Chicked

I got chicked at the Elephant Butte Triathlon today.  And not by a little.  I was completely crushed, destroyed, dominated, use and abused, worked over. She swam a 20:30ish for the 1 mile swim.  I was next out of the lake in 23:05 about :25 up on third place. I feel slightly used…in a good way.

Decision made

Done.  Over.  Sleeping in. Time to drink beer! My hip hurts, my leg hurts and the thought of 6 more weeks of trying to balance enough training without recovering properly is over-rated. It’s, at least in my opinion, better to heal up, rest up and start the new training cycle in mid-late October for next year.  That actually puts me ahead of where I was going to start it.  So more time to hopefully run lots, swim lots and ride a bit, mainly on weekends.  But after I rest and drink beer.

What to do?

Finally. I’ve reset back to AZ time.  Waking up at 4:30 really sucks, not as bad as 3:30 sucked, but still not my ideal time to wake up. 5:15 seems pretty good for now. Another week or two and that will get moved back 5-10 min. It’s not as light as it used to be that early in the morning.  I refuse to use lights on my bike until September.

Now that I’m set back to normal time, my hamstring is killing me.  My seat was too high on my road bike. Coming off almost no riding over three weeks caused some inflammation.  The NSAIDs seem to have knocked most of it down. It was a lackluster week for running and riding. Maybe 8 miles of running and 90 miles of riding plus a few swims.

I need to sort out my swimming. There are three options. I can continue to swim on my own, I can go to Ford Masters or I can go to the JCC masters.  But lets face it, swimming on my own, I don’t do a good job of that.  No frequency, not much intensity and very little volume.  I did finally roll over 125,000 yards for the year during Saturday’s swim.   If I go to Ford they have a set swim schedule. One day IM, one day long freestyle, one day short intervals, one day is a kicking set day etc. Not a good job of managing intensities or variety throughout the week if you ask me. The morning coach writes the workout and it gets repeated 3x that day. That really has to suck if you swim doubles. I swam there one day this summer and was not impressed at all by the coach on deck.  No control over the workout, or what was going on in his lanes. On the plus side, they have 3 workouts each weekday so getting to the pool shouldn’t be hard. The JCC option is appealing.  Very close to my house, it’s on the river path that I run and it’s from 5:30-7am.  Appealing because 90 min is much better then 60 when it comes to swimming. I can roll out of the pool and do most of my running right after. Unfortuantely it’s only M,W,F Sun in the morning. Sunday’s are out.  I usually run long on Wednesday morning, too hot to do that in the evening still and I run ~65 min on Friday.  Typically I ride T, TH, Fri mornings and have to run on the treadmill those days. If I swim in the mornings, I could run right after most mornings but would need to do something about my long run. Or I could swim M,F there, then Sat/Sunday on my own. 4 days on 3 days off, not ideal but more then I’m doing. Two solid workouts would be 1.5 more then I do per week. On the other hand, I’m swimming fairly well off of half assing it.

The Wetsuit Testing Begins!

Wetsuits. If you do triathlon you need one. My wetsuit self destructed a few weeks after my last tri when I was doing some open water swimming.  Zipper broke, a few seams split.  It seems it was one swim too many for the old suit.  It served me well, helping me exit 1st out of the water a few times, and in the lead of the lead pack a few more times.  I was convinced that for me, it was the fastest of the wetsuits I tried on several years ago.  I’d get another one just like but that model has been “upgraded” ie, redesigned, new an improved, etc.  sigh. 

So what happens when I need a new wetsuit? I head down to my sponsor Trisports.com and arrange to get a suit in every brand they carry in my size. From them I get a Blue 70, Zoot, QR, Synergy (which after seeing this video  I’m a little curious about the new player in the wetsuit market) and a 2XU . After posting on slowtwitch.com my desires to test wetsuits, the good folks at Desoto sports, NineteenWetsuits, and Xterra wetsuits contacted me about getting into the trial.  I also contacted Aquaman since I’ve always have been intrigued by their suits.  They had to ship it in from France since they had none in the US in my size. A Big Thank you to them for this.

I established some protocals to follow for the testing to keep it above board.  First I’m blinded to the suits I’m swimming in for round 1 until the day I test them.  I’m smart enough to figure out the last two suits but have only a 50/50 chance at guessing which will be swam first.  There will be two rounds of testing. Each round is going to consist of 2×400 scy on the 6 min.  Two suits will get tested per day. The suits have been randomily selected an neither I nor the selector knows which suits are going when.   After I finish round 1, round 2 will be reverse order of round 1. Each suit ultimately gets 4×400 of swimming.  This should help eliminate fitness gains and give each suit a fresh swim.  The first and last swims I’ll be swimming without a wetsuit to establish a front and back end barometer on how fast everything was/is.  Warm ups each day will be kept the same and I’ll be swimming 200yds after switching suits to make sure it’s on properly. 

This should give me a good idea as to what is the fastest wetsuit for me (not for you since we all swim differently) as well as how much faster I swim per 400 with a wetsuit vs without.  I wish I could say I’m in great swim shape, but alas, since Soma Half ironman in late October, I’ve been averaging 1 swim per week for an average of 2200 yds.  This is well below my season average of 1.5 swims per week and 7500-9000 yds that I would normally do.  

Yesterday was the first day of testing and I swam without a wetsuit.  I split out 5:07 and 5:10 for my 400s.  The :03 drop off (and the times) really tells me that I’ve not been swimming too much lately. Amazingly it correlates to the training log which says the exact thing.  Brilliant! and I’ll be having a few Guiness tonight to celebrate that stunning discovery.

I’m a pretty consistent repeat to repeat swimmer, able to swim +/- :01 for repeats all day long. Since Thanksgiving I’ve swam a couple of times. Once the main set was 3×600 on the 8 minutes every 100 was split out at 1:20/100 pace and 4×200 on 2:55.  The first 3 were at 2:37 the last was 2:36. 

It’s freezing cold in Tucson today, but in a wetsuit the fear I have of actually getting into water shouldn’t be a concern.  Yesterday it was all of 50F and windy.  Try standing on the pool deck wearing goggles and a swimsuit. Brrr. Not so fun. I don’t know why I hate getting into the pool so much. But alas I need to get over it quickly since I’ve got a bunch of wetsuits to test.