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:

Christmas break was spent in Calgary for the most part. It resulted in an awful lot less running than I hoped initially due to absolutely outrageous temperatures and then a lot of other activity. The hopes of getting out running frequently over the break weren’t met but when it’s because I wound up doing quite a bit of skiing the trade off isn’t quite as tough to take.

The skiing trips worth noting were a day’s ski from Sunshine parking lot up to the summit of Healy Pass. This was in anticipation of skiing into Egypt Lake shelter in February and I wanted to gain an idea of the layout of the valley and gauge the equipment needs on the trail before going in with a dozen or so people. Dad and I were on the trail soon before 9 am and made it to the top of the pass around noon. The wind was really howling up top so we didn’t spend much time there, just skied off the far side for a few hundred meters and then returned down the hill before taking lunch in the shelter of the trees.

The next week I skied up to Burstall Pass with both my Mom and my Dad on a new(ish) set of skis that I pillaged from the garage and had some new binding mounted on. This resulted in me having skins for the climb up to the top of the pass and I was really quite grateful for them. The ski in was nice, the climb was tough and the assault on the actual pass was I suppose unsuccessful. When we popped out above the treeline we were probably a half kilometer north of where we probably should have been. This resulted in us deciding that we’d done enough elevation and turned around to beeline it down the hill.

The very next day we skied in Peter Lougheed Provincial Park and skied up to Elk Pass before summitting Blueberry hill. The ski was fun and flying back down after all the work to get up seems to be more rewarding each time I do it. I think it’s a matter of me winding up heavier and heavier each time I’ve gone as I’ve grown up from being a little kid.

The following day I headed out with the whole family for two days skiing at Revelstoke Mountain Resort. The hill opened in 2007 and currently has the longest vertical drop of any ski hill in North America. We quite enjoyed the hill even though snow conditions on the bottom half were a bit sparse here and there. The weather was different at each different spot on the way up the mountain. The first day skiing in clouds up top and clear skies down below and the second skiing in blue skies and a bone chilling wind at -25^oC at the summit with a snowstorm happening in the valley below. The hill is quite steep and I quite enjoyed it, it’s obviously built to have a few more expansions added in coming years as currently there are a few more traversing requirements than would be ideal but for the time being that’s alright. Apparently every room in the whole town is basically booked every day of the year so some parts of the development there need to hurry along to make this place catch on in a big way.