Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas to you and yours and here is to Happy New Year. I always love this time of year. The festiveness of the holiday season carries a magic that is just so infectious.
For me, this season, has been as magical as ever. My training has been kept right on track and has really not prevented enjoying as much cheer as possible. Believe me, the hardest trip to the workout is easier than going to Wal Mart. Maybe that is why you rarely see a triathlete in Wal Mart;). I had a workout set for every day including Christmas. Christmas was a nice incline treadmill workout in the basement. A nice little present after opening presents. By the way, I must have been fairly nice this year as Santa and family brought some great tri gear to keep me going. He even brought me an early present of a true tri bike: Cervelo P2.
The only thing that has been sacrificed is my tradition of placing my glutinous behind on the couch and partaking till uncomfortable. It's actually been great to have the energy that comes with a vigorous workout plan as well as the lack of guilt when sitting down to the family dinners and snacking on those holiday treats.
My real challenge continues to be weather. Currently, we are under a blizzard warning. To combat that I hit the pool at 5AM this morning at the Y just as the snow was at the cusp of our area. It was so great to be out in the peace of the early morn with a light snow and to knock out the pool smack down. So now I reside at home and prepare for some core training ........snow shoveling.

Spin Cycle

You have seen bits of my training on a bike.  For me, the bike is definitely my favorite and with most favorites it tends towards your strongest event.  Fortunately for me, the bike is a major influence on your race.  Being fast on a bike over the distance of an ironman(112 miles) in and around 6 hours which should be your biggest allotment towards the 3 disciplines can pay huge dividends in both a fast time but when doing it correctly can also provide some residual energy to finish well on the marathon.
Currently my training is  two fairly short rides(1.5-2 hours each) in a week.  It is a bit of a function of my location and still some time till the race.  Even though the Midwest winter has been negligible to this point, it still is a challenge to ride in low 40's, windy, intermittent showers, and with only  10 hours of available daylight.  In comparison, summer just has a litany of opportunity for getting a 5-6 hour ride in and still enjoy the day.  Those days are coming I know.  Feel free to come join me on one of those even if on a moped.
To continue to improve my base on the bike I have gone multiple.  I am still getting a ride outside selectively.  I am doing spin classes at the Y.  I am doing a trainer in my garage.  Lastly, I am doing a compu-trainer at a cycle studio. 
I will give you some insight on to each.  Spin classes use a stationary bike in classroom setting with a lead instructor that will walk you through a variety of conditions put to music for about 45 minutes to an hour.  These are high energy and can really give you the beat down if you push yourself.  The challenge can be knowing how hard you are pushing yourself in the class as its mostly perceived exertion.  Its great for the cardio and keeping bicycle muscle memory. 
Riding a trainer involves placing your actual bike on a contraption that allows for you to pedal as you normally do without going anywhere. You adjust resistance on a fly wheel your rear tire runs against. Again, it can give a pretty decent workout, its good to be on the bike you will ride in the race and you can go all night long if you want.  The real challenge is that is sooooo boooooorrrrrriiiiiinnnnngg.  I use mine in front of a TV but still it just is pitifully blah.
The computrainer is a blend of a spin class and riding the trainer.  You use a trainer like you would at home but you are in a class setting.  The real upside is that its a much more realistic feeling ride and it gives great feedback as to how you are performing.  When you are riding your trainer it is hooked up to a computer.  This computer allows you to gain all the metrics of your ride and it actually adjusts your trainers tension so as to feel more like you are on riding an undulating road.  It even has preloaded courses so as to give you the feel of the course through the miles.  Yes, it even has the Louisville Ironman course.  Lastly, your metrics are all on big screen at the front of the room allowing you to be semi competitively against the other riders in the room.  It also allows you to see  your perceived thresholds to the real-time measurements.  There is no hiding or loafing here.  Its been really great to establish my fitness benchmarks or training zones.  Needless to say its a pretty energizing scenario that really seems to payoff in performance. It also spurs that competitive spirit and when your in a room of riders there is no shortage of that.
So I will continue to use these multiple platforms through the coming three months to build my base and with the use of the available technology I will truly be able to see if its happening.  

On the road while on the road

Last week was my first week of Ironman training while traveling for an extended period. For me, due to my work this is not that uncommon of a practice but working out while on the road is not easy. It's like cooking dinner in someone else's kitchen you have never been in. You spend significant time just trying to find the items to cook with and when you do it's still different as they are not the utensils you are used to.
So for me, I traveled to Cincinnati for our annual sales meeting on Thursday and Friday followed by our Christmas party Friday night. After that, my wife and I travelled to Louisville for our daughters swim meet on Saturday and Sunday. My training schedule had a swim Thursday AM, a run on Friday, Saturday was a recovery day, and Sunday was a bike ride.
To keep in line with my Thursday AM swim I pushed it to Wednesday night, 8-9PM since I was leaving at 6AM Thursday. Thursday was all good and it was a very productive and enjoyable day.  Friday I awoke to that sinking feeling. A cold was afoot. Nooooooooo! I sneezed, sniffled, and coughed my way through the day. I hit the treadmill post meeting and pre party in desperate hope of sweating the infestation away. No such luck was to be had. The upside was the training was still on schedule despite my condition. The added bonus was the humorous visual of me running hill intervals on the hotel treadmill circa the last century on its last leg in a semi asthmatic breathing pattern with my fellow workout partners being attendees for the Chinese English teachers association giving me the constant look of expected collapse at any moment. Needless to say the evenings party was not one I felt very up for but it was still nice to share a little holiday joy yet it ended rather early an off to bed for me.
Saturday as a recovery day and was perfect timing as I pushed the fluids and meds while soaking in the chlorinated heat of an indoor pool for my daughter's meet. No training was a great relief.
One of the great coincidences of the meet was its location. Being in Louisville it gave me a great chance to get an early look at the set up for the race. I checked out the hotel I will be staying in during the weekend, I checked out the transition area, saw the swim start location, and it was very exciting to see the finish line. It was recently voted as one of the top 5 best finishes of all Ironman races. The Louisville finish is on what the call 4th street live. It's one of Louisville's hot spots and is very impressive as they have basically roofed over a few downtown city street blocks full of restaurants, bars, and shops. Most describe it like finishing in the midst of a rock concert.
Sunday, I arose with some relief that I felt bit on the mend but a little disappointed as a steady rain was coming down. This was definitely dampening my enthusiasm as I was planning on riding part of the bike course. Again, some good luck quickly hit as the rain suddenly stopped and allowed me to go ahead and give it a go. The unseasonably warm temps of 55 were a bonus too. The ride was rather damp as the roads were still very wet and marred with a lot of standing water. It was still really nice to get some miles in with a double purpose of seeing the course and meeting my days workout plan. Plus it was great scenery riding along the Ohio river for the 22 mile round trip. The grand finale bonus was the smell of fresh cut Christmas trees that were staged at a stand at the end of the ride. Definitely, a new sense to be had while on a bicycle yet good news that my cold was receding enough to allow for a sense of smell.
And now.....Home sweat home.

Loving the smell of chlorine in the morning

With this post I will try and give you a feel for my swim workouts. I find these to be some of the most difficult workouts and that's not just because my normal workout start time is 5:30AM.
First, I will give you some background to my swimming history. It won't take long as I have next to none. I always enjoyed swimming but I have no competitive background. My swims to this point were either back to the pool ladder from a trip off of a diving board or back to the boat after a cooling swim. My exposure to competitive swimming began nearly 7 years ago when our daughter decided to go from swim lessons to a swim team. It was this rather insignificant event then that really puts me in a drastically different place today. Since then our pool activity has been a center to a lot of our life. Rachel has been a real point of pride for her mother and me. Her dedication and work ethic have been remarkable. As being swim parents we have actively participated in all facets of the club. I have become a USA Swimming official and her mother has been a tireless volunteer as a meet chair, team mom, committee chairs, and several other services. We have truly enjoyed the experience and have gained many close friends in this process. Again, its some of these friends and experiences that lead me here today as they are triathletes and several are already Ironmen as well. I will be the first to admit that being an official and watching a lot of meets does not do justice to the true task of competitive swimming.
Prior to my first tri I had been doing some swim workouts. These were an internet based guide based on some arrangement to slowly grow swim time capacity. It did give me progress. I can recall back to my first legitimate times in the water where I found a couple lengths to be taxing unto itself. With time it did get easier but comfortable was a ways off. For reference as to the length of an ironman it is just under 170 lengths of a 25 yard pool. As of now I am targeting about 1 hour and 25 minutes to complete this distance in the Ohio river.
Getting back to my current swim workouts. As part of my plan for training I joined the masters swim club which is part of the swim team that my daughter participates. This is a program for adults older than 18 with varying interests in swimming from just learning to swim up to competing in international events. Our local club has a specific triathlon program as part of the masters group that is conducted by our swim team coaches. This is a great opportunity for me to now build not just swim conditioning for this distance but to also get stroke specific instruction of which is crucial for a do it yourselfer like me. One key to swimming a distance like this is not just endurance with speed but with efficiency. The toll to your body is extensive. Anything you can do more efficiently  in the race will pay great dividends later. The last advantage of this program is all my swim workouts are pre set by a person which does it for a living. As a newbie to these, I find the descriptions to be so full of numbers, phrases, and acronyms that its like complex algorithms. To hear them read is like listening football plays in the huddle. Once you get the lingo it all makes perfect sense. Right now, I am that running back who occasionally goes the wrong way because he does not know the play book yet. The other true appreciation in swimming is for the amount of numbers. You have the number of swim sets, count strokes, count breaths, number of lengths, overall swim length, lap time, rest time, all the while you use this clock on the wall clock which just continuously counts up to 60 called a pace clock. Then you throw in these lovely periods of isolation every twenty five yards just to make you fully lose tract. So, right now I am swimming 2 -3 days a week for an hour to an hour and half depending on those numbers again. I actually go twice at 5:30 AM. This works well for my lack of daylight, gets my training done before I even have to be into work, and most interesting of all is my daughter is there practicing at the same time. How's that for a carpool? I can not tell you how interesting this is. First was her complete embarrassment of her father in the pool in front of all her teammates. Second, is this weird deja vu of being back at practice in a high school.

Either way this is working really well so far and it's very efficient. Allowing me to save for later.