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.

The ‘May 2009 Epic Adventure’ of the University’s Triathlon Club happened this past weekend in Canmore. 10 athletes tired of the indoor bike riding that Edmonton has enforced for the past half of the year got out onto the open roads. For myself it was an opportunity for my second and third serious outdoor rides of the season. I’d done a couple ‘Coffee Shop Route’ trips to St. Albert and one ‘Bakery Run’ out to Calmar thus far but these were to be somewhat hilly and long!

Saturday morning we headed out just before 10 am waiting until the world had warmed up a bit from the overnight low of minus 8 and then set out. We rode Highway 1 through the park gates to the bow valley junction and then along the parkway to Castle Junction. From there we headed up and over the continental divide on Highway 93 and descended the other side to the paint pots at approximately the same elevation. The climb was great, rather unrelenting as a whole but the pitch did vary enough that I still found opportunities to move from seated to standing. The south side (BC side) of the pass on the return wasn’t nearly as steep and the descent was long and fast, spinning out my top gear on the bike didn’t occur for long stretches at a time so I inevitably was putting out the effort to keep myself cruising above 65-70 kph instead of slowing down. The return climb was nice and then the steep descent was amazing. Dave and I co-operated on the downhill trading drafts and I broke 75 kph. From there the group split, some returned to Canmore directly and others took in a climb on Mt. Norquay. Simmon and myself turned left and headed out to ride the second half of the parkway to Lake Louise. Simmon turned at the end of the road and I continued for a further 5 km up to the Lake Louise Chateau as my final destination. The return was a long push into a headwind, 50 kms of rolling hills along the parkway. When I reached the end we had about 30 km to return to canmore and I needed a little break before continuing. A little bit of sugar and a quick rest of my legs and I was game to get back on the road. Simmon and I drafted one another back holding mightily respectable speeds considering the duration of the ride, the headwind which was luckily beginning to die off and a rather meager showing in terms of long-rides so far this season. My longest at 120 had been trumped by almost 85 kms and Simmons longest of 2009 by more than 100 kms.

The hot tub greeted us instead of a short run as most of the others did upon their earlier arrival and then the eating began.

Sunday’s collective ride was to be shorter so I headed out an hour earlier than their scheduled departure in the vehicles planning to meet up with them along the way at Kananaskis village and ride with them from there. I rode an average of 35 kph with a sidewind for the first hour and then began to battle the wind from the south on the second hour of my ride. I saw the cars go past loaded with bikes and I had motivation to really keep the effort level up if I was going to meet up with them for the ride. All was well in the end as I arrived on time but it took some hard work to do it including a top speed on one of the downhills of just 32 kph into an exposed headwind.

The group stuck together for the most part after meeting up and we rode a double paceline 30 kms south into the wind. Once we reached the gate to Highwood pass we turned around and headed back north with the wind at our backs. The speeds leaped by a significant margin as we rolled along at 45-50 kph along the flats and returned home in significantly less time than we had taken to ride out. After shuffling luggage and packing bikes we were still able to head out for a run together through Kananaskis village and down towards the river. Putting a hill, and a rather significant one, into the gameplan for the brick run was maybe not such a good decision following two days of serious riding because that’s the part of the weekend that I can still feel, the calves aren’t super pleased today, likely magnified by the car trip home almost immediately after the run.

That’s just a teaser photo: the rest can be viewed in the Canmore Training Weekend Photo Album and have been stolen from Becky and Justin. Thanks!

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.

It has been a few days since the race and I decided that it’s probably a good time to write down a few reflections of the marathon last weekend before the details are out of my head.

Thursday morning I gave a presentation at school and after lunch got on a plane down to Abbotsford BC where my brother Silas picked me up from the airport. I stayed with him and his three roommates in a rather full two bedroom townhouse that they are squishing into in favour of cheap rent and the ability to buy ski tickets. The next morning we made the 4.5 hour drive south from Abbotsford to Seattle and then 100 miles east to Ellensburg Washington via the I-90. The snow up top was still DEEP but as we descended we entered the desert and the temperatures crept up. We would sleep the night in Ellensburg and the next morning I’d run down 42 kilometers through the Yakima River Canyon towards Selah Washington. After checking into the hotel I found online that upon first appearance gave thoughts of funky smells and creeky beds, but turned out to be excellent annoyance free and cheap accommodation, we drove the course. The route is winding and generally downhill and for miles 3-26 passes through a canyon that’s just barely wider than the road, a river famed for its catch and release fly fishing, and a train track. We guesstimated the mile markers as we drove and I picked out a few mental notes along the way, there’s a pacman painted on a cliff at the half marathon point and made a mental note that the downhill after the first hill is steep and the second hill has a false summit. All things I mostly knew and there were to be mile markers along the way anyways, so I wasn’t obsessive about it and we enjoyed the views. Four and a half hours of driving adds up to a pretty good amount of time to sit in a car, especially when I’m focused on super hydrating my body, enough said.

We arrived and looked for the Selah Civic center along the west side of main street for the pasta dinner and decided to park the car, get out and look for it a bit better as the google maps pointer suggested we were pretty close. Once standing on the curb it was abundantly obvious where it was, across the street that we’d driven past twice already. Google is good but it’s not perfect!

As we chowed down on spaghetti and looked through the race package documents Silas and I came to the realization that there were more than a few crazy marathoners present at this particular race. Perhaps it had the highest concentration of what might be considered crazies at any race in the USA this year. The Marathon Maniac club was having its annual reunion race at this marathon. A club composed of people who run marathons like they’re going out of style. Some travel to run every weekend, some race on back to back days. Some are finishing up an all 50 states marathon challenge and some have already completed it. One was to run his 100^th marathon tomorrow and another was on 428 or something like that. A bit of an intimidating crew! Silas groaned every time a new stat was mentioned, and then they made the marathon first timers stand up, there were 7 of us… Out of 441 people.

Following dinner we headed back to the hotel, unpacked all of my junk and set things ready for the next morning then hit the sack. Up an hour and a half before the race start I chowed down on bread, jam and bananas for breakfast and some Gatorade. Silas warned me not to keep drinking or I’d spend the whole run stopping in the ditch, I assured him that wasn’t an issue as I put away a bit of milk and more Gatorade. Off to the race start we went decked out in Triathlon Club colours. It would be warm enough to start out in a wind breaker and T-Shirt and so the hoodie was stripped off even before I began. Walking 500 yards to the start was enough warm-up for me and one last watering of the bushes, a star spangled banner and we were off.

The first mile was slow, I was happy to take it easy off the start and ran it about 1 minute slower than my planned pace. The group was starting to thin out as we wove around through some farmland before making it to the canyon. Mile two was a fast one, taking the first mile easy meant people running my pace were already a bit further up the road. It would prove to be my fastest of the day and I soon settled down and nailed the third mile in exactly 7:37. It felt good, this was the planned pace for the race and I had no qualms about running that pace. I’d been tapering my volume way down and hadn’t done much of anything significant all week long, two steady runs, two hard hours on the bike and an easy half hour in the pool. What had been a pace that felt fast during my biggest volume weeks earlier in the buildup felt completely manageable. That’s a good sign I thought to myself.

I was now tucked in with people running approximately my pace and was no longer moving my way through the field. I had to keep an eye on the clock as well as focus on my position relative to multiple runners because I wasn’t about to gauge my pace off of just one person. These are people all planning to run faster than 3:30 and I was almost guaranteed that a few of them had done that more than ten times, maybe fifty. I was in the mix with quite a few of the marathon maniacs. Up one quick rise and suddenly we came around the corner and we in the canyon. I needed to start eating already and I felt as though I had just started but the numbers don’t lie, I’d gone 5 miles and that meant I had to put down 100 calories, that’s the game plan and I’ve got to stick to it.

Things cruised along nicely as we faced no more grades through the next 8 miles. The sun started to warm things up and I wanted to lose my gloves and toque. They couldn’t be abandoned just anywhere, I needed to wait for an aid station with a garbage can. I’ll just keep wearing them I thought to myself, but it was starting to heat up and with a solid 5 kms of waiting for the next aid station I started to get warm. Looking down my windbreaker’s arms were soaked with sweat. I took the gloves off and decided to carry them as starting to drip sweat was in no gameplan of mine. Finally an opportunity came, I lost the gloves and toque and kept on cruising feeling quite nice in the sunshine. Ten miles down, nearly halfway there, I started to chat with another runner, he was wearing an IMAZ visor so we discussed the heat and wind in Tempe, he’d raced in 2005. Faris Al-Sultan had won in hot and windy conditions before going on to slaughter the competition at Kona that fall. Suddenly we could see a clock on the road up ahead. 13.1 miles down in 1:39:40. That’s a half marathon PR and I hadn’t really worked yet, that’s good though I thought. Keep it steady for another ten kms to the hill and then I can get going if I still feel good.

Another mile done and my fellow triathlete went missing, who knows where to, forwards or backwards I don’t know. Around the corner we come, aid station and a big hill. This was the short one, about 4 minutes of effort and we were up top, a few guys had a sound board out with huge speakers echoing some rock and roll off the canyon walls as we climbed towards them. Over the crest and down, down, down, this descent was steep and I tried to keep it even and smooth, light on my feet I thought to myself. The canyon widened out a bit for a stretch and I ran alongside a marathon maniac for a while. I was keeping the steady pace from before and glanced at my heart rate, 174, I’m at the top end of acceptable. I cannot let this rise anymore or I’ll be in trouble, the plan is to keep it between 162 and 172. I don’t need to slow it down yet but I have to be careful not to speed it up. Should I keep running beside this maniac or not? It’s not a good idea if it will push me, it is a good idea if my mind starts to wander a bit, it’s easier to keep it steady beside someone else. I decide to stay with her and we get to some shade. My heartrate drops back to the middle of the range and I feel alright about that. We’re back in the sun soon enough and I take off the windbreaker. It gets stuffed down the back pocket of my jersey. 20 miles down, I thought the hill was supposed to start here. It’s probably just around the corner. Nope, maybe the next corner. I start to wonder what’s going on when it’s not around the that one… it’s getting close to the 21 mile marker when it finally comes into view. I slow to a walk through the aid station as I have done once already and take a powerade and water, mix the two and chug them down, then another two cups. I’ve been drinking two cups every 3 miles but my mouth is dry and don’t want to wind up crashing into dehydration in the last 5 miles. The hill is a gentle grade but it certainly takes a long time to climb and it’s starting to feel hot. It’s getting up to 20 degrees and I’ve still got tights on. One little patch of shade three quarters of the way up and I walk for 20 steps. Out of the shade, I might as well run. One last patch of shade as I crest the hill, I resort to another 20 steps of walking.

I’m at the top of the hill now, keep everything under control until you’re at the top of the hill I had been telling myself as I felt like I could have picked up the pace for much of the morning. Once again the heartrate is 175, slightly high but I’m getting close now as I’ve eclipsed the three hour mark. It’s now time to pick up the pace but now I can’t. The slight cambers in the road as we’ve run have been mostly long sweeping right turns and sharp left turns, my left leg had been slightly higher than my right for the majority of the time and I can feel it in the sides of my thighs. I’ve been able to feel it since km 25 but now it hurts. It’s surface pain, not deep, so I’m not really worried about it, it just hurts. It’s a gentle downhill but I can’t take advantage of it, the fronts of my quads don’t want to run down a hill. I haven’t been running down hills all winter, it’s icy in Edmonton and running downhill is a sure bet to wipe out. The pain slowly notches up and up until I decide I’ve got to take another quick walk break, it’s more than 20 steps this time but soon enough I’m back at it. I’ve got to count when I start walking I tell myself, that way I’ll never walk for too long. I run until it’s too painful and take another walk break. One more time, running is just TFH (hard) I can’t run even though my head says this is not the fastest plan and then I’m back walking for a stretch. I near the 25 mile aid station and take one last look at my watch. 3:20 is gone but 3:30 is all but guaranteed if I can at least run most of the way. I stop and walk through and pound back 3 cups. Don’t pull a Paula and loose the nutrition plan on the home stretch I remind myself. It’s a good thing someone famous once made this mistake because I’ll never forget myself. Back running. It’s downhill again but I’m close now so I’m not stopping to walk, with about a half mile to go it flattens out and I’m feeling better about the situation, the pain in my quads is stable, not getting worse as I run. One old guy comes past me and consciously make the decision not to think about racing him. I’m on the border of holding it together so I’ll just hold it together.

I see Silas in his red jacket, give him a thumbs up and come off the side of the road into the finish area. My name is announced, and I don’t really know where the line is but I have to stop or I’ll run someone over so I stop. Someone comes from behind me to pull the tab off my race bib, obviously I ran a bit too far. The race director spots the little shiny foot on my race number and give me a hug, I’m a newbie. I’m offered an aluminum blanket and a bottle of water. I chug the bottle and grab another bottle of juice. I finish it also on the spot. Another bottle and I make the slow walk to find a chair. I bend my knees to sit down and pause. All the people around me laugh, “you’re not getting back up once you get down” they tell me. I sit down and am feeling pretty chilly so I tuck the edges of the blanket in around me. Another one is blowing around on the ground and I wrap it around my legs. I down a few bananas. Another bottle of juice, a can of antioxidant baloney that someone is sponsoring the run with. It tastes awful but it’s liquid, cookies, yoghurt, some gummi bears. We chat a bit and Silas tells me that I’m number 46. That’s weird I thought, there were a lot of people ahead of me at the end, but it meant that I was actually at the front end of when things started to get busy. Look here for an illustration of that.

Getting out of the chair was a lousy process as was the walk down the road to the car. Race organizers had showers available with towels, soap and shampoo in the local Jr. High school and once I had given the quads a bit of a massage under the hot water they felt a lot better. We sought out an unsecured wireless network in the community to send a few emails and then ate lunch, I was already ready for it. 4:00 arrived quickly and we ate dinner for the awards ceremony but hopped in the car to begin the drive home before anything happened. Sleep? No way, we stayed up late drinking cheap American beer at a campfire on the banks of the Fraser river in Abbotsford once we were home.

The beginning of March marks a few things in my training. 8 months since the start of the Sea to Sea Bike tour. One month until my first marathon, 5 months until my main race of this season (Ironman Calgary 70.3) and 18 months until Ironman Canada 2010 (Penticton).

The past 8 months have been quite successful in terms of keeping the volume in. Since my shoulder allowed me to basically do whatever I wanted again I haven’t let my 7 day rolling average drop below 1 hour per day except for a few down weeks during periodization in the fall and just prior to Christmas when I sprained my neck. I my pseudo-taper (partly planned – partly lazy) coming into the Birkebeiner I hardly got below 10hrs/wk in comparison.

This weekend is 4 weeks away from the marathon I’ll be running in the Yakima River Canyon in Washington state. I’ll have run 70 kms this week by the end of the weekend and expect to run 84 (two marathons) next week. I will continue with the sustained run volume through half of the next week and then begin a 2.5 week taper. My long runs still planned are a 28 and a 32 km each weekend and will also be aiming to run a 10 mile and 12 mile run at sub 7:40min/mile pace. Those 4 key runs remaining actually constitute a good portion of the run volume I have to fit in and based on how they go I will be deciding upon what my planned marathon pace will be come race morning. I’ve been training with the hope of trying for 3:20 which is a 7:38 min/mile pace. I will have to decide if I feel prepared to tackle that before race morning. When the gun goes I need to know if I’ll be aiming for 3:20 or aiming for 3:30 I cannot decide mid-way and so that’s what some of the focus with these runs is for, determining what I will decide to bite off. Of course I’m hoping that I feel confident through these runs and can do the 10 and 12 mile runs at this pace but if I end up with a bit of a reality check I am ready to have my reality checked.

A plot of the last 8 months rolling average is available here if you’re interested.

The Eddington number, E, is the number of days in your life when you have cycled more than E miles.

It originates with Arthur Eddington, who was a physicist, who reached an E-number of 87 by the time he died in 1944. If you want to learn about his exploits in Physics then read his Wikipedia page. The idea is that increasing Eddington numbers isn’t all that simple of a feat once your number gets pretty good. To bump up from 60 to 65 all of the rides that you did that were between 60 and 65 are discounted and you need to do that many more above 65 plus the 5 actual rides to bump you from 60 to 65.

So the question you’re all wondering is “what’s my Eddington Number” I’m absolutely sure. Go calculate it! I don’t have any idea what yours is… unless you were on the SeatoSea bike tour and rode EFI (which means different things depending on who you are… “Every Fabulous Inch”, “Every Fantastic Inch” and of course some other versions. The tour prescribed that everyone would complete enough rides to score an imperial Eddington Number of 48 and a metric Eddington Number of 53. The metric one isn’t as good of a measure in my opinion as it weights quantity a bit higher than quality. Of course this discussion is a big fat sliding scale and I suppose the imperial version is just nice because that’s the only way you can compare yourself to Arthur Eddington.

I’m currently sitting at an imperial EN of 54 (metric 65 FYI). I am confident I’ll make it to 60 by the end of this season (15 rides) without thinking about it. 65 requires 25 rides and 70 would require 33 rides of the correct distances respectively. 70 might be reachable but would require that I’m careful not to log too many between 60 and 70 miles, gotta make them all count!

As this is obviously a lifelong kind of game and not for a single season… then it would make sense for me to keep chipping away at the number of rides I put in above 100 miles as that would quite obviously be a cause for some celebration quite a few years down the road. It’s only 82 rides away! Plus they all count for these lower scores (60-70) as well which is nice.

My bike showed up today…

It probably won’t ride on any roads for a few weeks, perhaps even months. I think I might even wait to ride this new bike out on the road until there has been a bit of streetsweeping done. I’ve got the first cervelo (dual) that I can ride on the sandy streets when the ice melts. Oh yeah, ice, it’s raining out there right now. It would qualify as relatively hard rain for the beginning of June. The bike ride to school tomorrow is going to be nuts because of it.

Triathlon club made its annual ski trip to the mountains last weekend. Panorama was the destination and even though there hadn’t been snow in about two and a half weeks the combination of excellent weather (blue skies), good company and ski equipment I don’t mind skiing over gravel and bushes with made for a very fun weekend. The temperatures were well above zero both afternoons and the snow conditions were nice and soft, unfortunately this meant that early morning skiing and some of the groomed trails were icy disaster zones but for the most part we still had a good time. I skied mostly the top half of the mountain, running some of the same runs repeatedly once they were discovered by our group to capitalize on skiing where the snow was and keeping a positive attitude by not worrying about the patches between here and there that were a bit bare.

There’s a new bike in the quiver!

After being professionally measured in early December I began the quest to find a bike that would suit the position I hoped to ride with for the next season (well next many seasons) of triathlon. My demands were a bit odd including an 890mm bottom-bracket to seat-top height and the hope of riding in excess of 80^o seat tube angle. The scoping out of all the bikes was happening at about the same time that Slowtwitch published it’s analysis of the pro positions on their bikes in Kona. It’s an interesting article and something I’d recommend perusing. If the bike positions aren’t something you’re super concerned with you will like the photo of Faris Al-Sultan with a bottle of gatorade stuck down the back of his speedo. Compare those shots with a few photos of yourself and there’s likely a few obvious things to improve. (Slowtwitch link)

I had a number of bikes that should have worked but the demand for something specific really bumped the prices into some of the upper brackets for what would have been ideal. I was excited to try out the same bike that Torbjorn Sindballe rides (Argon 18 E-114) but recognized that the pricepoint was too high to even bother trying to sit on a frame that would work. I’m too big to get a frame that most shops carry extras of and it’s not really fair to have one of them ship a frame in if I’m not actually going to consider buying it. I toyed with the ideas of Felt (B2-series awfully steep but not good value and DA is just too expensive), Look(496 has too much lacking, 596 is too expensive), Orbea (well Ordu’s too expensive, Ora’s not serious enough) Kuota (Kueen K is too expensive, Kalibur is not steep enough)… really I thought about a lot of things and after many hours of research I came back to cervelo. I’ve been riding a Cervelo Dual from 2004 and have enjoyed it thoroughly but it just can’t go steep enough on the seat-tube angle. It’s also been crashed twice and starting to put upgrades on a bike that’s been smashed is questionably intelligent. The next models up in the cervelo time-trial lineup rock out around the 78 degree mark without even trying. Pushing the seat forward is 80 degrees, maybe even 81 if I splurge and go for the (second from the) top of the line P3. I got myself on a 61 cm P3 bike in Calgary over Christmas and it fit like a glove, steep and really really tall! I couldn’t justify the price differential to the better bike without actually trying out the P2 which might or might not have been able to do the position. After waiting around for one of them to show up at a shop and then to be built I was able to hop aboard one of them a week ago Saturday 7 weeks after the process began. The results were good, the seat tube stays steep enough when pulled out to accommodate my enormous legs. I had solved the problem of correct positioning at the cheaper of the two prices and with only one of these bikes left in Alberta at the 2008 season’s prices I got it before the availability was lousy and then every other bike I had previously eliminated would have been back on the table for discussion. The following photos are on the new bike but they’re action shots and not fitting shots so the comparison to the still shots on the fit bike don’t correspond exactly.

It’s silver and red so that aero-helmet I bought back in October matches nicely. I had debated at the time whether or not it was a wise idea to get a silver helmet considering I had no other silver cycling gear… but it turns out to be an excellent match. It doesn’t exactly match with my racing kit for next season which is green, gold and black to represent the University of Alberta but that’ll just have to be how it is. The stuff you can’t see from the photos that is worth noting is that it’s setup with Shimano DuraAce components, visiontech up front, and FSA Hollow-Carbon cranks. The seat is fi’zi:k Arione and the wheels are the standard Shimano R-500 that it seems like the whole triathlon world rides as their training wheelset.

Plane tickets have been booked for the flight out to Abbotsford and Victoria for the beginning of April. That means I’ve committed to running this marathon and it’s no longer just an idea. That also means I shouldn’t be writing a blog about buying plane tickets, I should be outside running.

This will be my first marathon. I’m training based on a modified version of the Furman Institute’s marathon training guide. It of course doesn’t expect that you spend 3 days per week in the pool, commute everywhere by bike and do a fair amount of cycling on the side. I’m not hoping to slaughter a 3 hour time or anything spectacular so I’m leaving out a lot of running speed work in favour of doing my very high aerobic intensity work in other sports and focusing on strength (hills!) as endurance with my runs which are aiming for 4 or more each week. If you think that all translates into not actually following a FIRST (Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training) Plan you’re probably mostly correct. I am doing my long runs according to their guidelines of distance and pace. Pace is what the program has it’s reputation for, you can’t dawdle on the long runs, a long run should be a run! The long run get’s it’s own day of the week (mine moves around… not FIRST) and I’m hitting the longer version of the tempo run each week as well. The short speedwork is mostly being skipped and I do a short run of hills instead most weeks. Like I said though, I’m getting high aerobic demands in what FIRST would consider my cross training, I still work hard in the pool and speedwork on the road can’t get me that many gains. I don’t hope to run terribly fast, I want to finish well and begin the triathlon season without a running deficit from the winter. I’ve also drawn upon Gordo Byrn’s training philosophy quite a bit in developing my training plan and the two most specific rules I’m trying to follow with regards to his running advice are:

• Don’t sacrifice tomorrow’s training by overdoing it today.
• Try to maximize your ten year mileage.

The race for those of you who are interested is called the Yakima River Canyon Marathon. It follows the yakima river between Ellensburg and Selah Washington. This is part of one of the rides from the Sea to Sea tour this summer. My blog post on the day’s ride is available here and it is entitled “A Big Ring Day” as I rode the whole day in my 53 tooth ring. That’s because we had a tailwind and it was slightly downhill for most of the day. The marathon course does go generally downhill but not by much and there’s a big hill that comes at 21 miles in. It’s not going to be a walk in the park but how could I not go back there when the scenery is so great. Here’s a photo from this summer: