Tahoe Training Weekend Wrap-up

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This past weekend the Ironteam went up to Tahoe for a training weekend.  I managed to swim 1.4 miles, bike 91 miles, and run about 14 miles and I was really happy with my performance.   This was the first chance for most of us to get a really accurate look at what we're going to be doing exactly 3 months from right now and it was exciting to work out on the actual course. The family and I took a couple extra days off work and headed up early to get some actual "vacation" time in before the Saturday/Sunday combo of workouts and I'm really glad we did that.  A 5 day, 4 night trip starts to actually feel like a real vacation!  I sneaked in a single loop of the bike course Thursday morning but Thursday afternoon and Friday were all about family time.

We swam and did two loops of the bike course on Saturday and then we did a shortened version of the run from Squaw on Sunday.

Here are links to my swim, bike and run on Garmin Connect:

I think everyone who participated learned a lot, about the course or about themselves.  Here's a partial list of what I learned:

This course is hard! If you thought this bike course was going to be easy then you either didn't read the course description or haven't been to Tahoe before.  It's not "Death Ride hard, but this course has got a lot of hills.  Each lap has a pair of climbs that deliver a one-two punch, plus a ton of other climbing along the way, just because.

I think we did about 7,500 feet of climbing on our 91 mile practice ride Saturday so I'm going to guess there's at least 8,000 feet of climbing for the whole thing.  The pair of climbs through Northstar and over Brockway summit takes about 70 minutes, including 8 minutes of descent where you give up 600 feet of elevation only to turn around and re-climb it.

There's no such thing as an "easy" Ironman, but I think this one will go on to be known as one of the harder courses.

The run is not as flat as I thought. I thought the run was going to be really flat, but it turns out there are more undulations on the bike path from Squaw Valley to Truckee than I had realized.   I don't handle running up steep hills very well, (or down steep hills either, for that matter) but this isn't that bad.   Not like Wildflower-steep or anything like that.   Just enough to let you know that there are some ups and downs.

Those "undulations" might feel like mountains on race day though!

I'm going to be ready.  This bears repeating:  I think I'm going to be ready for this thing.  I rode the bike course three times this trip and I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to do each loop in about 3:20, which gives me an estimate of 7:45 for the whole bike course.

I'm pretty confident about that number based on my current physical condition and we've got 3 months left to train and optimize.  Of course anything can happen so this number could slip if it's really hot on race day, if it snows on race day, if I have mechanical troubles, nutrition troubles, etc.   But 7:45 is a good number to use for my spreadsheet.

I've got 1:40 marked down for the swim, based on my times in the pool.  Not sure how much time I'll shave off because of the wetsuit.  I don't trust the Garmin for great open-water swim accuracy on a multi-loop course, but it thinks I did 1.4 miles in 49 minutes which would predict a time of 1:24 for a 2.4 mile swim.   We'll say 1:40 to be conservative.

The run is the real wildcard, because I'm so bad running off the bike.  I was averaging a 10:30 pace on the run Sunday but that's certainly not indicative of the real thing.  My Wildflower runs are always around 3 hours, feeling stronger after the first part.   So perhaps 6 hours?

If you add all those numbers up and add some time for transitions you get a predicted finish time of slightly after 11:00 pm.  That's cutting it close, but I'll take it.  Anything could happen on race day but it's reasonable to predict I'll be able to finish before the midnight cutoffs on race day.   3 months is a long time to train and there's a lot of improvement to be done that will only increase my safety factor.  I feel good about this.

This course is stunningly beautiful. The swim is pretty, with the clear water and the neat shades of blue and green.   The bike route goes along the lake, down the Truckee River corridor, and through old-town Truckee.  The run is along the meadow in Squaw Valley and along the Truckee River.  Pretty much A++ scenery the whole way.  (Okay - the climb up Brockway has some ugliness to it, but that's about it)

The altitude isn't so bad. This was a nice surprise.  I'm sure I could pore over the data and correlate heart rates and power outputs, etc. and find a quantifiable difference but overall, it wasn't that bad.  The only time I ever really noticed the altitude was in the first couple minutes of the swim and the first couple minutes of the run. Nothing too bad, and it seemed to go away.

I plan to have a full week up there before the real race, and that's about the best I can hope for.

Squaw Valley is a really nice place to stay. The Village at Squaw Valley is really nice.  Heck - I wouldn't mind owning one of those units!   There are a lot of hotels right around there that look really nice too.  Unfortunately they're all booked up for the actual event so the family is going to be looking for a house somewhere else.  Probably in the Truckee or Donner area.   If you have a place we could rent from you, please let us know!

Northstar can suck it.  We stayed at the original Northstar Village buildign for two nights because Team In Training got a discounted group rate.  I don't have the mental energy to rehash all the reasons why, but suffice it to say that they're charging WAY too much for a really tired property.  We got a one bedroom apartment with a full kitchen at Squaw for less money than a run-down hotel room at Northstar.   Never again.

AMBBR wrap-up

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America's Most Beautiful Bike Ride (AMBRR) went very well yesterday.  It was a quick 36 hour up-and-down trip that included a bike ride all the way around Lake Tahoe and a quick trip through Truckee and Northstar to check out parts of the Ironman Tahoe course, and a then a couple extra miles to push it just over 100 miles. The only downside was that my Garmin 910 cut off the last 30 miles of my ride.  Apparently there's a known bug with Garmins that cause them to truncate long rides when space is running low.  The moral of the story is to make sure you clear enough memory before a ride starts.  Obviously a bug, and there's apparently no plan from Garmin to ever address it.  The good news is that I have the data from the parts of the Ironman Tahoe course that I rode.

Here's the Strava link for my ride:  http://app.strava.com/activities/57879712 I really did continue on around the lake clockwise and end up where I started - you'll just have to take my word for it.  I created a new segment in Strava just for the part of Brockway Pass that is part of Ironman Tahoe.  Currently there are 499 people that have ridden it and I can only imagine how many uploads Strava will get on September 22nd.  :-)

We're heading back up to Lake Tahoe in a couple weeks for a more structured training weekend and I'll be able to swim, bike, and run the entire course and collect a lot more data.

You can keep track of my fundraising progress on my Team In Training page and help my fight blood cancer by making a donation of any size.  http://pages.teamintraining.org/sj/irnmnltt13/bjohnsuovy

America's Most Beautiful Bike Ride

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A lot has happened in the last two months!  Wildflower came and went pretty well.  I had some bad cramps from drinking too much of the lake but things went well overall.  I broke 8 hours and achieved all the goals I set for myself so I'm thrilled about that. We've been building mileage and adding hill climbing over the last month or so and I'm up to an 80 mile ride.  We've been climbing hills like King's Mountain and Tunitas Creek in order to get ready for the hills we're going to find at Ironman Tahoe.

This weekend is a big weekend for me:  The team is heading to Lake Tahoe for an around-the-lake ride called America's Best Bike Ride.   The ride goes all the way around Lake Tahoe, plus some extra mileage to make it an even century.  (100 miles)  This will be my first century, plus my first time biking up at Lake Tahoe.

Ironman is all about pacing, especially on the bike, so I'm going to use this weekend to test out a race-day pace based on my power.  "Training and Racing with a Power Meter" suggests targeting 68-78% of FTP (Functional Threshold Power) with an Intensity Factor of .70 - .76.  I'm not actually planning on running after the ride so I'm going to target the higher end of those ranges.  This will be the farthest I've ever ridden so it will be a nice milestone.   I hope to finish strong and I'll be collecting a lot of data to see how I perform at altitude.

Fundraising is going well, with over $5,500 raised to help cure blood cancers and provide for patient care.  I'm hoping to hit $8,000 and you can track my fundraising and make a donation here:  http://pages.teamintraining.org/sj/irnmnltt13/bjohnsuovy

Wilflower Practice Weekend Review

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This weekend was a big weekend for the Ironteam - Wildflower Practice weekend.  We're all training for an Ironman in the Fall and registered for the Wildflower Half-Ironman in May as a practice race, so this was a practice race for the practice race.   I'm a huge Wildflower fan so I was really looking forward to this.  I did the half-Ironman course three times 10 year ago and was curious to see how my performance now compares to back then. I took Friday off from work and headed down at noon.  We hit no troubles on the drive and got to camp around 4:00 which gives plenty of time for a leisurely set up.  Dinner was a bit scattered and random, and probably not the best it could have been for a pre-race dinner.

I went to bed around 10:00 and for some reason couple not fall asleep no matter what.  I was warm and comfortable but just could not drift off.  I wasn't nervous or anxious or cold or hungry or dehydrated or anything else I could think of - The only problem I could think of was that I wasn't very flat.

The loud wakeup siren came early at 5:00 am and I was more than happy to get up, mostly because I was bored of lying there doing nothing.  I got up, had some cereal, got the bike ready and headed down the hill in the dark for a 6:30 setup time and ready to hit the water at 7:00 am.   The transition area was laid back and I did my normal routine of laying out my towel and making two piles:  one for T1 and one for T2.

I just bought a new wetsuit last week and was excited to try it out.  It fits pretty well!  It's definitely the right size, but it's a little on the thick side which makes it slightly restrictive.  Hopefully it'll loosen a touch over time.   The swim went really well, taking 42 minutes.  I had some shoulder trouble leftover from skiing but it didn't affect me at all and the swim went really well.

T1 was pretty laid back.  I felt awesome coming out of the water and ran up the dirt road through the parking lot and started changing.   Since this was just practice I kept it super laid back and ended up taking 14 minutes which is about 3 times what I normally take.   One key to a good T1 is putting on enough sunscreen and I did very well at that, then headed of to my bicycle adventure.

The bike at WiIdflower is something special.   The first mile out to Beach City is a series of little whoop-de-dos that never let you get settled.   Then you hit the steepest hill of the day getting out of Beach City.   Then 10 miles of big rollers.   Then somewhat flat, then Nasty Grade and the last 10 miles of hills.

This year I'm training with a power meter on the bike and looking to it to help me with my pacing.  My Functional Threshold Power (FTP) is around 186 Watts right now and the book says a half Ironman should be biked at around 80% - 85% of that in order to   I aimed for 160 Watts which is just on the high side of that range.

The problem with Wildflower is the hills are so steep that I can't make it up them in my lowest gear without busting through my power budget, and these hills start right at the beginning with no chance to really warm up at all.   I have a power alarm set at about 220 Watts and it goes off quite a bit on the hills.  The good news is that I can stay under budget for most of the ride, including most of Nasty Grade and the hills after that.

I was worried about not taking in enough nutrition on the ride and so I over-compensated.   I ate about 6 or 7 Gus on the bike - about one every 40 minutes or so - plus a few bottles of Fluid and a couple of Chomps.  Probably more than 1,200 calories of sugar which is too much.   Around mile 50 I started feeling sore in my back and neck, and I kept eating more Gu in anticipation of the hard run.  I was hoping for well under 4 hours but he bike took me 4:06.

I hit T2 not feeling great but not really knowing why.  I figured I would start to feel a little better after some coconut water and a slow mile shuffle but things did not get better.  I assumed that I was going to need a ton of energy so I kept eating Gu!   (bad idea)  The last one I ate was a real chore with my body not wanting it but my brain forcing me to finish it.  This was just compounding a bad situation.

I've become a fan of a 6/1 run/walk strategy but the hills are placed in such a way that you can't really force that schedule onto the course.  Instead I try to walk/jog up the hills and run on the flats and downhills.  I got some good distraction from Matt F. from SF Ironteam and kept jog-walking the best I could.  By mile 4.5 (on the big hill) I was feeling pretty bad and feeling a little woozy.  I hadn't seen anyone in while and I decided to just sit down before I fell down, and that's when Cornell and an SF girl passed me.

After a minute I felt a little better and decided to just shuffle on to the aid station at the front gate.   That's where I started to drink some plain water and immediately started to feel better.  In hindsight I realize this water was diluting the mass of sugar sitting in my stomach.   After a couple minutes I started to feel better and even started to jog a little bit.  I started to feel good after turning into the Redondo Vista campground and I actually jogged most of the way to the turnaround in the pit.

I was doing some math and realized that I wasn't going to hit my goal of 8:00 overall.  Even worse, I wasn't able to keep the minimum Ironman pace of 14:40 per mile, which means I wasn't on track for making the cutoff in an Ironman.

Conclusions

The swim was great and I think I'll be able to double my endurance and make my personal goal of 1:45 for an Iron-distance swim.   Aside from that it was a bad performance.  My main problem was ill effects from the over-nutrition, but even disregarding that my time was slightly below minimum required Iron pace even though I held my power, or even exceeded it.   That's a big red flag for my bike capability.

The run was a disaster, as it always is.  I'm not a strong runner and I'm no good at hills, which makes Wildflower a tough course for me every year.  Luckily the run course at Tahoe is much flatter and I'm going to rely on that fact in order to finish.  My pace when I was able to run was worse than 10:30, and I could only do that less than half the time.  Iron pace for the run is 14:45 and I need to be able to hold that for hours.

If there's a silver lining to this performance it would be my post-race recovery.  By the end of the run I was actually feeling pretty good, and after I stood in the lake and got some food in me I felt pretty good.  I was in a great mood Saturday evening and woke up feeling great on Sunday and Monday.   I had very little post-race soreness or fatigue and I attribute that to the training I've been doing with Ironteam.

Good:

- used sunscreen well - wore bike jersey on run (as always) for sun protection - new jogging belt with two bottles worked well - should start with one bottle of coconut water and one bottle of fluid - held to bike power budget as well as possible given the hills - excellent recovery resilience

Bad:

- ate way too much and got a bad stomach on the run - forgot sunscreen chap stick - could use new tri shorts - mine are worn out - missed my time goals for bike and run - need better efficiency on the bike to extend endurance - best run pace was still slower than 10:30/mile

Greg liked Wildflower

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Wildflower Time Again!

The Ironteam season is coming along nicely and this weekend is going to be a big one:  A half-Ironman practice race down at Lake San Antonio, which is the site of the Wildflower triathlons every year.   Many of us on the team will be doing the half-Ironman race at Wildflower this year as a practice race for Ironman Tahoe, so this weekend is like a practice-for-the-practice-for-the-real-race.   Very meta...

Wildflower holds a special place in my heart and it's the only race I do every year, without fail.  My interest in triathlons has wavered over the years but I always do Wildflower.   I started volunteering for the race in 1996 and after two years of that I was hooked and I had to try competing.   I've competed every year for the last 15 years, doing the sprint course once, the Olympic course 11 times, and the half Ironman 3 times.   I still volunteer every year.

The last time I did the half Ironman distance was in 2003, and my times were usually around 7:30.  (seven and a half hours, which was 45 minutes swimming, 3:50 biking, and about 3:00 running)  My shoulder is not is full race form for swimming this weekend but I'm hoping that by the time the real event comes around in May I'll be able to match or even beat my times from 10 years ago.   I'm 10 years older but I'm WAY better trained than I ever was!

They say "Plan the race and then race the plan".  The key points of my plan for this weekend are:

  • Swim easy.   Don't aggravate the shoulder.  Does my new-to-me (heavily used) wetsuit fit well enough?   Will it last until Tahoe?
  • Bike smart.  Aim for 80% - 85% of Functional Threshold Power, just like the book says.  Test out the new bike/gears on Nasty Grade.
  • Run/Walk strong.  I've never felt comfortable with my run at Wildflower and I'm in better run shape than ever before.  Test the 6 minute/ 1 minute run/walk strategy.
  • Eat and hydrate.  A lot.   Nice thing about Wildflower is you can pee wherever you want.  :-)
  • Collect Data.   Collect power/heartrate/pacing data for the bike and run.   Real Wildflower is only 7 weeks away.
  • Take In The View.  Visit the lawn at the Visitor's Center and catch at least one sunrise and sunset each.   Because I do it every year.

Greg liked Wildflower

Wildflower is extra-special to me this year because there's a strong Team In Training tie-in for me, because of my honoree, Greg Junell.

Back in 2002 I was living the dream in San Luis Obispo - beautiful town, beautiful people, perfect training conditions, at the top of my form in my late 20's.   I got to see Greg on a regular basis and he was pretty heavily into massage therapy.  His partner Dorene is a massage therapist too, and they were part of the volunteer massage team that went to Wildflower to rub down athletes before and after their races.

After my half-Ironman I paid my $20 and waited specifically for Greg to be available and lay down for a great 20 minute recovery massage.  Half way through Dorene saw me there and so she joined in for a few minutes and I got the elusive four-handed massage for a while.

Those of you who knew Greg know that a massage from Greg isn't just about flushing toxins out of muscles and soothing sore legs - When Greg gets into a massage it's about connecting your energy with his and really experiencing recovery at a a deeper level.  On this beautiful afternoon on the grass in the festival area, in the middle of everything that makes Wildflower such an interesting little temporary community, I got one of the best recovery massages of my life.

I talked to Greg later about what he thought about his Wildflower experience and he was really thrilled about it.  He was affected by the same things I was 15 years ago - the huge gathering of healthy, fit, like-minded people focusing all their energy on something positive for the weekend.   This was before smartphones and 3G and wireless Internet, so Wildflower was really a way to get away from your normal life for a few days, go camping, and immerse yourself in the lifestyle.   You could go the whole weekend without seeing anyone smoking, or being negative, or talking about politics, or over-commercialized sports, etc.  It was a weekend of pure existential triathlon bliss.

Greg was stoked by that, and I was stoked by it too.  We all had a great time and no matter how many times I do Wildflower I'll always have that memory of that afternoon and that conversation afterward.  Greg liked Wildflower and I like Wildflower too.

Major fundraising milestone reached!

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Below is an email I just sent out to all of the people who have donated to me, in order to celebrate passing the half-way point on my fundraising journey.  If you're sad that you didn't get a copy of this email delivered straight to your inbox, take a look at this link:  http://pages.teamintraining.org/sj/irnmnltt13/bjohnsuovy Hello Supporters!

Thanks to each of you for supporting me in my effort to to run Ironman Tahoe and raise money to fight blood cancers. Thanks to your support I've raised over $4,200 which puts me over half way to my fundraising goal of $8,000.   Our Ironteam group has raised over $110,000 so far, which is wonderful.

Remember that a small portion of that money goes to pay for my training and for the overhead of running the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society but most of it (more than 75%) goes directly to cancer research and patient services.

Our group has been training for 3 months and things are looking great so far.   We're building up our distances and working on adjusting to working out 4 - 6 times a week.   I'm swimming about a mile and a half at a time, biking about 30 - 40 miles, and running up to 9 miles.  Soon we'll be training harder than I've ever trained before.

There are about 6 months of training left and we're going to be raising the mileage numbers significantly and doing a series of practice races to get ready for the big event.  The workouts will progress until September when all of this hard work will pay off in Tahoe, but LLS is already making good use of your donations now.

Thanks again to each of you - this is shaping up to be a really monumental year!

-- brian

http://pages.teamintraining.org/sj/irnmnltt13/bjohnsuovy http://www.lls.org/#/waystohelp/whygive