[kingQuez]

Another lunchtime swim today. Technique was still a bit off, but a lot better than yesterday; I'll aim to do one more short easy swim between now and the weekend and hopefully things will come back. Brought my watch with me today to see how I was doing at an easy continuous pace in the pool.. 50m splits in seconds were 63, 68, 65, 67, 66, 67, 64, 66, 71, 64, 66, 67, 66, 70, 71. Not very consistent at all. Ran out of time so had to call it a day at 750m. Need to start swimming in a group session/take more lessons or something.

SWIM: 950m: 4x50m warmup, 1x750m (16mins 41sec).

[kingQuez]

Very easy run today... need to make sure I dont break anything between now and the Dublin City Triathlon on sunday! I've a bit of a niggle in my right leg, so back stretching the gracilis + his friends. Really enjoyed the run, its been ages since ive gone for an easy run and been happy to stick to that plan.

RUN: 3.2miles (29mins, 9mins 3sec/mile).

[MCOS]

Best of Luck in Dublin this weekend. Good running progress too... closing in on sub 40 pace

[kingQuez]

Thanks for the wishes MCOS, but it's going to be a did-not-start for me as I'm being shipped out of the country on sunday with work for a week (I found out today)

After setting out to finish an OD race this year I can't let it slip. I'm away the weekend of the Erris Beo Blacksod point triathlon, but have scoped out a race in the UK at the end of september. I'm due some holidays, so I'll turn it into a long weekend and catchup with some friends over there. Still a bit gutted that Im missing this sunday though, even if training hasnt been great the past few weeks.

[kingQuez]

Done nothing for the past two weeks.. runners never made it out of the bag during the roadtrip for work, and I picked up a cold on the flight back. Jetlagged+sick for first 1/2 of the week, and just tired now.

I am however signedup for my replacement triathlon 3 weeks to go! Cant wait to get back training after this weekend.

[kingQuez]

Brick session today.. definitely felt like I havent been out training for a few weeks. Outside of right knee was sore towards the end of the cycle; time to tell the IT band whos the boss again I think. Worrying how high average HR was for a 7min/mile pace.

BIKE: 26k in 1hr5mins; max hr 164, average 139
RUN: 2.85miles in 20mins (7mins/mile); max hr 170, average 159

[kingQuez]

Managed to drag myself out of bed early thismorning for a swim, and out for a run in the vening then too. Was planning to run a bit longer but just wasnt feeling the love so turned back early. Was feeling very jealouse of all the people out training for the marathon (at least I assume thats what the masses were up to!).

SWIM: 1k. (4x50,2x100,1x200,2x100,4x50).
RUN: 4.6miles, 37mins (8min 2sec/mile). Average hr 137, max 157.

[kingQuez]

Wednesday 16th:
SWIM: 1300m as a mix of 50s, 100s and 200s. I actually lost count so it was somewhere above 1300.. just not sure how far above

Thursday 17th:
CROSS: Gave underwater hockey a go with a friend's team.. good fun! Swimming with fins is hard work on your legs...
(If you havent seen it before.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozVGO...eature=related)

Sunday 20th:
RUN: Im not sure I believe mapmyrun.com for the distance... its giving it back to me at 7.4miles, when I was expecting it to be about 6 (based on how I felt). Time was 47mins11sec, max hr 161, average 145... which would have me at 6min23sec/mile (just under a 40min 10k!), which I find a bit hard to believe (See stats for the 13th/14th this month, though I was still slightly under the weather on those days). I was fairly well rested having been on holidays for a few days, and calfs are a little stretched.. but.. hmm.. not sure it all adds up

Today:
SWIM: 1k. 2x100,200,500,2x50.


The rest of this week is all about ticking over. Tomorrow is off. Planning to cycle to work wednesday, run 2miles+swim 800m (3x50,5x100,3x50) on thursday. Friday is off. Saturday will scope the route with bike/car combo, and race is sunday! Worried I havent done enough on the Bike, but its too late now

[kingQuez]

I didn't drown and had a great day out on Sunday

Scoped out the course on Saturday: seeing the swim course as a single continuous setup in a lake (rather than just 60 lengths of the pool) didn't scare me as much as I expected, probably because it was all reasonably close to a shoreline. At least there wouldn't be currents to worry about. The run course mostly looked OK, until I saw 'Hill 60', the evilest hill I have ever seen in my life. Aparantly it's notorious in all the xc-races in the area. There would be three laps of the run course, and my calfs were tired when I walked up the hill fresh. Promptly blocked that from my mind . Drove the bike route and was quite happy until I saw all the hills at the north end of the course where you do two laps. Any notions I had of doing a fast run were gone. Still; nothing like a challenge, and I had set out to finish.

On sunday got up at crack-of-dawn-o-clock and off to setup transition. I upgraded from duct tape to elastic bands for attaching the bike shoes to the bike this time round.. and found it much more practical than the hackerey I'd come up with for athlone! The route from the side of the lake into the transition zone was much nicer on bare feet than in athlone too, so my backup plan of using compeed plasters wasnt needed.

Swim went well; I was in the first wave with all the other people with swim times of 38mins+. First half went well, but for the second half my goggles had fogged up enough that I had to stop and pull them up to sight occasionally. Got out at the end and nearly fell over during the first 5m of running towards T1.. didn't expect to be quite that light headed !

T1 went great, in+out in about 44seconds.

Cycle: Settled into it and enjoyed the first flat sections.. got to the hills faster than I expected and just kept on them at a comfortable pace. Nearly hit a drain at speed going down a steep downhill bendy section of the course, which gave me a bit of a fright. On the next lap round someone had ended up on the opposite side of the road there and ended up getting medical attention (I slowed to see if he needed help, but two other cyclists had already dropped out to help out). Quads did feel the burn during the hills, but the weather out was great so at least I didn't get cold during my slow crawls uphill in my lowest gear. Overall the cycle wasn't as bad as I was expecting; I took a gel at 25k and again at 35k, using about 500ml water over the entire route (I think). Very impressed with the lack of drafting during the entire course.

T2 again went well, although I arrived at my spot with a little too much speed and almost went on my ass on the damp grass. Recovered nicely and didn't take out anyone which was good. Minor faffing as someone else had racked their bike in my place, ending up with a t2 of about 1min 30.

Out onto the run and for the first few mins my legs just weren't there. They eventually kicked in, but just before Hill60 -- which instantly took them back out of action for the next 1/2 lap. Every time round the course the hill creamed my legs for 1/2 the course, and then I made up time on the second 1/2 which was relatively flat before coming back downhill gradually again. My only gripe was there was no waterstations during the run. The pre-race info had one advertized on the run course, so I didnt bring a bottle with me for the run expecting there to be some available on the course.

So. That's that. Delighted to have finished a standard-distance triathlon, pretty much hit all my expected times (40min swim, 1hr40min bike, 40min run.. give or take half a minute here or there -- Ill pull down the full times later), ending up with a time of 3hrs25seconds. A bit disappointed I didn't go under 40mins on the run (which I think wasn't a full 10k, making it all the more disappointing), and would have liked to come in under 3hrs. Not feeling the same glory as with the marathons, but thoroughly enjoyed it!

Oh, and someone nicked (possibly by accident) my goggles and swim hat from transition

Cheers to everyone that's answered all my triathlon questions during the year -- I've now hit all my goals for the year, thanks for all the help!


SWIM: 1500m, 0:39:04, average hr 157 max 211 (so presumably it messed up logging).
BIKE: 40k, 1:39:08, average hr 155, max 175
RUN: 10k, 0:42:10, average hr 168, max 178

[Bleebucannon]

Well done on the Tri! Just came across the blog for the first time today and read most of it. Very helpful as I'm now starting to train with a Triathalon in April / May in mind. Made for v good reading, Thanks!

[kingQuez]

I've been thinking of updating this log for a long time now. I'll fill in some information on what I did last year for continuity; the log kicked off from me learning to swim, and in 9 weeks time I'll hopefully have my first Ironman under my belt. My OCD tendencies cant let me skip the 2010 year of updates without filling in some info on what I was doing.

My 2010 goal was to finish a half ironman in <6hrs, and do a good few olympic distance races (ideally getting under 2hrs30 in one of them).

My biggest limiter was still swimming, as I never really felt confident in the water in 2009 (or had any sort of speed). I joined a tri club and spent the winter in the pool; after the initial shock of actually working during a swim session I improved a lot. In retrospect I shouldn't of waited to join a tri club; I thought you'd need to be ridiculously fit and pretty dedicated to the sport before you'd want to, but its a great way to meet folk and really enjoy some of the training sessions.

The middle distance tri I did was in wales (Bala), my first race of the year, and I finished it in under 6hrs. That was what I was training towards, and was pretty happy with the result. I think my swim was about 36mins for 2k (i was really happy with this), the bike was slow (i'd done a good few long cycles, but never improved my speed), and I had an ok run (1'50 for 20k).

The weekly hours I put into training from jan 2010 until the race were:
2,3,4.5,2,5,5,7,4,5,7,7,6.5,5,6,7.5,7.5,5,8,4,10,11,(taper - i didnt track this).
I'd various niggles during training and had to do a lot of running on grass. The longest bike session I did was 100k. Overall I trained more consistently than the previous year, but the structure was pretty erratic. Looking at the weekly totals now makes me cringe a little, they seem really low -- but thats what I was able to manage at the time, and I managed to (mostly) hit my goals off them.

I did a few olympic trathlons then too (hell of the west, beast of the east, dublin city, blacksod point) but missed my goal of < 2.30 by a couple of seconds. The other fun event I did was the escape from ireland swim, where they drop you to Ireland's eye on a boat and you swim back to howth.

It was a fun year and I really enjoyed both training and racing.

[kingQuez]

So, this years A goal is to finish IM Austria. I've been fascinated with the ironman since I first heard of it (when training for the dublin marathon back in 2008), and couldn't believe a person wouldn't die doing that much exercise in one day. When I saw Chrissie Wellington win Kona her third time I was in total awe of her and the event (until then I'd only read about it). I wanted to do a HIM last year, with the goal of doing a full distance one this year. The choices were Austria (if i got in) or Challenge Roth otherwise.

The main things I'd like to get out of this year are:

• a sub 40min 10k (which has eluded me the past two years)
• finish IM Austria in a respectable time (to be determined )
• and ideally clock a good olympic distance time depending on recovery from Austria.

My bike time is the biggest limiter I've got for the IM. In the races last year I was pretty well placed in the swim/run relative to eachother, but dropped to the bottom of the field on the bike split. To put this in context, last year it took me 5hrs to do 100k over the sally gap (via laragh and blessington) and I needed a week to recover from it. Things have improved a lot since then, and I did the same cycle recently and have it under 4hrs without killing myself as part of a regular training week's brick session. Obviously there's still massive room for improvement here, but clearly better as a result from work over the winter.

I've been reluctant to keep this log up to date because I didn't know how training for the IM would go. So far its been pretty consistent (25 weeks in with 5 until taper time), but there's still a lot that can go wrong. For a long time I was fearful of having to chase the bike cut off in the race (even with a good swim). I know there's lots of experience amongst the boardsies, but sometimes it can manifest itself in quite a negative way. I have enough gremlins telling me this is a bad idea, and don't really want my training plan shredded to bits--so I'm probably going to be a bit vague on some of the grand-plan details on any updates I post. I figured coming from the non-pointy end of things, if im successful with this, the log might be of interest to other folk considering giving the IM a go so kicked it off again. I've been lurking on boards for a while and its time to get involved again!

At some point in the past few years I became a glass is half-full person, and the half-empty folk just kill the buzz. I'm prone to being critical and constructively-negative, so try to avoid anyone that might encourage me to question whether I can do this, and instead assume I can if I keep the training ticking along and survive some of the hardest sessions.

Let's see how it goes

Sub 40min 10k
I ticked the 10k goal back in january at the fields of athenry. I'd signed up for the race because I was struggling with running in training, I hadnt been out in months and wasnt enjoying it--so I decided to sign up for a race to go through the motions and just have a fun day. It seems spending a lot of time in the pool had improved my cardio fitness, and after another month of running I was back on track. I initially thought my garmin was giving me dud data in training when I did a few intervals (the hrs are way off -- so i wasnt trusting the pace), and was quite surprized on the day that it had been telling the truth. After the first km which was slow and a bit of a warmup, the next 8 were run in lockstep with another guy--at 1k to go i'd been told it was all downhill so I kicked off and ran hard. The PB was a little bittersweet, it took me about three weeks to fully recover from the race so training wasn't brilliant after, but I'm still happy I managed to finally bag it. Great race--will certainly be going back there next year! I had paced myself a little conservatively during it, and the new 10k goal is 36'xx (another time).

[kingQuez]

Run: (missed an interval session, plan was 8x4mins @10k pace)

Swim: 900m warmup, 2x(2x200m sprint, 400m sprint, 2x100m sprint, 100m easy). With good rest between each. Badly paced this lot and suffered at the end, 200s between 2'50/3'15, 400s were 6'15/6'35, 100s between 1'25/1'35.

[jackyback]

Best of luck with the race and training. You look to have some great speed in the swim.

[kingQuez]

Thanks jackyback; fingers crossed some of it transfers to the open water and I havent just improved my kick off the wall!

LSR: 2hrs, 25k. 4'49/k. Average HR 129. Normally find the LSR nice and easy but legs just weren't happy tonight, calfs quads it-band and glutes all complained during it.