Week 13 is over...17 to go

Last week was a good week of training. Hit all my workouts and finished off the week with a 9.5 mile run and a 64 mile bike ride. I changed my training up a little bit after some difficulty dialing in the speed on my long runs. I had been struggling to run sub 11 min miles on my long runs, but at my race last week I ran a 7 min mile 5k. I thought this was way too much of a change. So I stopped following heart rate so much and started going more by feel. The result was a run that for the first have I paced just under 11 min miles and I wanted to negative split, and I finished the final 50 minutes at just over 10 min miles and after the run noticed that my heart rate barely went up. It was a revelation! Then I did a long loop with Kit Hayes sunday that took us from Carrier park, through weaverville to mars hill, over to marshall and back home along riverside. What a ride! She always pushes the heck out of me so I know I"ll be a much stronger ride for it by the end of the season. She still destroyed me on the climbs, but I still survived them :) Maybe I"ll be able to close the gap by the end of the season. For this long bike ride I took in about 400 calories of need and 400 calories of GU. I went through about 1.5 bottles of water. It was about 75 degrees and calm.

Charleston Sprint, my first race of the 2014 season

So this race began in a wonderful fashion. What on tuesday looked like a 60 degree day and sunny, became 100% chance of 2-3 inches of rain on wednesday. So needless to say on wednesday, I wasn't nearly as excited about the race as I once was. But I still held out hope that it might change, but it wasn't looking good. Friday approached and no change, so it just meant dealing with a cold and rainy race. Not ideal, but that just meant suck it up and deal. So I took my bike over on friday to drop it off. Then had to deal with tire issues. How fun. But at least I had to deal with it friday and not the morning of. Turned out to be nothing, just an issue with a new tire needing more space than my training tires did. So anyway, on to race night and morning. The rain began right on schedule at four o'clock and it was torrential. There were constant flash flood warnings for the area but still no cancelation. I was woken up by my phone around midnight with another flash flood warning. I was getting more and more exciting about the race. 4:30 am got there pretty quick and I woke up and first thing I did was looked out the window to see the torrent of rain I expected to see. But, low and behold there wasn't any rain! Where was it? When would it come back? I assumed it was only a matter of time till more rain. I told Rachel not to come out because I didn't want them sitting out in the cold and rain. Bad decision. Not another drop fell and it wound up being a great race, even if it was a bit wet and muddy. On to the event. All segments went really well for me. In fact it was a polar opposite of every other race I've done. I typically have had good swims, followed by better bikes. Only to lose badly in the run. Apparently I haven't been swimming enough. The swim was slower than I had expected. It was a 500m swim, so I expected to come out around 8:30-9 minutes and I was just over 10. Good enough for 36th overall and 2nd in my age group. Not bad, could've been better. So I headed into the bike in decent shape(course I had absolutely no idea how many people were ahead of me, I assumed I was out of the running, since my age group is typically insanely competitive. I jumped on my bike, and started pounding. My goal was to average about 22 mph and I wound up chasing that speed the entire time. We had somewhat of a headwind on the way out which made it pretty tough to hold my speed, but still ended up at 21 on the outbound stretch. Once at the turn around and the help of the wind I took off out of the gate and held about 25 mph for a few minutes before settling in at about 22-23 mph for the return trip. I had an excellent dismount after learning from my mistake last year and waiting way to long to get my feet out of the shoes. Probably took them out a bit early and lost a tad bit of speed, but nothing like last years last second fiasco. I wound up with a time of 36:23 with an average speed of 21.6 mph. Slower than intended, but the wind held me back a bit. But it was still good enough for 19th overall and 2nd in my age group. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I entered the run segment in second place in my age group. Also unbeknownst to me as well was that the first place guy was about 50 yards ahead of me. I hate calf sleeves, seriously, they do nothing except keep competitors from seeing your category, but that's a rant for another day. Anyway, the only reason I was trying to hang with this guy was he was a big guy too and I should be able to hold his pace. I started out around a 7:30 and gradually increased my speed over the course of the race. By mile 1 I had dropped it to a 7:15 pace. Also began closing out the distance on this guy. Hadn't quite caught him yet, but the gap was getting smaller. At the turn around i was a couple feet behind. I finally passed him at a tight turn where I cut the inside of the turn and slipped by. This was a couple minutes before the 2 mile mark. I think this demoralized him too as that's when he said that he was in my age group and didn't have enough to hang with me. Which also gave me a little more fuel to keep pushing. Shortly after I was passed by another guy but didn't give him much notice because he too had freaking CALF SLEEVES! I didn't know his category but he looked a bit older than me and thought he was in a higher group. Bad decision. Turned out that guy was also in my category and with only about a half mile left in the race I could've summoned a little more to hang with him. I still managed to keep pushing my pace knowing that other guy was a bit behind me and i wasn't about to lose the lead after how hard I fought to overtake him. I wound up with my last mile being a 6:46 pace(would've been faster had the race not been a quarter mile short, as I was getting faster continuously and always close faster. My run leg wound up being 26th overall and 2nd in my age group. I actually had a better run than swim, which has never happened before. I wound up finishing 20 seconds behind the first place finisher, the guy who didn't have his age group visible...bastard. My final time was 1:08:07. I finished 22nd overall out of 124 and 2nd out of 10 in my age group. I'm still more than thrilled with finishing second in a very competitive age group. It's also a great start to the season!

Ironman Louisville Training begins again

So, as of today there are 174 days and 25 weeks until the big day. So originally I was planning to do Beach 2 Battleship in late October. There was always a part of me that wanted to give Louisville a shot, but I do have a tremendous fear of the heat and humidity. I wanted to give this race a shot to see how I could handle it, considering my dream is to race Hawaii, which is just as bad, if not worse considering the challenging course as well. Well, life got in the way, things came up that forced me to change races, so as fate would have it, Louisville became this years race. I'm excited about it. Ironman puts on an amazing show, and I realize they have their critics, from my experience, they earn the extra money. It's an amazing environment out there and the passion and enthusiasm of the crowd is well worth the extra cost. I know I can suck it up and deal with the heat, and like I read somewhere once "Of course it's hard, if f-n Ironman!" So, i don't know if this makes me a quitter or impatient, but I've decided to scrap my first Half IM of the year and get into my Ironman planning early. I'm already feeling the symptoms of mild burnout but I think a lot of that is due to the misery of waking up in the cold. The early stages of Ironman training are a lot easier than these mid stages of Half IM training, so I'm changing tactics. I dont' think I can manage to keep up with 3+ hour bike rides for the next 6 months non stop. For instance, this weekend I jumped in and had a 1 hour run and a 1:45 ride, compared to what I had planned would've been a 90 minute run and a 3 hour ride. And the intensity is far less than what would've been anyway. I can deal with the gradual increase rather than pretty intense training for the next six months. So this weekend began my training with about a 5.5 mile run and a 35 mile ride. The other thing I'm doing this time is that I"m not just doing this race for me. I will be dedicating my effort to the Wounded Warrior Foundation. I will be trying to raise awareness and money for this foundation, that, frankly in my opinion, shouldn't exist. If we cared as much about our soldiers as we claim these brave men and women who were wounded in the line of duty should want for nothing for the rest of their lives. There shouldn't be a non-profit doing what our government should be doing. But this is our world, and I would love for everyone who reads this to contribute what you can. Im eventually going to have a personal fund raising page, so if you choose to donate I'll put the link up on these pages. day Well, 174 posts to go!!! HA...who am I kidding, as if i'll remember to write this thing every day. Here's to trying!