Hello Dear Readers!
Well the race day is coming up very quickly. I leave on Thursday to fly to California. I shipped my bike last Thursday and it should get to Santa Rosa on Tuesday. Hopefully it will be undamaged! I instructed the bike store to check everything out and make it race ready. Since it's been a while since I updated the blog, let's catch up on some items:
Training
My training for this race was a little up and down. Since my training has occurred during the hottest months of the year, I had a few setbacks due to heat overstress. Basically, sine I am not a morning person, I have been getting up later and doing my long runs and bike rides during the hottest times of the day. So every workout I get close to heat exhaustion. This is good if you do it sparingly and let your body adapt to the changes, but I was doing it nearly every time! So the problem starts to arise that the accumulation of heat stress causes your body to not recover from the training well and as a result you get slower and slower. My Coach (Kevin), saw this was happening and ordered me to back off for a while and that seemed to do the trick. I have done a lot of long distance stuff over the last few months with several 100+ mile rides and 20+ mile runs. My taper period has been going really well and I feel myself really itching to get out there and hammer the miles. I am definitely ready for the distance, but the speed is something that is yet an unknown until I actually get to race day.
Body Health
Overall, I feel really good. No knee pain that is of any consequence. I am still a little tight and am stretching nightly to try to stay loose. Also I am working on making sure I carbo load this week, try to get plenty of sleep and get very hydrated.
Race Day Items
Race day so far is looking pretty good. The weather over there says it is going to start in the 50's and then get into the low 80's. PERFECT racing weather. The elevations of the bike and run are no where near as difficult as Lake Placid's Ironman was so that is definitely a bonus. One thing that is really interesting about this race is that it is considered a "Green" triathlon. This means they do their best to minimize waste. How do they do that? Well for one thing they don't use paper cups during the run! They use this item called a HyrdaPouch. Kind of like a water bottle and you hit the jugs with it as you go through the water stop. I was concerned about this really slowing people down and I just heard the other day that the race director decided to add paper cups back and gave people the option of going cup-less until 7 PM then they have to use the HydraPouch system.
Another interesting race item is that this is one of those races where the start and finish are in different places. I HATE THAT! All well, so I have to ride the shuttle (boo hoo!).
Expectations
Besides just finishing this race, I am still attempting to win that elusive sub 13 hour Ironman time. The way I see it, I can do the swim in 1:20, take 10 minutes to go through transition and get the 112 in within 6:20, take another 10 minutes (will need much less) and have 5 hours to do the marathon. I figure I can do the bike with an average speed of 18 MPH and have plenty of time to make the 5 hour window. If everything goes according to plan I just might finish somewhere in between 12:30 and 13:00 hours. Wish me luck!
I'll try to blog again once I get to California and I will definitely try to take some pictures of the wine country I will be riding through. Until then....
Tri your best!
Bill
