Sunday July 10, 2011... 8AM standing on the beach at Little Lake in Peterborough, ON the gun goes off and into the water I run along with 401 other people... It's the start of the Peterborough 1/2 Ironman triathlon.
At the beginning of the season I had planned on doing the Sprint distance. Then my coach and fellow athletes who can't suffer alone convinced me to do the 1/2 distance in Peterborough as training for Muskoka in September... So I did. 2K swim, 90K bike, 21.2K run - total time was 6:47.... So....
Swim: I opted to go with the farmer john and my new speed sleeves.. in the pool it's not as tight around my neck and I wasn't getting the choking feeling.. I went out to warm up - swam out to the first buoy, cut across and then back in. Felt good.. But in my head I was still nervous - not doubting myself or panicking but nervous.. So I did the swim and took it easy.. A little too easy according to the clock but - my goal for Muskoka is to do the swim in 45 mins. I did P'bo in 51:59 but that included a 2+ minute walk/run back onto transition... Still - way too slow a pace and when I came out of the water it didn't even feel like I'd been swimming... Far too easy... Plan for the 2 months is to focus on speed in the pool drills and get more open water in at Wilcox for the 2k distance....
Bike- Felt great. I was happy with the pace - kept to the 3 hour mark I wanted and averaged 29.4kph... basically I'll get north as many times as possible and ride the Muskoka course- first outing will in fact be this Saturday!!
Run - total 1/2 marathon time was 2:43:45 with an average pace of 7:48.. ok - that's closer to my first 1/2 marathon race in September of last year vs. my usual 7:20 pace I've been racing at but - this was the first time I was coming off a 90k bike session... So - i'll keep working on my steady run pace and building the distance on those during the week with the RR marathon group... Continuous hill sessions will help too midweek... Then the LSD on Sundays will keep building more and more distance/endurance and I'll add in longer runs off the bike on Saturdays... Keep it around 10K on those and incorporate some mid session speed intervals to really push things...
Not sure what the heck took up 5 minutes of my time in transition on T2 but.... I did have a little discussion with one of the officials- mindlessly I unclipped my helmet before racking my bike... But thankfully just a gentle reminder from the nice older man and no penalty.... So at the end of the day I did what I set out to do - I FINISHED a 1/2 Ironman and pinpointed my training strategy for the next 2 months.... And shared those thoughts with my coach of course!! Ok - on to Muskoka!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment