. (20kmTT average HR was 154bpm, came after 90kms into the ride. the output here – although I just told you not to use it – of ~41kph is an approximate Half IM bike pace, and being at the top end of the spectrum it would be a fast one!)
• Ironman effort. This seems like a full balanced leg effort, upper and lower legs, little to no strain through my lower back. Try to stay relaxed in my oblique abs and disconnect the upper body from the lower body to stay calm. I’d characterize the effort level as what I could chat with someone with one sentence at a time. Not a full discussion. Can close my mouth and breath through my nose if I’m chewing for a while without getting out of breath. Maintaining enough mental focus to keep the pressure on the pedals at all times but devoting mental attention to peripheral details like staying relaxed through my shoulders and upper arms, keeping my head in an aerodynamic position (I basically never ride with my aero helmet on but I often pretend like I am so that when I do put it on it doesn’t go sideways into the wind.) HR 135-140. I can’t climb a hill out of the saddle at this HR. It’s impossible unless I get a triple chainring. If I’m going up a considerable hill the HR comes up, guaranteed into mid 140’s. The physicist in me says it’s OK to work a bit harder on the uphills than on the flats. The extra effort is more favorably being translated into moving me forward faster rather than pushing air harder, so the return on investment is favorable.
• Long ride average HRs wind up around 115-130bpm. 130bpm only if I’m by myself and not sucking a draft at all. Minimum HRs while riding my bike (should probably call it sitting on my bike and turning pedals… hardly call it riding) is 100bpm. I’ve scored a couple rides below 100bpm this year already, they’re not useless, they’re enjoyable, and when the primary goal is to have fun I find it ridiculous to say that I shouldn’t do them.

There’s 5 inputs here, and that’s enough for triathlon in my opinion. There are a couple more input levels necessary to race well at cyclocross and race well in road racing, both of them are on the top end, they’re needed to train for the start in ‘cross, mashing gears to climb the barely climbable, running the sandpit, and for periods of the road race where a selection is being made. None of these things happen in a traditional non drafting on the road triathlon, and aren’t so necessary to distinguish, not that they don’t happen during training, for example on group rides, but they are used sparingly.

The first is the mid-night arrival of part of our skiing crew. My cell phone rang a few minutes before 4 am and I was up out of bed to let in a Lesley and Pat who had spent the night driving Highway 2 in less than ideal conditions to accommodate a late night flight into Edmonton International. I was excited to get out of the house and go right then instead of heading back to bed, but sleep definitely was on the menu for the wearied travelers. Waking up at what would normally be a very lazy hour the next morning we loaded up and set out for the trailhead after a dose of caffeine and a few bites of breakfast. I can’t speak from personal experience but it seemed like enough sleep was had during those short hours by my skiing comrades to recharge adequately for a day in the mountains. Either that, or there was significant horsepower being absorbed by osmosis from the beautiful surroundings that we were skiing through. Considering the number of disclaimers placed that they had few skills and little prior experience they were quick on the uptake. Pat started out as a rather shaky kneed skier but gathered his wits about him quite quickly. Luckily though, I was the one carrying a dozen eggs.

We made good time along the trail, not because we were traveling exceedingly fast but mostly just due to the fact that we weren’t taking very long of breaks. That and a little bit of not wanting to be going “too slow” while leading the group meant that whoever was up front was huffing along and then the others didn’t want to let them get out of our sights. Then whomever else took over felt the need to keep up the pace, the problematic pattern perpetuated itself and subsequently some solid skiing ensued. We’d made a good choice with the waxes and no-one struggled much which was a huge bonus for the morale. Additionally we were left some encouragement in the snowbanks along the way by our friends who were up the trail by a few hours.

Our arrival at the cabin was earlier than anticipated and we had nearly caught the other 7 members of our group who were just taking off their boots when we pulled up. It was about this time that we unloaded food onto the table from our respective bags and realized the magnitude of the task at hand. It was going to be quite a feat to even eat half of the food we’d brought in.

The menu for the trip wasn’t meager pickings for (at least) seven reasons.

1. Carrying good food makes it easier to rationalize why you have a heavy pack. If it’s full of stuff you only marginally want to eat it could lead to complaining. If it’s all gourmet, there is less opportunity to bemoan sore shoulders and an aching back.
2. No-one has ever developed scurvy in two days but we certainly didn’t want to risk it. Better bring some fresh vegetables for our omellettes to ensure we don’t develop anything like that. We were bringing along a med-student but not a real doctor to diagnose and treat big problems like scurvy, better to rather play it safe than sorry!
3. Pat needed to be fed, and everyone knows that he can really pack it away when he decides to.
4. Olives, figs and wine were good enough for all those Roman emperors so they’re good enough for us too. And if Marcus Aurelius would have known to have stuffed his olives with Camembert I’m sure he would have been all over that too.
5. I’d heard concerns about Oatmeal being too boring, so the obvious solution would be to bring it up a notch with cranberries and orange zest.
6. Good chocolate keeps the ladies happy – fact!
7. This was New Years and we were supposed to be celebrating!

Our stay was two nights and our intermediary day was spent on a day-excursion from the hut up towards Assiniboine Pass. The attempt would end at 2:30 when we had to make the prudent choice to turn around instead of pushing onwards to see what we may or may not be able to see from the pass proper. The day ski had us enjoying a fine balance of gently falling snowflakes and sufficient visibility to enjoy the surrounding vistas. If it had been any more clear, the beauty and vastness of the entire valley at once could have been too overwhelming for us; and like I said, we only had a med-student along and not a doctor to perform a potentially necessary resuscitation. There was also a moose spotted along the trail, it had a beard but was definitely still female.

Following our excursion we cooked up some fine tomato lentil curry on rice with a side of garlic butter mashed potatoes and gravy for dinner. After giving our stomachs a lengthy 4 minutes to digest the meal we pulled out the figs, olives, chocolate, crackers & Camembert, cookies and pistachios and got into the port. There was a short debate as to which time zone we planned to celebrate new years in. A long and tiring day of skiing by some parties had them voting to even celebrate on a half hour increment representative of Newfoundland. The suggestion was quickly overruled and Dave set an emergency alarm in case we all somehow managed to fall asleep before midnight, to wake us up at ten to twelve. A few games of speed scrabble ensued, amazingly everyone was able to win a round, some Garden Beans were grown, traded and harvested. There were some stories recounted and then, sooner than anyone would have guessed, there was an alarm going off and the countdown had begun towards the beginning of 2010.

The masses bundled up in multi-coloured down jackets, fleece pants, mitts, toquies and hut booties and then headed outdoors to ring in the New Year from the boundless serenity of the creekbed instead of the cramped quarters of the cabin. Predictably some hilarity ensued, and upon return to the cabin we headed out to kick off the new year with a short ski through the night under a full moon.

The next morning we were treated to a few patches of blue sky, an excellent breakfast of cheese and chive eggs on english muffins with cranberry orange oatmeal, and we were off. Once rolling we were rather quiet as a group. I’m not certain on the reasons why. Perhaps people were exhausted from a few long days in the outdoors without much sleep, maybe they were mad about someone absentmindedly dripping paraffin on the red bean crop, perchance they were concentrating too hard on not falling over to have a conversation, or possibly they were just sick of being with one another. My guess is that is was none of these: we were too captivated by the beams of sunshine coming down through the forest, too busy relishing the glimpses of mountaintops peaking through the gaps amongst the trees, and finding ourselves entranced by the swishing sound of our skis along the tracks pressed into the snow. It was a contented silence. In the week since, that’s one bit of the trip that I’ve been consistently revisting in my mind. The closest thing to contented silence I’ve had since being back in the city was scrubbing the kitchen floor with my head in front of a dishwasher that was loud enough to drown out the rest of the sounds in the house. Obviously it’s almost time to get out of town again!

The ski out was fantastically exciting and we made good time down much of the descent towards the cars. The mile-long-hill was almost as much fun on the way up as it was on the way down two days earlier and soon enough we were standing in the parking lot making comments about not really wanting to be done yet.

By day 3 the shaky kneed Pat was still a rather shaky kneed skier but he was a heck of a lot more confident and quick as evidenced by the following video footage of the weekend. (Lesley’s out front in Pink, Pat’s just in front of me). Clip 1 is from the tail end of Day 2 and Clip 2 is from early on Day 3.

My full gallery of my backcountry trips over the Christmas break is here and Dave’s Flickr set of the trip is here.

I started writing this bit earlier last week but had to postpone posting it until I could flesh out a few paragraphs after a fantastic ski trip. So it’s not in time for the 2010 list making that happened last week, but I don’t think that really matters. Readers who were going to read it will likely read it anyways, that’s what readers do – by definition.

1. We’re greedy, selfish, love prejudice and are still somewhat racist – perhaps that’s not the most politically correct means by which to kick off a review of the decade, but the specifics making me note this fall chronologically near the beginning of the 200Xs for myself. Spending a year away from Canada in 2000-2001 highlighted the fact that typically we like ourselves a lot and we don’t like other people all that much. My own experience was probably magnified by being in my early teens at the time, the age that’s arguably got the meanest peers of any age for everyone. My own situation as the foreign kid made that all the trickier. I was the only boy in the grade with long hair I was the only one with an accent. I was one of a few from the village three towns down the road from school. I was too tall. I was damn good at maths. I had the wrong shoes for with the school uniform. I didn’t get the right food packed in my lunch (Mom fixed that one quickly though). I fit no molds and while the prejudices I experienced were rather tame compared with the ethnic cleansing experienced by many people groups around the globe they were certainly noticeable to a wee little GCSE student.
   Oh well, back to Canada in the summer of 2001 I’d escape being the subject of these prejudices, and that should hopefully reduce the amount of tension I felt surrounding this issue. But boom, September 2001 rolls around. Maybe I’m more aware now, or just older, or it’s more extreme than it has been before, but there’s racist commentary all over the place. Everyone Arab is suddenly a terrorist. How did that work? Maybe I needed to have experienced prejudices from the being-dealt end before I had reason to feel uncomfortable finding myself at the dealing-out end. Not a lot has changed by the end of the decade, nearly every media outlet I’m influenced was spewing reports about the climate change summit in Copenhagen. None of it made me happy. There’s an entire global community trying to sit around a pie, and debating how to slice up that pie, and every single nation at the table needs to have an above average slice. All the big polluters want some version of a cap and trade system, yet no system based on cap and trade knows how to distribute the quota. From what I understand, the quota distribution system has basically been proven by economists to not work in the long run. Unfortunately that’s the system the big players are pushing for because they know that if they can weasel their way into an unfair share of the global quota for emissions then while the whole world has to tighten their belts they will have to tighten their belts the least. Alberta will profit from this, I know it, and it makes me sick.
   Intentionally trying to deny developing nations an equal shot at using the planet’s resources is just as self-serving as a game called: “Make a flamethrower out of an aerosol deodorant can and try to light the Canadian kid’s hair of fire in the locker room at school.” Maybe it’s because once we’re grown up we find bigger and more complicated words to use to mean the same thing as ‘bullying’.
2. It was this decade that I made a realization world conflict was current. I distinctly remember watching the BBC news in the living room at our home on School Lane, Staveley Cumbria UK. There was footage from what I only remember was some Serbian conflict in Macedonia sometime in the spring of 2001. There was house to house and street to street armed conflict being shown between people who looked too much like me. I remember being somewhat shocked, sure there were wars going on, but from what I understood, Canada, America and Europe had their shit together we were too intelligent, too highly developed, and too “good” (whatever that means) to rely on anything but diplomacy to set things straight in the world. Canada’s army was for sending on peacekeeping missions with the UN, and that was something that should be highly respected. We were so well advanced in my mind, and we should be proud of it. Our soldiers went to Honduras to help out after hurricanes, or to help dig people out of the rubble after big earthquakes, no soldier that I identified with ever did anything that I didn’t think was good. Wars, genocide and armed conflict happened in places like Rwanda or Chechnya, Israel sometimes bombed what I understood to be “the bad guys” in Lebanon. These weren’t people like me. It’s not like I was out of the loop on the whole Kosovo conflict during the late 90s, but up until this point in life I don’t think I’d realized that this wasn’t too foreign. Perhaps, just because they were fighting, they weren’t at all like me. Perhaps it was the fact that I was now in Europe and the footage was from that afternoon and being shown hours later on the same continent. I remember this distinctly to be a perspective changing occasion, my reality was not as peaceful as I thought it was. People just like me fight, and kill each other. Whoa, what an eye opener for a random weekday afternoon.
   This only happened mere months before September 11, 2001 and mere months after that Canada was off an fighting in a war in Afghanistan. These events weren’t such a hard pill to swallow after the TV broadcast that spring, I seemed to know by then that the world was less at peace than I might have imagined earlier.
3. Pope John Paul II died in April 2005. The world paused for a while it seemed, this man had done so much for humanity during his life that absolutely the entire world took note when he passed on. I didn’t know a whole lot about the man, probably average for the average person outside of the Catholic church, but the way things seemed to pause worldwide when he passed away grabbed my attention. It seemed that the whole world converged on Vatican City to pay their respects to this man who had played such an important role in the history of the world. This fascination by the general public meant that I also started to learn about the Catholic church, and when the media died down I kept on going. This would lead initially to just paying attention, but later beginning to attend weekly mass, reading a few excellent books and taking elective courses through the Catholic college on campus. Pope John Paul II’s death was actually rather immaterial to myself but this set in motion a significant change in perspective and appreciation for differing views and values within the ecumenical church.
4. Perhaps this is the only thing on the list that occurred at a certain time and made the impact right away. Most of the others were events that occurred over months, or catalysts for perspective changes that occurred over the course of years. This happened over the course of maybe 20 minutes one Friday evening in front of the TV in the basement. Bono was giving a speech at the federal Liberal Party convention. It was the night where Paul Martin was taking over leadership from Jean Chretien. Bono took the stage and made a strong case for the power of our nation to do good in the world. He suggested that this period of history would be remembered for three things, the internet, the war on terror, and the lack of the first world’s involvement in the affliction plaguing the continent of Africa. That being a combination economic suppression through debt and exploitation as well as AIDS destroying entire generations of lives. It was a combination of compelling statistics as well as sincere human to human communication. The case was made in my mind for two things; first that there were real things that could be done on a super huge scale to make amends for some of the problems facing different areas on the planet. That if federal governments around the world decided to make it a priority to improve aspects of the global community thing would actually change for the better. Second, he changed how I thought about how I could view my government. If I believed that the potential existed to make positive change in the world, then I should be considering which federal party campaigning to form a government was going to behave most appropriately in that global community, not just for what they could provide me. I was for the first time thinking as a resident of planet earth, rather than as a resident of the overprivileged nation of Canada. I recall the speech relatively frequently when thinking about global issues and definitely every time I’ve been able to cast a ballot since then. If you want to read it, someone graciously typed out the Full Speech and posted it online.
5. It was about mid-decade that Canada changed the legislation governing same sex marriage. This, according to my understanding, was the turning point for gay rights in our country. It seemed that over the course of the previous few years there was an ever increasing frustration with the issue swirling around in the public media, and within different circles of conversation that I participated in. Following approximately 2005, when the same-sex marriage legislation battle came to a close within Canada, there has been a chance for the whole country to calm down and catch it’s breath. I’m certain that this has been for the better. All of the slippery slope arguments that had been made over the course of the previous years failed to hold any water. Religious officials had maintained their right to treat marriage as their traditions saw fit, no-one was trying to marry their pets, and no-one was force-feeding our children messages about their sexual orientation. Society had unambiguously improved, freedom had been granted to a slice of the population without taking anything away from the rest of it. Hallelujah! My own experience relating to the actual issue however, was rather unattached. I didn’t write any letters or join any protests, but I was content to see things change, with me on the sidelines.
   A year later, I was confronted face to face by someone I really respected about almost everything. How could I say I was going to vote for the Liberal party in the 2006 federal election when they had legalized same sex marriage? I was caught totally off guard by that statement. I remember anticipating that the discussion of who we would be voting for in the 2006 election was going to be about something like healthcare, or environmental issues, or the gun registry, or dealing with fallout from the sponsorship scandal, or a fiscal imbalance between the federal and provincial governments… One of those issues that the media kept pushing. Nope, I was mistaken, the question went something like this: If I agreed that biblical teaching was that the God-designed plan for relationships and families was between a man and a woman, how could I support any federal party that would permit otherwise? I distinctly remember having to pause and collect my thoughts for a bit. Well, the fact of the matter was that I wasn’t opposed to that. Actually, I was in support of it. The presence of committed relationships between people of all orientations was undeniable, and it wasn’t going to change because someone else was going to label it as sinful. What good was it going to do in the world to prevent some people from participating in a social structure that was largely run by the government, the insurance guys, and the tax-man?
   The discussion turned into a great one, ideas flowed about our largely undeveloped ability to listen to the needs of other people rather than decide what their needs were. The problem solving strategies that we’d been force fed through school and then university, more often than we’d like to admit were trying to cram round plugs into square holes. If there was a bit more listening and less strategical approaches taken in real life we’d soon realize that our plans for others’ issues had our own fingerprints all over them. Our home-grown solutions unfortunately don’t start out custom designed for other situations. In the subsequent months there was a lot of good that came out of what started as a really tense situation. A ton of trust was developed because, as I recall it, we were actually listening to each other once in a while.
6. Lance Armstrong won his 7th consecutive Tour de France during the summer of 2005. I spent that month of July generally in recovery mode from spending May and June sick in bed. The result was a lot of TV watching, and a new found love for the sport of bike racing. It was a realization for me that I was far more interested in this sport than most others, there seemed to be very little luck in the game, there was skill, effort, fitness, and strategy, and ultimately the best guys seemed to be able to win but they had to try amazingly hard to do it. There was something beautiful about a sport where you could earn fitness by putting in the hard work and quantitatively get better at things. That summer was the catalyst for me heading off to do all sorts of things in the world of endurance sports: learn how to swim, do my first triathlon, bike across an entire continent, run my first marathon, actually win a race. and get myself sufficiently enamored with long distance triathlon to sign up for Ironman. If we’re looking for life-changing and not just mind-changing events this one is it, since that Tour de France I’ve found hundreds of hours each year to put into this endurance sports campaign. As a totally unexpected bonus I’ve made some of the best friends of my life as a result.
7. I changed how I thought about food during this decade. Heading off to University required that I was going to be the person choosing what I would eat every day for breakfast lunch and dinner. I did a decent job right from the start, and got a lot better in the years that followed. Whether that was initiated by seeing the whole world go crazy about the Atkins diet in the few years prior, or due to the hilarity of “Supersize Me”, or just because I didn’t know any better than to eat relatively healthy, I ate better food than 99% of the world living in residence. There was a basic realization that the world chooses to feed itself very poorly sometime in the first half of the decade. During the second half of the decade things changed again, there is a difference between not eating poorly and eating well. Making that change takes some time and some effort but the decision to do so occurred based on conversations with real people who had their heads on straight. My friend Tulani had completely quit eating sugar and I tried that for about two months, before gradually becoming more lax on that front. A family friend, John, was eating strictly according to the direction of a naturopath, nothing processed and huge categories of the supermarket put “on hold” until he developed “better blood”. Neither appeared to be missing out on anything, it was just a decision, and their enjoyment of life and food had improved as a result. A simple realization really: I could choose to eat what I wanted, and I was in complete control of how I was going to decide what I wanted. Rather abruptly I pretty much didn’t want all sorts of things.
8. Friends ended in the spring of 2004. This is, I think, somewhat tied to a realization that occurred when Justin Timberlake tore off part of Janet Jackson’s top in front of all of America at the Superbowl the previous winter. The relationship between society and men and women is far from perfect. Friends wasn’t a show serving up sexist messages, but it wasn’t doing it quite right. If it weren’t for Sarah Jessica Parker being on the TV at the same time and being the go to example of liberated sexuality, perhaps Rachel Green, Monica Geller, or Phoebe Buffay (unlikely) would have been developed into that character. When the second half of the superbowl party turned into a discussion of whether or not the “wardrobe malfunction” was supposed to have happened or not, it wasn’t a marker of emancipation. It was an indication that things weren’t right, despite the fact that people were now suggesting that they were. Sure, women had rights like men but we’re far from having arrived at a solution, or destination. Somehow the end of Friends, made this especially noticeable to me. The fact that the feel good ending to the show is Ross and Rachel back together and Monica and Chandler heading to the suburbs with the twins was kind of a sick joke.
   In theory there’s freedom and equality but in reality in my perception this has just been replaced by almost equally un-beneficial expectations that we just hold in our heads. The issue of women’s rights has migrated from one that existed on paper for one sex to one that exists in the mind of society and afflicts both genders. As of 2004 when Friends came to a close we were far from success. Later in the decade there was an election in America where Hillary Clinton and Tina Fey, err… Sarah Palin, played large roles. Was anything better? Things seemed to be regressing more than they were progressing on this front through the last decade if you ask me.
9. My federal government admits fault with regard to their dealings with the residential schools. This is something that I’d been learning about over the course of a few previous years. Until I had spent a fair amount of time learning and discussing I was almost completely certain that this was not my issue. Despite the severity of the issue or the magnitude of the problem, I was most certainly not involved. Until I started to learn from people instead of books. Suddenly the issue was my issue, but the avenues to do things still seem distant and obscure. I identified with the damage caused and sometimes I think that’s all that anyone hopes from me, to listen, share the pain and to agree that what happened is wrong. When the apology was made in 2008 by the federal government I was lucky to be spending the week with friends, native and white, who also could pause and reflect on the significance of it. Not a lot changed that day, but witnessing the official statement seemed important to me. It was hopefully the beginning of a new renewal and at the time, I remember feeling a sentiment of great hope in so many conversations. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission might have gotten off to a rocky start but I’m certainly rooting for it to be able to overcome those obstacles and make a firm record in history on the second attempt.
10. Quantum mechanics soaked up my life for the better part of two semesters of university. What I at first thought was the pinnacle of my education was nothing more than an ivory tower rather detached from the world. By the time I was part-way through my final year of undergrad I could speak differential equations like the best of them. I had knew the normalization constants for dozens of probability wavefunctions off the top of my head and could basically guess at the forms for most others with an uncanny chance of success. I had started to develop intuition with regards to diagonalizing the matrices necessary to make eigenstates of an interaction matrix orthogonal. I had developed skills that even I myself deemed useless. I didn’t have a huge issue with it at the time, it’s not like I suddenly wanted to un-learn these things. It did cause me to back up however, I wanted to decide which skillsets I was going to develop as a part of my education. Quantum mechanics no longer made the cut. It’s no wonder that Engineering Management and my Christian Theology courses were my most appreciated the next semester. I was basically refusing to become a maven of mathematics, a prima donna of process control feedback or an exemplar of electronic wavefunctions. I was done with learning things to score well on tests. I was only going to train my brain to do things that I knew were useful. Now you could start debating with me the merits of training a brain to focus on putting out the most even wattage on a bicycle over the course of 5, 6, 7 or 8 hours, but that’s besides the point.

]]> http://krabbe.ca/blog/2010/724/feed 0 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/728 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/728#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 05:02:50 +0000 admin http://krabbe.ca/blog/?p=728 Slurp the ‘Nog… and don’t burp on the Jog

Rules:
You must drink 2 liters of full fat egg nog. The calorie count for the carton must exceed 2500 calories. Light egg nog therefore will not be permitted. The full carton must be brought unopened and un-tampered with to the start of the race. It must then be completely consumed, you may pour your egg nog into glasses or cups if you prefer but you must provide your own cups. Drinking from the carton is also permitted. Straws are not permitted.

When you complete your carton of egg nog you must exit the house, put on your shoes (no shoes inside) and run around the entire block that our house is on. The length of the run is approximately 720 meters. Running on the sidewalk or the road is permitted. Running will be completed in a counter-clockwise fashion, this permits maximal visibility during the finishing straightaway. It also provides an empty alleyway only one lot down the road for individuals who wish to remove themselves from formal competition after the first 10 steps of the run.

The winner will be selected as follows:
The first person to consume all egg-nog and run around the block with all of the egg nog in their stomach wins.

In the (extremely unlikely) event that no-one can complete the run with all of the egg-nog in their stomach, there will not be a winner, but the person who leaves the house first may be considered to have beat all of his/her competition.

Lore:

• The first running of the ‘Nog Jog occurred following a mandarin orange swallowing contest. The result of the race proved that Reuben had indeed swallowed multiple segments of the orange without chewing.
• The second running of the ‘Nog Jog resulted in egg-nog being ejected from a nose within the first five seconds.
• Despite failing to complete the ‘Nog Jog in it’s proper format, all competitors of all previous years have continued on to pay their dues by encircling the block with a partial stomach of ‘Nog. If there is any etiquette in this tradition it is to respect the race, and making your way to the finish line is an honorable form of paying respect.

This year’s race occurred on the evening of December 23. 16 individuals arrived with their egg-nog in hand and competed in the race. The kitchen was more than full, as more spectators arrived than competitors. Racing began at 10:37pm. The first complete 2 liters was consumed 63 seconds later and the first egg-nog was ejected from a stomach less than a minute after that. The race was completed by only 4 individuals of the 16 competing.

Results:

1. Josh*
2. Reuben
3. Jacob**

*Fastest chug (1:03) and fastest run (3:03) of the evening.
**Jacob was making his ‘Nog Jog debut, as was 4th place Trenton. Andrew was awarded an honorable mention for fastest unofficial finisher, completing with less than two liters contained in his stomach.

The footage follows:

]]> http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/728/feed 0 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/639 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/639#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:34:22 +0000 admin http://krabbe.ca/blog/?p=639 If you’re going to catch this pandemic influenza strain you might be interested to know what you’re getting yourself into before-hand. I wouldn’t recommend catching it, but if you do decide that you’re going to get sick and are wondering what it’s going to be like and how long it’s going to take before you’re healthy then take a read.

Day 1:I wake up with an irritated throat. I think that it’s probably due to the fact that our house smells like liquor after my room-mates had a big birthday party here last night and there are in excess of one hundred empty bottles on the dining room table evaporating a disgusting concoction of booze-smells into the air. I have no other indication that I’m not feeling well until about 11am when I start to feel achy in my lower back and am feeling kind-of chilly. I presume being cold is due to having every window in the house open to let the booze-smell out and the aching muscles due to a hard-fought race the day before. I head off to the race today and decide to line up and give it a shot even though I’m not feeling 100%. I feel strong off the start and ride very well for the first lap, I’m sticking with the lead group, but about 10 minutes in I feel like I’m breathing pretty hard considering my actual effort level. My pace doesn’t fall off until the third lap when I feel like I can’t breathe in deep enough to keep racing. I back it off to a JRA pace but I am not catching my breath. I decide I need to stop or I’m going to be in serious trouble, riding off the trail into the woods is the image playing itself out in my head. I know I’m going to get lapped out of the race anyways, not finishing vs not getting a time seems irrelevant at the moment. Once I stop completely it hardly takes any time and I can breathe again, I change and spectate the rest of the race with a down jacket on and feeling rather comfortable. I think I might be catching a cold so pick up some COLD-FX and DayQuil on the way home, I dose up on DayQuil and feel just fine for the rest of the day.

Day 2: I wake up feeling rather miserable and chug back some more DayQuil, pop some Ibuprofen, some Cold-FX, a couple Vitamin-C tablets, a multi-vitamin and some B-12 (this is not for the cold – I’ll write about this eventually). I’m pretty shivery and my face is hot, that gets a lazy student diagnosis as a fever even though I have no thermometer. I don’t feel like eating much – so I don’t. My achy lower back now includes knees, piriformis, triceps, pectorals and a mild headache. Those are all of the muscles or joints I’ve stressed during the last week of workouts… I’m not terribly surprised that the parts of my body with tissue rebuilding are going to be hot-spots for influenza aches. I feel a lot better within about half an hour of my vitamin binge but still deem myself diagnosed when that irritated throat from yesterday morning starts to become a cough. Diagnostic criteria are as follows:

• Aute onset of new cough or change in existing cough, plus one or more of the following:
• fever (> 38C on arrival or by history)
• sore throat
• joint pain
• muscle aches
• severe exhaustion

By 4 pm I’m ready for bed, that finishes my tally for racking up all of the criteria for having H1N1 (while not necessarily severe exhaustion it is certainly exhaustion) and being satisfied with a fantastic diagnosis I go to sleep. Total caloric intake for the day is below a thousand calories. I don’t think I’ve done that in a decade! I wake up at 10pm and stay awake for an hour before getting some NyQuil in me and heading back off to sleep.

Day 3:I strategically wake up at 7am to down my morning dose of DayQuil, Ibuprofen, Cold-FX and Vitamin-C before heading back to sleep for an hour. I wake up after the effects of the drugs are in full swing and I feel pretty good. My voice has deteriorated to the point that I occasionally sound like a braking train (Example soundtrack). The aches are a tad less but my nose has started to run a bit more and I can tell I’m totally dehydrated. I have been sweating like crazy and the hoodie I slept in is kind-of damp. I last until 6pm and then take a snooze for a couple hours. I set an alarm to wake up again to re-dose on NyQuil for some drug induced ZZZzzzz’s which should guarantee me to sleep through the night. Total calories is less than 600 – new record – and half of that is from a slice of chocolate cake – totally nutritious.

Day 4:I do the early wakeup to get drugs in my system before having to get out of bed, unfortunately I’m probably starting to get over this flu as I’m not so totally tired that I can immediately fall back asleep for the next hour. So be it, and I resign to laying and shivering in my somewhat damp clothes. I do what every serious triathlete does when lying around in bed in the morning, I take my pulse, and then I do what every engineer-triathlete does, do it five times to try and get a measure of the accuracy. The results are not to my pleasing: 75-80 bpm, resting with legs slightly elevated. That’s about 40 bpm higher than it should be – definitely still sick. The aches have left my legs but my back is quite sore today. Total calories for the day are around 1000 as I noticed that my pants are really loose and that I’m rapidly loosing weight, I need to get some food in regardless of my desire to do so.

Day 5:Waking up early to drug myself into an acceptable state to get out of bed has become routine. I repeat the method again, it seems to work. Today the fever is gone but I still occasionally find myself with the chills. I feel like I’ve developed more of a head-cold than a full body flu as I’m rather blocked up in my sinuses. Basically no appetite but eat regardless. I weigh in at 11 pounds less than I did last Friday today, that’s weight loss that rivals what those chumps are doing on “The Biggest Loser”. Not good news – bad enough news that I’m not even going to bother trying to race at Provincials in a week, I’m too wrecked from this to recover back to race-shape within a week and I know it. I’ve got my fingers crossed that I could go for an easy swim on the weekend.

Day 6:I wake-up and deem myself no longer sick. I’m a far cry from healthy, but I wouldn’t even call this a bad cold any-more, just a cough and runny nose, I’m like a walking talking model of health with a few ribs showing. Oh, and the fact that it was 1pm before I realized I should eat something. I’ve still not been hungry yet since this started although last night after my weigh-scale nightmare I cooked up a serious meal and ate lots of it. No sensation of hunger when I started eating or sensation of satiation when I finished. Hopefully that aspect of normality returns or I fear I’ll keep rapidly cutting weight.

]]> http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/639/feed 1 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/372 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/372#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:01:02 +0000 admin http://krabbe.ca/blog/?p=372 The accumulated intelligence of the triathlon community has not come to very good conclusions regarding where on your bike is the most aerodynamic place to carry your water bottles. This is no secret and if you read enough articles from enough varied sources and try to determine where the smartest people tell you to carry your water bottles you will wind up rather frustrated. It doesn’t seem that people have even decided upon the optimal number of water bottles to carry during a race of a certain distance. The jury is out and it’s not likely to be getting back to us before this season is up so it’s time to listen to the logic behind the arguments that are made and then deduce what you believe to be a somewhat intelligent decision based on those theories.

Bikes of all shapes and sizes come equipped to carry at least one bottle in a frame mounted cage inside the front triangle. The lone exception to this rule (Cervelo P4) is similarly equipped. Studies have shown that carrying a bottle inside the frame of your bicycle is not detrimental to the aerodynamics of the bike. In low virtual wind angle situations it has been seen to improve aerodynamics by aiding in laminar flow over the front half of the bike. Basically research shows that it doesn’t make sense not to carry a bottle here. Trek has tried to tell us that this situation can be improved by carrying an aerodynamic bottle… and they would prefer if we select the Bontrager speed bottle. The research hasn’t been done independently but it does make intuitive sense based on what the triathlon world has come to learn about the general properties of cylindrical shapes. Specialized came out with their own response to the Bontrager speed bottle, namely the specialize virtue aero bottle which is meant especially for mounting to a specialized transition frame to create the faring effect (legally here because it serves an extra purpose) of the bottle integrated into the Cervelo P4. For ~$50 odd dollars you can upgrade the aerodynamics of your bike to include one of these aero bottles. Unfortunately it will also mean that you have to decide not to jettison that bottle during the race unless you’re happy to throw $15-$20 overboard. For an Olympic distance race this might make sense, when consuming anything more than 750ml is unlikely and there aren’t going to be aid stations along the way… but for a long course triathlon the logic fails. The aero bottle doesn’t make sense because they can’t be replaced en-route at the aid stations.




Then the question must be answered…. how many bottles to carry? The longest distance between aid stations that I’ve ever heard of in a long course race is 30 km (two aid stations en-route), meaning that most athletes will not be riding for much more than an hour between stations. They do come even more frequently on occasion, as close as every 20 minutes in some races, perhaps enabling you to go bottle free if you are brave enough to drink at the command of the race course (an unwise plan if you ask me). As the 45-60 minute durations are more common between aid stations, and because for myself this is the situation for both of my races this year, that is what I was designing my plans around. Drinking the 700ml gatorade bottle every 45-60 minutes is pretty close to as much fluid as is consumed during a long course race in what I would consider normal temperatures and going with one bottle is perhaps an acceptable plan. Most athletes want to consume a sports drink but do not want to be bound by that drink for all of their hydration. Chasing a strawberry and banana flavoured gel with orange Gatorade can be a bit of a shock to the mouth and ultimately the stomach. Water is better for chasing down solid or semi-solid food than sports drink. It doesn’t lead to peaks in the sugar concentration in the stomach which can hamper digestion and absorption of the precious carbohydrates that you have so dutifully put down the throat. In my experience and personal preference having water along with the gatorade is a wise choice to keep from having the sharp variations in stomach sugar concentration. Water should go down with the gels or shot-bloks, it feels better with good reason.

So, two bottles are necessary. But where does the second one go? If you’ve got two frame racks, then that’s potentially your answer. If you don’t there are two other options. The first option is to put a bottle behind your seat. The behind the seat solutions are typically pairs of bottles which is more than is necessary. The debate was between one and two bottles, not between one and three. That extra spot doesn’t need to carry liquid, and it shouldn’t. That’s potentially another 2 lbs that you’re going to carry for the duration of the race. To shave two pounds of weight off of your bike would almost certainly cost in excess of a thousand dollars of upgrades, carrying the third bottle is an expensive mistake. A single bottle cage can be zip tied to the seat rails and centered behind the seat… that’s the cheap option and has been used by many a professional in the sport. The dual bottle cages can be used with one bottle and one of the sides can be used to carry the spare tyre and CO2 cartridges, another plan used my many a professional in the sport. The debate over which kind of behind the seat bottle carrier is most aerodynamic is still a debate. The logic at the moment seems to be that lower is better than higher. Maintaining laminar flow of the air flowing down over your back is very important to the aerodynamics of positioning and keeping the bottles (cylinders = bad) out of this important area is, well, important.

The final remaining option is to put the other water in front. This has one distinct advantage over the other bottle placement plans. If you put a bottle up on your handlebars you wind up looking at it quite a bit, this inevitably means that you are reminded to drink more often than if you tuck it behind your bum. While a well disciplined athlete ideally doesn’t need the reminder, every less than perfect athlete does benefit from simple things like reminders. “Bottle In Front” can mean different things. The most common is to make use of the product that screams “triathlon bike” like no other, the profile design aerodrink system. Basically this is an open topped bottle with a straw up to head height that sits between the aerobars. There is a net or a sponge placed in the neck to prevent sloshing and splashing of the water but easy refilling on the go as a full bottle can quite easily be tipped into the container. The system seems to work although there are many people who like to complain about the bracket mechanism that is meant to hold it in place. Most people I know end up using zip-ties to hold the thing in there… which means it gets washed infrequently… but doesn’t come loose when you’re screaming down a hill at 75 kph. The up-front hydration system can also mean mounting a speed bottle vertically in between the aerobars and fitting it with a straw to drink from like a profile design aerodrink. This was seen on a pro bike at the world championships last year and causes a bit of a stir, it’s a smart idea to improve the aerodynamics of the aerodrink system which despite the name doesn’t seem to be overly aerodynamic. The speed bottle up front plan is a good idea except that it still requires filling like the aerodrink system. What if there was a way to carry bottles, real bottles, up front with decent aerodynamics?



Steve Larsen figured this one out and while I’m not sure if it’s been wind-tunnel tested, it does past my logical wind-tunnel tests. The issue with sticking a bottle somewhere on your bike is that it is cylindrical and inherently un-aerodynamic. Laying the bottle on it’s side makes the bottle look the least cylindrical possible. Placing the bottle onto the bike like this is potentially acceptable, and when it’s places between my forearms in my theoretical wind-tunnel it remains largely out of the wind. I have a habit of folding my fingers into one another while riding in the aero position. Photos here & here of the TT position, and there’s a bottle hiding in there in both images. This may not be as aerodynamic as is possible with my hands separated and gripping the aerobars but I find it keeps my shoulders relaxed which is important. If I hold on to the aerobars with any grip I am shifting my balance to be governed by the hands, whereas if I govern my balance through the armrests at my elbows my fore-aft balance is improved on the bike, my shoulders are relaxed and the end result of the relaxation is that my legs are free to operate independently of my torso which means big watts. I mention this to describe the reason that I am making a windshield for my aerobars with my hands. My forearms are spaced only slightly wider than a Gatorade bottle and as a result filling this space with a bottle is actually likely an aerodynamic improvement as the bottle likely behaves like a faring, filling in this gap. Keeping a bottle there can be done by a variety of means including just laying it on it’s side and hoping it balances between the aerobars. This doesn’t work very well for bumps but with the inclusion of a modified bottle cage, the bottle can actually be held in place securely.




I opted to design this modified bottle holder based on the Specialized Rib-Cage Pro Road. I didn’t go for the carbon version because I wanted to be able to cut it to fit. I cut the portion of the cage that is meant to grip the neck of the bottle off. This prevents sliding the bottle in and out to a large degree but not holding it in place. If I keep the angle of the cage with respect to the aerobars correct I can still add two more points of friction between the bottle and the aerobars. The neck-piece was un-necessary so it was removed. I also found that this cage design gripped the bottle equally firmly when the bottle was fully placed in to the point where it was approximately 1.5 inches from the bottom of the bottle cage. Because I wanted to keep the center of gravity of the bottle as far to the rear of the aerobars as possible and didn’t need that extra 1.5 inches of sliding room I decided to shorten the length of the cage as well. This meant that I was going to use the stem of my handlebar as the point at which the bottle “stopped” when fully inserted. The bottom corner of the cage was removed leaving the upper ribs to reach over the handlebar and brush up nicely against the armrests of my aerobars (Vision TT bar) allowing me to zip-tie these to the armrests to hold the cage in place vertically. I ran a zip tie through the upper mounting hole of the cage and around the bolt in my stem to keep it held back butted up against the stem horizontally. It took a few iterations of cutting the cage shorter to get it to fit like I wanted. I didn’t want to cut off too much too soon because there’s no way to put it back once it’s cut.




The result is what I consider to be the most functionally flexible and likely close to the most aerodynamic way to carry the second bottle on a TT bike. I am also partial to it because it is extremely simple to remove and drink from without stopping from pedaling and there is no need to break from the aero-position to remove or replace a bottle from behind the seat.

]]> http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/372/feed 0 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/350 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/350#comments Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:19:23 +0000 admin http://krabbe.ca/blog/?p=350 One of the highlights of the post race dinner was the Race Director admitting that he named his race the Chinook 119.1 mostly to make fun of the World Triathlon Corporation. You have to be pretty brave to name the entire event that you plan something that you think is a joke. He has to hope that people either understand his sense of humour or is thick skinned enough to not care that people think it’s a silly name who don’t understand the jab at the world’s leading long course triathlon corporation.



I mention that because I think it gives a good idea of what kind of people run the race… they are there to put on a very high quality event and have a fun time doing so. That’s what it’s all about to them and it really sets the tone for a fun day for the rest of the athletes, myself included. Today was one of my funnest days of racing ever. I don’t think I’ve really had a race day that in general I didn’t find fun but pretty much all of today was a good time except for a tiny stretch of the run course… but I’ll get there soon enough.

I like to start out my race reports with a brief description of the taper. My last blog entry included a description of my final days of high volume. From there on out I dropped back primarily the training volume but kept the intensity up. I realized that there was a possibility that during my taper for the Yakima River Valley Marathon that my intensity actually went up during the taper instead of maintaining it as that was a full 20 day taper. My training stress wouldn’t actually be dropping off very much if I cut volume and boosted intensity and the recovery wouldn’t occur. I did my best not to ramp up the intensity too much… okay onto the description. Wednesday I did my typical interval session on the bike and then brick run of about a half hour. Thursday I went hard in the pool and Friday I did an easy 50 minute open water swim with some friends from the club. Saturday I did a sustained ~threshold on the bike for 30 minutes into a brick run of 50 minutes. I did this during the heat of the day and did the ride on my rollers on the patio in the backyard in 32 weather with no wind or breeze. I wanted to prove to myself that I could function in the heat to give myself some confidence if it turned out to be hot on race day. I didn’t fall apart in the heat nor did I thrive but felt okay about racing in hot weather if that turned out to be the situation. Sunday was off except for some pretty crazy dancing at a wedding reception. Monday I did an abridged version of my pre-swim run and then swam for an hour. I did my last run on Tuesday composed of 10 short hill repeats which I capped at about my running threshold effort. Wednesday I was coaching the bike workout and did a rolling hill simulation to get my mind in game for the rolling hills of the chinook half course and skipped my brick run. Thursday I took it silly easy in the pool and Friday was also off. I tried to make sure I didn’t go anaerobic anywhere during my last week and was successful with that although I did push the intensity up close to threhold in all three sports’ final workout not including the lazy swim on Thursday. I got to Friday evening feeling physically alright, no muscles were still tired from training but I wasn’t feeling super fresh and charged up like I have been during some tapers (I have other times cut even more volume than this)

On to race day. I didn’t try to do breakfast a full two hours before the race because my stomach would be growling so finished my meal at 6:30 for an 8:00 am start and ate a banana while setting up transition. This was my first time decking out the new bike for a long course race so had the spare tubular and CO₂ behind the seat, gatorade on my new cage on the aerobars a la Steve Larsen and a couple gels and 2 packages of shot blocks behind the steer tube. It took a long time to prep everything compared to any other horsing around training or other little races, kind of a surprise. I don’t want to imagine sorting out special needs bags and all that jazz for IM on top of this.

I was a bit rushed with putting on the wetsuit (decided to put in on at the 5 minute warning for the start!) but because I am fast at that compared to some of the others from Triathlon club *cough* Lesley & Becky *cough* I got it done in time and joined the masses on the sand. I didn’t really warm up so to speak but loosened up my shoulders. My first 200 yards swimming is always my easiest and fastest so why not include that in the race right?




We got to the countdown and soon enough we were off, I looked around for some feet that were kicking well to follow but the first pair I got on weren’t going in a very straight line so I left them and ended up going alone most of the way to the first buoy which is weird because this is the portion of the race where the pack is at it’s thickest. I picked up some feet as we turned directly into the sun after 400m and was happy to follow them as I couldn’t really see anything sighting anyways. He seemed to be going straight so I trusted him. I know it was a guy because he wasn’t kicking… most guys don’t kick in triathlon swimming that I know of anyways. I still felt like it was a bit of a drafting feeling but going around the next buoy I lost him. Sighting was alright again and I finished the first km solo. Out of the water my watch said 17:40 which was pretty good, on track for approximately the goal time of 35 minutes. If I got some good feet to follow I might still make it… but I couldn’t find the feet once back into the water after the on-beach turnaround.




Off I went alone again, someone picked up my feet at the buoy. I could tell because he was climbing up my calves all the way to hitting me in the backs of the knees. I pulled away with my arms and gave him a warning splash with my feet, I think he took the hint and left me alone. I tried to keep it steady and smooth as I was heading back into the sunrise and probably didn’t do it as straight as I could have but got there eventually. The final stretch to the finish seemed to go by really quickly and off I went up the beach. I wasn’t particularly speedy through transition and did an odd hopping along strategy down the carpet along the side of the row so I didn’t have to run on the pavement but did have to jump over all of the shoes splayed out on the carpet. Helmet on, race belt on, go! I’m sure I passed a dozen people through transition which is great and put me in a good mood for the start of the bike. I did mount with the shoes on the pedals which included a bit of a weave but there was a whole road to use and I’m convinced this is faster as long as you don’t screw it up. People say the only reason to do it is because the pros do it, I say the pros do it because it’s faster and I haven’t screwed it up yet.



I got going on the road and was up to 40 kph before I really realized it, I hit my highest average speed after about a kilometer, 44 kph! The gradual downhill probably helped but soon enough we merged onto Highway 22X and the quick bit was over and the hard work began. I could tell the story as I experienced it or as actually happened here. I had my aero helmet on and because it howls in my ears in any wind condition I wasn’t convinced that we had much of a headwind, the grass wasn’t moving all that much when I looked in the ditch. In reality we had a pretty serious headwind on the way out which starts out basically with a 20 km slightly rolling climb heading west. The kind that makes you wonder if you’re working hard enough or not when the average speed is falling. After that the hills are more distinct you’re either riding along mostly flat or going up or going down. Less of this gradual stuff which in my opinion is harder to do. I can ride along at a bit more than 20 miles per hour on the gradual climbs which is fast enough to warrant staying on the aerobars for the climb… but it’s tempting to stand up and hammer. I’m getting to the end of the gradual climb and the drafting police motorbike comes up beside me and pulls in ahead to watch the group of three riders who are up ahead of me. I watch them trade positions a bit as I slowly gain on them. Climbing our first steep hill I catch them and just as we’re cresting the hill I decide to make my move and push past them. I try to move by with enough speed that they don’t start pacing off of me which is obviously what they’re doing which has aroused the suspicions of the drafting police.



I roll through the place where the first aid station is supposed to be but there is nothing there other than a car with a few people sitting in it. I wonder what is going on and quickly decide that with my extra water bottle and the gatorade that I’m not quite done yet I can make it to the turnaround no problem just hoping that there is indeed an aid station there. Dad comes past in the car and I’m starting to realize that there is a truck driving half on the shoulder half on the road just a ways ahead of me. Dad stops in a driveway to take a picture and I ask “what’s this truck doing?”. The aero helmet prevents hearing an answer but I eventually figure it out. This is the lead vehicle. I’m leading the race!



I come bombing down the big hill with the truck just ahead of me, I get quite a bit of dust in my face and have to spit some dirt out. Here I come to a roadside pullout and there is a Budget rental truck in the ditch. There’s a guy with gatorade, great. I have my own personal aid station and he passes me a bottle as I have just finished my first. Off I go, wondering what exactly is going on until I am almost at the turnaround. The Budget rental truck passes me again within a kilometer of the turnaround and I watch as they leap out and the same guy who handed me the gatorade 15 kms back hands me another. Quite deluxe service! He also nicely tucks a banana in my back pocket for me and I make the turn and head back. It’s a bit downhill but only barely, it’s here that I realize how hard of a headwind we’ve been battling on the way out because I’m quite quickly cruising along at 55 along the flats. The gap to second place is longer than I would have guessed but I feel like I’m sticking to my race strategy so I don’t get too concerned about going to hard. I was to try and take it easy on the way out and give myself the liberty to pick it up a few notches for the ride back into town on the condition that a) my nutrition was on schedule (need to get in 1200 calories by the end of the bike) and b) that I was able to do so without compromising any aerodynamic position later on. (not allowed to get an achy back by pushing too hard). My nutrition was ahead of schedule by 100 calories already so I really cruised here, trying to capitalize on the tailwind as much as possible. I don’t want to go too fast that the Budget rental truck doesn’t catch up to me again to set up the course aid stations ahead of me as we drive but I’m lucky that I have the big hill to climb which takes a while and the truck does get ahead. Unfortunately I do the next three kilometers coming down from the hill and onto the flats at 65-70 kph and the truck never gets out of sight. He pulls off the road and as they’re setting up the table I come through. They have a gatorade to hand to me and I take it and keep cruising. The foil cap under the cap hadn’t been removed so as I cruise along at 60kph I’m undoing the screw top and peeling the foil off with my teeth and screwing it back on so I can get a drink. I’m having a really fun time now and get it in my head that I’m chasing this truck. Faris Al-Sultan in an interview after Kona a few years ago commented about chasing the video helicopter all the way to Hawi, I had my own little version here except this was a truck.



The long course merges here with traffic from the Olympic distance triathlon and I think I entered their field about 4/5 of the way back through the pack. That meant that absolutely no-one else was doing more than 50 kph and so I was hauling along and passing loads of people which became a bit nerve wracking at times because one person going 36 kph down the hill passing someone going 35.9 kph down the hill quite rapidly forces me to go 3 people wide down the shoulder. This is back on the long gradual descent into the city that I had described and at no point does my speed drop below 45 kph here. The police are doing an excellent job with traffic and I’m very rapidly into the community again and heading for T2. I finish the bike in 2:31 and change which is pretty good, about the fastest I anticipated I could go, 10 minutes faster than I though I would go, and fast enough by about a minute to set a new bike course record. I’m also 100 calories over my 1200 calorie goal which I’m happy with.



My T2 isn’t super fast but I try to limit the time as much as possible because I know it’s counted as part of my bike leg time. I’m wearing socks which is never a fast choice but for a half marathon it’s a necessary choice for me. I’m off for the run. The first 200m go splendidly and I’m happy and thinking that this will go well. Then I very rapidly start to feel cramps coming on in my quads (Vastus Medalis for those of you who are interested – that’s an aero-position cycling specific muscle also if you are interested in that too). I’m wondering if this is going to mean a very painful run or a very painful walk, I’m actually kind of hoping to negotiate with the muscle for a third alternative of a pain free walk versus a painful run. Hopefully things can correct themselves I think. I get out my e-load and take 4 little pills, that’s half the batch. If it’s going to help it will take a while I tell myself, motivation to keep running for the time being. I try to focus on my breathing instead of my legs. I’m actually breathing corresponding to an appropriate effort and that’s encouraging even though I feel like I’m going super slow. I remind myself of the race plan, I’ve allotted the entire first 5 kilometers to focus on getting my running legs together. This isn’t what I had anticipated meaning by that statement but that’s what it means now. I’ve done a pretty good job of distracting myself for the first 10 minutes until I head down the hill into the park and the muscles start to feel like they’re going to leave the verge of cramping and enter the realms of serious cramping up. Okay, I tell myself, this isn’t 5 kilometers yet it’ll come around before 5 kms is done and I do pause for a 5 second stretch of my right hamstring (actually it’s higher up, maybe bicep femoris?). I get some gatorade in me and keep going. Kilometer marker three is arrived at just under 15 minutes and I’m actually pretty surprised. I have to pee and this is the only washroom on the course except for maybe being able to find one back in transition so I take the opportunity. The little standing still break actually does me some good and by the time I’m back out on the path I’m feeling better. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to cramp up in a ball and start crawling. I don’t worry about selecting an appropriate pace until the 5 km marker, I’m just running as I feel comfortable to do so. Kilometer 5 comes at 23 minutes and I’m obviously starting to move efficiently at last.



The gameplan is to try and take it easy for the second half of this first loop, open it up on the first half of the second loop and then try to hold on as well as I can for the last 5 kilometers. I do back off the pace a bit at the 5 km marker but all is well and I try to run as smoothly and evenly as possible, the sudden movements are more likely to cause trouble than the steady and repeatable ones.

I’m off to the out and back stretch here and will get my first look at what my gap is like back to second place. I hit the turnaround and awaken the people who are sitting there to check my name off the list. “Wow, I guess our job starts now” is the sentiment of their statement even though those aren’t quite the right words. I’m congratulated and off on my way back. I keep watching for white numbers (red numbers are the Olympic distance athletes) and none seem to be arriving. I’m just about to complete the 1 km out and back section when Kyle comes by (I would learn his name later). He’s surprised to see how far off I am and I’m even more surprised to see how far ahead I am, this is weird. It’s hard to gauge the speed of someone going the other direction but I’m not convinced he’s going to catch me but I’m also not convinced that he won’t. I don’t really have any way of knowing anything about the gap so just keep trucking. Up the heartbreak hill and I don’t want to try any stunts so grab my water and gatorade at the bottom and walk up the steep pitch. Once on the gradual pitch I start running again, it feels pretty good and I head on back to transition to start lap 2. Transition is supposed to be an aid station but no-one expects whoever is in first place so there is nothing there for me. I don’t even really know where to look for water so I just keep going.



I am wary of the cramping coming back when I go through the same section of path (not because it’s bad path, it’s just because it’s been 50 minutes since my last dose of electrolytes) and I decide to take three more caplets. Off I go down into the park and I realize that it’s starting to heat up, it’s actually hot, certainly not the 19 degrees that was forecast. I slow down at the next aid station and pick up gatorade and water from the table so that none gets spilled. I need to get as much in me as I can. The last bit of water gets poured inside the front of my tri-top which can now evaporate kind of like a second skin to sweat from. The chill helps and it’s about here I realize that this is where I’m supposed to be speeding up. The missing water had me distracted but now I’m in the shade for 2 kms and I pick it up a few notches. I do at least 3 kms at around a 4:20 pace which for me is at the end of feeling like I’m running fast. It’s a good feeling and the cramps in the muscles have decided to depart for good. I get a cheer from Dad and head off to do the out and back, getting a chance to see my split back to the next guy again, is he gaining or fading, is there a new guy hunting me down or not?

It seems like the kilometer goes by pretty quickly to the turnaround and I get two volunteers to cycle with me in to the finish from here. It takes quite a while to see Kyle again who is indeed still in second place. He’s about 100 meters further up the path than last time so maybe 200 meters gained… but I’ve got more than a kilometer on him and am feeling alright. Gatorade and water at the last aid station and I’m walking up the steep section of the hill. No last minute cramping allowed. Off I go up to the finish, it’s fun to have some people along the way cheering and the announcer gets peoples attention. When you’re the winner people actually pay attention to the announcer and turn around and watch. It’s kinda weird, that never happened for 19th place.



I’m pretty happy to stop running and I don’t fall over which is some sort of success. I just want to lay down right away but there’s nowhere to lay so I have to keep walking which is probably good for me. My total time was 4:46:11 which is pretty good. The bike course and swim course are longer than the official half ironman distance so based on the paces completed today my comparable time for other half ironman races would be 33:58 / 2:21:17 / 1:38:59 = 4:34:14. That’s reasonably quick considering the relative difficulty of this bike course to some of the other ones out there like GWN or the Calgary 70.3 race I’ll be doing in August. Hopefully I’ll be able to ride close to 2:20 which I guess I showed today isn’t completely outrageous and then if my training progresses in direction I’m going to try to bend it I could run closer to 1:34:XX (ie sub 1:35). Who knows about the swim, 1700 people might be a washing machine that I don’t deal well with or maybe it’ll just be far easier to stay on people’s feet and I’ll wind up swimming a bit faster. I’ll hopefully also figure out this cramping stuff and not deal with it in a race again. I haven’t had it in training to the same degree so maybe it’ll be tough to figure out in detail, who knows exactly, giving this a trial run was the purpose of racing prior to tbe big show in August.

Oh, and the stat streak that I’m proud to continue. No one who has ever swam slower than me has finished ahead of me in any triathlon to date.

Complete Gallery of the day thanks to Reuben Krabbe is available here

]]> http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/350/feed 1 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/148 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/148#comments Mon, 11 May 2009 13:52:04 +0000 admin http://krabbe.ca/blog/?p=148 The UofA Triathlon Club’s annual Spring Thaw triathlon came and went this past weekend. The club puts on the race as an effort to expose people to the sport of triathlon and get people out to try the multi-sport experience. Our club even received a few thousand dollars to subsidize race entry fees for UofA students towards this end… making this the cheapest triathlon in the province for UofA students. It was even cheaper for members of the Triathlon club who all raced for free once again this year. It also happens to be a great opportunity to RACE!

Lots of the club’s big guns spent their morning volunteering so it wasn’t quite the showdown of Triathlon club skills that it could have been but non the less members of the club had an excellent showing… taking the top four spots for men and top two spots for women at the Sprint distance.

My race day started with a 4:30 am wakeup and first breakfast prior to arriving at the race site prior to 5am to help set up the transition area and some of the course. Heavy lifting before 6am! I then had to try and figure out for the first time in my racing career how to do a pre-race meal and then do another one all before my swim heat hit the water soon after 10:00 am. It was a bit tricky and I don’t think I did it exactly right. I ate a full breakfast (got rid of the overnight hunger) at 4:30 and then proceeded to try and also eat a normal meal at around 8:30 am like I would have done anyways. I wasn’t hungry enough to really eat but kind of ate anyways and drifted a bit close to the race in terms of time prior to racing that I was still eating. Ooops.

I cited a swim time of 13:30 and hopped in a lane with some likeminded people and one dude who was insistent on swimming 13:00 flat. He was very concerned about being able to pass up during the swim and so we all agreed to hit people on the feet when we wanted to get past and then to wait up and let those people past. That’s standard fare for faster swimmers getting by, no big deal. Into the water we go, I’m the first one out and cruise along at about pace for a 13:30 swim. Our friend the 13:00 swimmer has made up his 20 second deficit in swim start by the time I’m at 75 meters (Hmmm… sounds like he’s trying to swim about an 11 minute time?) and goes ahead. We’re all enjoying the draft for the next couple hundred meters and then some more passing starts to occur. Some people need to go by me and I go by a few people. It’s probably the case that no-one is strong enough to lead the line at the speed we’re swimming but everyone in the draft line would like to pick up the pace just a tad. As some people pass one another and wait up at the end one swimmer gets crammed into the little space where there previously was no swimmer before and now has no option but to hit people on the feet, now not trying to elicit the “wait up and let me pass you” response. Frustration and confusion ensues. We get to 600 meters and I want to pick it up for the last three laps. No-one else must be counting I think to myself and cruise out of the line down the middle of the lane… No one will believe a foot tap anymore. I pass three people down the middle and the heartrate is picked up a bit. It’s a tight squeeze and there had been some shoulder bumping but I pass the 13 minute dude during my last fifty and climb out at exactly 13:30 minutes. I suppose it’s a form of success?

Into T1, I’ve got a shammy towel and try to soak up some of the water in my shorts and from my thighs so they’re less likely to be chilly on the ride and cruise into the transition zone. Helmet on, number on, go!. My transition cannot be any faster as I run down towards the mount line and hop aboard the P2. I’m running my HED3 up front and aero-helmet and get some cheers and jeers from the tri-club members who are volunteering. You’re not allowed to be slow if you’ve got the gear to go fast.

I crank out the first lap including the emily murphy hill with an average speed of 40.5 km per hour. As I settle in to ride the next lap I’ve got a knot in my upper stomach, I try to ignore it and keep pushing… the second time up the hill isn’t quite as fast and I deal with a bit more traffic. By the time I’m up top my average speed has dropped to 39.8 kph… I get aero off the top of the hill and keep cruising, I chug down about a third of a bottle of gatorade. I brought 2/3 of a small bottle thinking I might drink twice but elect to just stick with drinking once. The nose of my seat starts to rotate down a little bit from level, argh! that’s not supposed to happen. There’s nothing I can do though, I’ve been riding hard out on the tip of it trying to be as aerodynamic and powerful as possible, now my seat is effectively a tad too low. I continue through the third lap and just as I summit Ben Adam is arriving off the next swim heat. He’s quick and I’m determined to stay with him for the lap. I have no problem doing so until I climb the hill the last time and don’t want to go anaerobic. I did for the first three laps but stay seated and make an effort to stay aero on the last lap so I’m not in the midst of recovery when I arrive in transition. It’s a good choice and cruise back into transition. I take the dismount a bit too quick as I leap barefoot from the bike and the pavement kind of hurts my feet. Oh well. Into T2 I come, rack the bike and helmet off. I’ve elected to wear socks even for 5km because I haven’t trained without. They probably add two seconds per foot, I’m relatively successful I decide as I stand upright again and Andy is yelling at me to show my number as I leave T2. The race belt is on inside out and the side displayed is just white! The draft marshals apparently couldn’t have given me a penalty even if they wanted. (Not that there was anyone nearly fast enough for me to draft).

The first 100 meters is quick but the subsequent 500 meters are slow. I’m frustrated as I feel like I just can’t pick up the speed. It takes probably the whole first kilometer before I feel like I’m actually pushing the pace on the run and am breathing hard. I crank out the first half and come to the turnaround. I’m far ahead of everyone else from my heat so until now the only people I’ve seen on the run course are barely moving people from the previous heat. Once on the return I feel like I can let it fly and feel pretty good. I’m running about as fast as I think I can run but not getting tired out. I’ve only got a kilometer and a half left I think to myself when I go past Cory and Simmon volunteering and they shoot my photo. I can’t run fast enough through the final stretch it seems even though the pace isn’t terribly fast. A few hundred meters to go and I switch from run to sprint and finish a bit wobbly on my legs. Once the heartrate drops back from the sprint finish I feel pretty good, I probably could run another 5 km and not be too much slower I think to myself. That’s frustrating, I couldn’t have run any faster. Serves me right I suppose, marathon training doesn’t translate to top end 5km speed.

There’s not too much time for me to to wait after finishing until Ben cruises in off his bike is out onto the run. Next off the bike is Lindsay and she’s got a pretty good gap on both Stefan and Pat who come in off the bike together. Pat flies through transition and Stefan has to tie his shoes, he’s just racing for fun today, he won his category at a bike road race the day before and has nothing to prove. Pat is off to hunt down Lindsay and record the fastest run split of the day.

Total results for myself include almost a 40 kph bike split and reasonable run at 20.5 minutes for 4.8 km. My swim time is a whole minute faster than last year when I believe I was told I was finished swimming after only 700m. In total that translates to the equivalent of about 2 minutes improvement on the swim (reality only 1 minute faster) and I cut a minute on the run as well as a bit more than 4 minutes off my bike time. I’ll attribute 5 seconds of that to the helmet, 5 seconds to the race wheel, 5 second to the new bike aerodynamics, 5 second to the new bike’s weight and 10 seconds to my better aerodynamic bike body position. That leaves me 3:30 seconds of raw ‘effort’ improvement on the bike from last year. All in all the improvement of my swim as what was my limiting factor didn’t make as much difference as the improvement to my bike top end speed which was refinement of my strength. That’s not terribly encouraging to make me keep working on the swim… but that’s where the deficit to the competition still lies. The beginner lane at triathlon club pool swims has been eliminated and I will be taking that bull by the horns next winter. Swim improvements from here on out for the 2009 season are likely to be minimal. I’m content to swim about a 35 minute half ironman pace (equivalent to this swim speed) as I feel like anything more is going to tax my ability to run a fast 21.1 km.

The annual showdown with the Spring Thaw Triathlon will come to an end in 2010 as I’ll be race director for this event which precludes me from competing unfortunately. It should still be a rocking race and I’ll likely pick up one other short course race next season just for fun to test out the speed, probably more likely to be Olympic distance than sprint though, a one hour effort is relatively rather unsatisfying once you’re tapered for it.

]]> http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/148/feed 0 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/175 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/175#comments Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:51:24 +0000 admin http://krabbe.ca/blog/?p=175 I ran the Calgary Police Half marathon in 1:36:23 on Sunday April 26. It was one of my least favorite races of all time but it did result in a personal best on the distance so in retrospect I am happy to have run it. I perhaps also learned a few things while running it, maybe it’s more likely that thinking about why it felt so lousy afterward was how I learned a few things. None the less I’m pretty confident I didn’t run as fast as I could have on the day due to some poor pacing choices and I probably didn’t run as fast as I could have that week due to some poor tapering choices. The results however are good so let’s start there. I was actually quite quick, averaging 4:35 per kilometer is more than acceptable considering all the factors. I also have to consider that I ran 26.2 miles only three weeks prior and that my training focus on the run has been endurance with the focus on pushing past the two hour mark. While it seems a bit silly to suggest that the half marathon is not really an endurance event the honest truth is that it’s bordering on not being one. I have pretty good reasons to believe that my body’s glycogen stores when topped off properly run themselves out in about 100 to 110 minutes when riding a bike through triathlon club practice if not supplemented with a few extra calories. While running is different than the stationary bike and considering I did consume 100 calories of shot-bloks on the run in addition to two cups of Gatorade I had absolutely no need to run off anything more than glycogen and sugar-burning aerobic work during the race. If the muscular endurance is there to get me through about 34 kms with no ill effects and my glycogen storage is good enough to go the distance then realistically 21.1 kms shouldn’t be considered an endurance challenge, it’s an aerobic one meaning unfortunately that my speed should basically be a measure of how much my huge body could breathe and how much I was willing to hurt to stick it out. (Taking in a bit of food was probably an unnecessary safety net but as I’m used to taking 100 calories every 5 miles on runs lasting longer than 60 minutes I opted not to play with something that works, it certainly wasn’t going to slow me down anyways.)

That’s all said basically to suggest that I did run a fast race, that I have developed the endurance to crank out a 21 km run at hard effort without feeling the need to really dig deep to keep it rolling once past the ten mile mark. I found myself actually looking forward to getting some intermediate miles down between 10 miles and 12 miles, in retrospect those are normally finishing miles. I wasn’t struggling to be able to maintain the pace I ran towards the finish, I just couldn’t pick it up. The endurance was there but the speed wasn’t.

Perhaps describing why the speed wasn’t there starts with a little description of the taper, or lack thereof before I discuss the race-day strategy. Following the marathon three weeks prior I found I was capable of hard aerobic work on the bike within a few days but my ability to do any real effort while running had totally disappeared. I rode hard at triathlon club practice and wimped out on the runs, even having to quit an intervals set halfway through, I couldn’t manage it and walked slowly home from the river valley. After a week and a half I was out on my feet again and was successful for the first time at a Wednesday Night Cross country race. My legs held up for 17 minutes as I ran slightly above my aerobic limit the entire time. I felt great and likely as a result of this positive feedback to the restoration of my running I took the training hard right through the weekend and into the next week. I racked up my biggest 7 day stretch yet in 2009 with varied sport focus including two excellent 10 km run efforts at moderate pace. I cruised right along into the next Wednesday’s race, this time running a bit closer to my aerobic capacity for the duration. The taper would begin Friday for Sunday’s race by taking two days off. Not really a taper at all you might say, and you’d be right. It would have likely been sufficient to rest up if I had not just completed a serious training effort spanning 13 days without a break. Friday and Saturday were spent in recovery mode from the training load of the last weeks and not acquiring the extra bits of rest required for a good race performance.

The mental preparation for this race was also lacking, I hadn’t actually decided what my goal pace was supposed to be, I tossed around the idea of trying to run 7 minute miles and aiming for a 92 minute time. Perhaps it was my fast performances at Wednesday night races that suggested this in my head. I knew however that I was far more likely to be successful at running an even pace the whole race and probably would reasonably shoot for 7:15 miles if aiming for an even paced race. I started the race not having decided upon the plan, hopping the fence into the starting chute without really gauging whether or not I was self seeding appropriately. We cruised out of the start and I nailed two 6:45 miles in a row, I was feeling pretty good, refreshed and plenty happy that it wasn’t snowing or raining as had been forecast. This was a terrible pacing strategy and I would pay for it, I slowed appropriately to approximately the pace I should have been running the whole race by the time I went through 5 miles but was perhaps a minute ahead of all the people who were running this pace consistently through the race. That meant there was a slow and steady stream of people passing me as I went down the hill into the weaselhead, I had an incorrect picture in my mind that it was a steep downhill and short jaunt over to the uphill on the other side. The flat across the bottom was an entire mile long and I got frustrated a bit confused by why things seemed to be going the way they were and saddened that there were people getting past me. I was well within my limits running through this stretch and should have upped the pace and stuck on the tail of any one of the other runners but instead I was hesitant to choose one, worrying about the consequences of passing control of the pace over to another stranger. Up the hill I went, the cycling muscles came into play and I passed a few people on the ascent. The race gets a bit tedious here through to the ten mile point and I was still running well within my limits not terribly pleased by my pace but accepting the fact that I was sufficiently quick to still have the 1:40 under wraps. For a few miles this became the plan, keep it under 1:40? That was outrageous and when I actually calculated how slow I could go and was then starting to go I realized I had to pick up the pace. Having chosen a specific planned pace would have been valuable here but that wasn’t the case and I opted to make a last ditch effort with about 4 kms out to salvage what I was realizing was a poor race plan by picking the nearest tall guy and deciding to run his pace as he went by. It worked for 300 yards before we went up and over the overpass and I needed to pass him on the uphill. Down the other side and I was out on my way through to the final 3 kms, the disaster zone was finished and I finally picked up my pace to a moderately hard effort hovering right around my aerobic threshold and went for it. The ends of races are always interesting some people fade badly and others pick it up, as I was picking it up some of those ahead of me were also speeding up and my plans to knock them off one by one got a bit complicated or I was getting to the border of being out of it. I came through the 21 km mark with one other man who started a sprint to the finish and I started to go with him but as soon as I realized he had me beat I backed off. No point in loosing a sprint to the finish I thought to myself and just ran it in across the line.

Summary of results: here.

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