Category: triathlon

2009 Peachtree City Triathlon

Another race has come and gone. This one holds a special place in my heart because it was my first triathlon back in 2007. I ran this race last year, but didn’t have the opportunity to improve my time because I was injured.

Let’s get the important stuff over first:

Thanks to Sharon and David for coming out to cheer us on! It was a blast to have you there.

Times:
Bill: 1:12:35 which is a 10 minute improvement over 2007 (1:22:56)
Jenn: 1:41:31 which is a minute and a half improvement over 2008 (1:42:55)

Time breakdowns later. Right now let’s talk about…weeds!

You may recall from last year I spoke of the forest of lake weed that had grown up in Drake Lake. I even posted a representative photo at the top of the entry to visually describe what it was like swimming last year.

This year, we’d been told by the race director that they had brought in some carp to eat the weeds as they grew; that there wouldn’t be any at all during race day. I withheld judgment, given the floating mats of lake weed I got to plunge through last year.

Happily, the lake was clean as could be (of weeds). Not a one came out to clog up my goggles, or get in my face, or cling to me as I rose from the deeps like the creature from the black lagoon. Well done guys!

The race day weather was great. Partly cloudy and mid 70’s. High humidity though (I’ve been fantasizing about the first day that is cool and low humidity around here). Everybody was friendly and the volunteers were great, as always.

Swim start was the usual confused muddle as we filed to the start line by twos. We were set loose at about 3 second intervals to head into the water at which point I’d already moved up five slots. A lot of people who do this race don’t hit the water running. I end up passing people before I’m even really into the water. You gotta do the high-legged run into the lake, guys, and then dive for it. Seconds count!

The third-mile swim was good—weed free as mentioned—and I came out in advance of my 9 minute target. I ran through transition, put on my helmet, glasses and shoes and was off on the bike course.

I had a (slightly) amusing scene when I had to pull over off my bike right outside of the transition area. I called a volunteer over (“A little help!”) to hold my bike while I adjusted my timing strap which was flopping around¹. She came over very tentatively and asked over her shoulder, “Can I do that?” Yes, you can.

The bike course was normal, some shifting through ups and downs as we passed along the first couple miles and then just grinding through the course. It is not a technically challenging ride, with only a few sharp turns. I wondered if I were going to receive a drafting penalty during the first mile because I got caught up in a group of good riders that was being paced by a race marshal. I made an effort to show I wasn’t drafting even though I refused to drop off the group (it was very congested at this point). Thankfully I did not get a penalty.

Coming into T2, I did a flying dismount (after cursing the woman in front of me during the final approach, there’s about a 300 meter no-passing zone and she was going slooooowwwwww) and ran to my rack. I actually passed people going down the aisle, which was kind of cool. I was happy that my legs weren’t trashed like they were at Chattanooga. I’m not entirely sure why because I wasn’t holding back on the bike. Whatever. I was happy. A quick transition to run and off I went on the 5k course.

The 5k course for this race has a bit of evilness at the very beginning. Within half a mile you’re doing these quick whoopdee do up and down little hills. Not a one is more than 10 feet high, but they’re steep on both sides. This is cruel on legs that aren’t yet ready for the run portion. Yes, I know. I can hear you saying, “Suck it up, wimp!” but I can still complain that it hurts.

I pounded through the 5k at my best pace. About a half mile in, a guy (who’s number I did not get) passed me and I noticed that he was in my age group. I commented on that and he smiled and kept going. He ended up being my Rabbit for the remainder of the race. I kept him in sight as well as possible.

My 5k strategy for triathlons is pretty simple: First mile, survive. Second mile, maintain and push a bit. Third point one mile, let it all hang out. I managed this well, and I pulled up with my Rabbit about a half mile from the end of the course. He had been leap-frogging with a teenage (18) year-old woman in a tri-suit. I pulled past them at this point and mentioned, nicely, not cruelly, that they better not let me win and both of them took off after me. We were running flat out across the Drake Lake bridge and past other people. Both of them hung in until we came to the last uphill before the turn into the finish chute. I honestly don’t know what happened to them, but I started sprinting with everything I had left (not much) and left them behind.

Overall it was an excellent race for me. Obviously I crushed my former PR in this race, but the way I handled the various legs was just about perfect. I would have beat my former PR even without a good race; I’m in much better shape. I’m also back to the point where I was in High School with respect to “running through the pain”. I got out on the run course and thought to myself, “This hurts a lot, but it’s only for 20 minutes. You can put up with a lot for 20 minutes,” and off I went.

Of course, this has a downside, as I commented to Jennifer after the race: I haven’t run a race in the past year where I wasn’t going all out, balls-to-the-wall. I haven’t been racing for the fun of it. It is fun, but I need to schedule a race where I’m out there just for the hell of it, relaxed and carefree.

I had a great time and look forward to next year’s race.

Time breakdowns:

Swim (1/3 mile)	8:42	12th in my age group
T1	1:50	21st in my age group
Bike (13.9 miles)	37:39	28th in my age group
T2	0:50	3rd in my age group
Run (3.1 miles)	23:35	24th in my age group
Total	1:12:35	18th in my age group

I’m pretty psyched about these numbers. It’s not like this isn’t a competitive race. Some notable things:

The time difference between 12th and 8th in the swim is only 20 seconds. If I could knock off 40 seconds, that would’ve put me in 5th. That’s totally doable by next year.
T1 was very tightly bunched. I did it in 1:50 and was 21st. 10 seconds faster I would have been 8th. 10 seconds slower and I would have been 60th.
Not much to say about the bike, just that I getting sick of being passed going up hills.
T2 was spot on. Don’t think I could have done that any faster
Run times were great. Next year I’ll be working on my 5k times so this should come down.
18th Position is awesome for me. That’s the top 15% of my age group. This qualifies me for age group nationals next year if I choose to go.

¹: I almost always end up with a timing strap that is too big for my leg. Next time, I’m bringing a safety pin or a needle and thread and I’m tacking the loose end onto the strap. I lost 10 or so seconds on that, which would have moved me up in my age group!

August 23, 2009

2009 Chattanooga Waterfront Triathlon

The 2009 Chattanooga Waterfront Triathlon has come and gone. I had a good race (although I was rather sore the day after) and I’d definitely do it again.

Race central and transition were situated one block west of the Tennessee Aquarium, in and around the riverside greenspace next to the Tennessee River. Transition was well laid out and convenient to access before, during and after the race. The swim course was a point-to-point 1500 m swim (with the current!) from some docks near the Chattanooga School for Arts and Sciences down to the boat pier adjacent to the aquarium. The bike course was an out and back on US 27 to the north of town. The run course was an out and back along the riverside trails upstream of transition.

The swim was great! My only “complaint” was the length of time I had to wait to actually get into the water. They did interval starts, every three seconds, and they did it by race number. Therefore I, #1029, got to wait for a while. Officially the race started at 7:30 and I don’t think I got into the river before 8:30. Once in the water, it was great swim. Given the width of the swim course and the disbursement of the swimmers getting into the water there was hardly any jostling, and that mostly by accident. Everyone could choose their own line with ease.

Before the race, I kept asking people what the speed of the current was but no one had a good answer. Well, I usually swim 1500 meters in about 30:00. I did it in about 23:00. My math puts that at about 0.56 mph on the current (~0.25 meters per second).

Transition out of the water was something of a pain because it involved a set of stairs, but once up and out of the watefront, T1 was easy and we were off on the 26 mile bike course.

A major thing I took away from that race was a desire for both a bigger and a smaller chain ring on the bike course. It was challenging with two hills that made me wish for a lower gear to get into. By the time I crested those I was hoping I hadn’t crushed a sub 55 minute 10k out of my legs. The lower gear would have been useful.

On the other side of those hills, I didn’t have a high enough gear to avoid overspinning on the downslope! I’m a biker who enjoys making up time by going as fast as possible on the downhill sections, but on a few of those hills I was spinning at ~120 cadence which is way too high to maintain good form (and with some of the bumpiness of the road, might have led to me dumping on the asphalt at ~40 mph). Something I took in stride, but other people less comfortable at high speed on their bikes noted, was the bridge/pavement joints coming into town on the last serious downslopes. These joints were jarring if you weren’t ready for them and caused some mental anguish because of the speed that we were going when we hit them.

Many of the members of the North Atlanta Multisport Club agreed that the bike course was a tough one, so it’s not just me being a wimp.

Once back into town, I broke a rule (“never do anything new on race day”) and did a flying dismount coming into T2. Apparently my old bike skills from doing this as a kid were present because I did not slide into T2 on my face.

T2, as T1 was easy. I was gifted with an easy-to-locate rack position (plus I practiced both T1 and T2 approaches before the race began) then I was off onto the run course.

Ugh, ugh and triple ugh. The 10k run course was a struggle for me. I left a lot of my legs out on the bike course due to those hills I mentioned and the normal “it takes a mile to get up to speed out of transition” was more like four. In fact, I never really did feel like I was working the run well, so I had to push through it. My mile splits on the 10k were 9:44, 9:00, 8:52, 9:21, 8:46, 8:51, so yes, I did pick up the pace, but it certainly didn’t feel like it.

The course had one cruel aspect to it: A stairway up to a pedestrian bridge at about mile 0.6. This was tough enough on the way out, but then you had to do it again on the way back, this time down the stairs, and my quads were very unhappy with me. I had to walk it or I was going to fall over with cramps. But, after you’re off the stairs, it was a mostly downhill sprint to the finish where I thought about collapsing, but didn’t.

My times were:

Swim Rank	46/137	66th Percentile
Swim	0:24:42
T1	0:02:30
Bike Rank	71/137	48th Percentile
Bike	1:21:16
Rate	19.2 mph
T2	00:01:18
Run Rank	78/137	43rd Percentile
Run	0:55:36
Pace	0:08:58 per mile
Penalty	0
Final	2:45:21
Place 78/137	43rd Percentile

Compared to my age group (men 35-39), I was faster than both the average and the median swimmer and the T1 transitioner. I was slower than both the average and median on the bike but faster than both the average and median in T2, and just barely beat the average run time but was slower than the median run time.

M35-39 Times	Swim	T1	Bike	T2	Run	Total
Mean	0:25:36	0:03:07	1:20:32	0:02:17	0:55:25	2:45:26
Median	0:25:40	0:02:50	1:18:48	0:01:39	0:53:10	2:41:23

This is not a good thing. If I’m beating the average on any of these items, it should be the bike course, because that’s where you spend most of your time. 41.8% of your time, on average if you were a 2009 Chattanooga male racer aged 35-39. Another 33.5% was on the run followed by 15.5% in the water (for the whole field of racers it was 42.7%, 32.9%, 15.8% respectively). So if I want to be faster than my age group competitors, biking is the best focus.

My total time was slower than the median but (barely) faster than the average. You can see that the times are skewed toward the faster end, with a tail off to the slower triathletes. As I just mentioned, my total time was just a hair faster than the average, but I placed at the 43rd percentile mark and the median total time is over four minutes (2.5%) faster than the average. That’s quite a bit. In fact there were ten runners between the median and the average finish times.

As it stands, biking is a prime focus of my Ironman training regimen, so we should see some improvements.

The data are pretty noisy, but a ten person moving average shows between 15 and 22 seconds per athlete per place in the range around where I finished. So for every 20 seconds I improve, I’ll move up a place. I’ll have to look at other olympic races and see if that holds up. Here’s a graph that shows finish times by placement. Again, only for M35-39. In my zone (78th) it’s pretty close to linear.

Finish Times by Placement

Notable happenings:

I passed at least three people in my age group during the run. Go me. Of course, I didn’t check their race numbers (remember, people with higher numbers started after me at the swim) so I don’t know if that meant I beat them or not.
Jenn came with me to the race and took all the pictures.
This was my new bike’s first race! It did great.
I passed at least four Profile Design aerobottles littering the bike course. The bumpiness of the road obvioulsy jarred them loose. They weren’t secured as well as this one. Likewise at least three pairs of sunglasses and one pair of prescription glasses.

US 27 on the bike course was coned off for us to use the left lane both going and coming. I didn’t encounter any cars that took exception to this. It seemed like all the drivers took this in stride, in fact lots of them were cheering for us.
Parking race morning was easy. That was appreciated.
A friend, Gabriel Chavrat and his girlfriend Kelly stayed with us at the hotel the night before. Gabriel finished strong at 2:58:00.

We had a wonderful pre-race dinner with the rest of the North Atlanta Multisport Club in Chattanooga. It’s a great club, if you’re in the vicinity.

This was a fun race and I look forward to it next year. Make sure you check out my full flickr set.

July 13, 2009

Tired

The Chattanooga Triathlon was fun! I’m totally wiped out. I’ll write something more later. Here’s a picture to tide you over. I love the concentration!

July 12, 2009
Packing for Triathlon

We’re off to the Chattanooga Waterfront Triathlon. This is what I bring:

Check through the image link for a bunch of notes on the flickr photo.

The packing list is kept easy because I hardly need any clothes; it’s summer in the southeast. Shorts, t-shirt, sandals will cover it. A rain jacket would be superfluous because if you get wet from the rain vs. if you get wet from sweating to death underneath your jacket, it’s all the same.

July 11, 2009
2009 Callaway Gardens Sprint Triathlon
I participated in the 2009 Callaway Sprint Triathlon a few weeks ago, on a whim. It was the week before and I happened to get an email from the race director mentioning the race. I thought to myself, “self, why not do that race?” So I did.

It was a good, fast, PACKED race. The swim start was in five or so different waves and thankfully for me, I was in the second. This meant a relatively clean bike course, other than the people in my own wave. By the time I was coming in from the bike course, it was wall to wall bikes coming out of transition. This was not a USAT race and there weren’t any officials on the course, but even if there had been, there was no way to enforce the drafting regulations; there wasn’t enough room to avoid the draft zone.

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. This was a short race: approximately 400 meter swim (although given my time, I’d bet on 350 meters), nine mile bike (my bike computer said 8.2) and a two mile run. The swim course circled a quarter of the perimeter of one of the lakes at Callaway and it was in such shallow water that anyone having problems could stand up, if necessary. The transition zone was in the parking lot (lanes 8-10, I think) and was laid out reasonably fairly. More on that in a moment.

The bike course was through the gardens and at the time my wave hit it, there wasn’t any traffic yet, although the race director did specifically warn us that traffic was not being prohibited and to watch out for “grandma behind the wheel”. The course was relatively flat with a few rolling hills and only one downhill section that might be a challenge for a beginner (ess curves). The bike course was not the same as the one used during the 2008 duathlon, which was a surprise to me.

The run course was a clockwise run around the lake that the swim was in, ending outside Callaway’s big-top circus facility. Flat and fast.

Running pictures can look so dorky, can’t they?
- Speed. I finished this race in 50:34. That’s the same time it takes me to run a 10k. This was fast!
- Attitude. There wasn’t much pressure given that it’s not a USAT race (no ranking) and that there were so many beginners there. I had fun talking with several people at the swim start who were doing their first triathlon.
- Location. Callaway is a nice place for a race.
- Course. The swim, bike and run courses were all pleasant.
What I thought could be done better:
- Transition setup. Yes, I know I just got finished talking about how it was a low-key non-pressure race, but the transition layout was first-come first-served for bike positions and there were definitely places that gave you better transition times than others. See my little sketch here for an illustration. As you can see, the path for transitioner number one is considerably shorter than for transitioner number two. Given the physical layout of the swim exit, I don’t think this problem could be addressed
  unless you moved the transition zone down a few parking slots and made the swim exit longer. Just remember to get there early and claim a spot down by path number one.
- Portable Waste Facilities. Sometimes you just got to go, and the bathrooms available at Callaway were not sufficient to bear up under the number of people who wanted to use them all at the same time. A few portapotties would have been useful.
- PA System. The race director tried to give a pre-race briefing at the swim start but it was next to impossible to hear him with the handheld bullhorn he was using. In fact, the people who came with me to the race said that they had an easier time hearing him from all the way across the lake than I did at the start line.
- Transition security. I walked in to setup my transition spot with David and Sharon. No one objected. Typically only race competitors with numbers are allowed into transition. Afterward, I got my bike and gear without showing any one my race number. I know were all one big happy family, but it would be really easy to swipe someone’s gear. I’d be willing to pay a bit more in my entry fee for better security.
- Draft Enforcement. This one would be hard to do. Honestly, for this race, I’m not sure it matters, especially for those of us who aren’t competitive in our age groups anyway. But it still burns me a bit when I see three guys going past on Cervelos and playing Tour de France peloton. Either they don’t know the rules, or they’re cheating. Even in the scrums that develop on packed courses like this one, I make an effort not to ride directly behind someone and take advantage of the draft. Why? Because that’s the rules. I don’t think that you could really enforce the draft rule on this course, but you could post a few people at undisclosed locations around the course to take down the numbers of obvious tire-clingers.
Here are my times.

8:01 Swim
1:54 Transition 1
23:15 Bike
1:50 Transition 2
15:36 Run
50:33 Overall

I finished 67th overall (out of ~1200) which sounds great except that this was a beginner’s race. Still, I’ll take it. More importantly, I finished 25th out of 107 in my age group. Again, this was a beginner’s race. We’ll see if that top-quarter finish time holds up this weekend at the Chattanooga Triathlon.

More race coverage to come after we get back from Chattanooga on Sunday! Wish me luck.
July 11, 2009
New Bike!

Despite assurances by myself to the contrary back when I signed up for the
Florida Ironman, I bought myself a triathlon-specific bike a few weeks ago.
It is a Felt S32 with Shimano Dura Ace/105 and Felt TTR4 wheels.
For those of you who have no idea what that means, it’s an entry-level tri
bike. It’s pretty much the least expensive category of triathlon specific
bicycle out there. Most manufacturers have something similar. It’s also
white on red, so it matches my road bike, a Trek 1500T. No, color was not a
criterion for purchase.

Why did I spend the money on this bicycle? I had originally intended to put
aerobars on my Trek and ride that in the Ironman, figuring that I already
had a perfectly good race bike. This is still true, in that I now have
two perfectly good bikes, however I felt unsafe biking around town
with the Trek and a set of aerobars. The aerobars get in the way of the
grips at the top of the handlebars, making the bike less maneuverable in a
busy downtown traffic-filled setting. As I’m going to be putting in plenty
of time in the saddle in situations where quick reactions might be called
for, I decided that it was worth it to have two bikes, rather than
continuously mounting and de-mounting the aerobars on one.¹

I’ve had the Felt out a few times so far and it feels a lot different than
the Trek. Honestly, the Trek feels better, but then its components are step
up from the Felt. The Felt is only a race-bike though, so as long as it
goes fast and straight, that’s good enough for me. Plus as time goes by
(not this year) I’ll upgrade things in a piecemeal way.

Some people ask what the point is to a triathlon specific bicycle when a
road bike seems to do all the same things. This is an excellent question
with an easy answer: A tri bike is designed and constructed around the
aerobars. The intention is for the rider to spend the majority of time in
the aero position, reclined forward on her forearms in a fashion that
reduces aerodynamic drag. This puts you farther forward on the frame than is
normal on road bikes, and most road bikes can’t really manage a “proper”
aero position for triathlon due to their frame design. Of course the
“proper” position is something that a lot of age-groupers can’t do anyway
because it requires training and muscle acclimatization (I’m not there yet).
Anecdotally, I’ve heard that if you don’t spend 80% or more of your race
time in the aero position, than there’s really no aerodynamic benefit in
making the upgrade to a tri bike.² As I plan to spend that
amount of time or more during the Ironman (~6 hours on the bike!) this was
another good reason to get a tri-specific bicycle.

My Trek saw probably its last triathlon (ridden by me) at the Callaway
Sprint a few weeks ago. The Felt will see its first race this weekend at
the Chattanooga Riverfront Triathlon, an Olympic distance race. I’m sure it
will do well.

¹: Anybody want to buy a very lightly used set of Profile Design
clip-on aerobars?
²: I would pedantically dispute this claim given that
any time spent in an aerodynamically improved position will
decrease your total bike time, but there is a cost-ineffectiveness argument
if you’re deciding whether or not to purchase a bike on this basis. If
you’re not going to use the aerobars, spend the money on a good road bike.

July 8, 2009
Brick Workouts

I did a brick session today! “A what” you ask?

When training for multisport, it’s important to combine those sports during training. That may sound obvious, but it’s more difficult than you might think. For example, it’s frowned upon to dash out of the YMCA pool and jump on a spin bicycle. Likewise, if you’re going from bike to run, there are logistics involved in making sure your bike doesn’t get stolen, etc. This type of training, moving from one sport to the next with minimal rest between simulating race conditions, is called brick training, or just bricks.

Brick training¹ is critical for acclimating muscles to the sudden switch as you transition from the swim to the bike, or from the bike to the run. Of the two, the bike-run transition is the more difficult. The change from biking to running can be a difficult and painful switch for your legs. Training for this makes it easier to manage, if not actually less difficult. As an example from the olympic triathlon I did last year, I managed a 56:43 10k, which boils down to 9:09 minutes per mile pace. However, the first mile of those 6.2 (10 k) I split in about 12 minutes. If you subtract out that crappy first mile, my last 5.2 were at an 8:36 pace. That is a huge difference in time and it’s all because of how painful that first mile was. Thus, bricks.

Of course, I don’t think anyone, even elite level triathletes, come out of the bike-run transition and pile along at the speed that will be their run race pace. Warming up those muscles is important, so an ascent up to the target pace is called for. I’ll have to ask around my triathlete friends and see what they think.

The swim-bike transition isn’t as difficult on the body as the bike-run. When you get out of the water, you may be a big logy-headed from the effort you were just exerting with your upper body, so it’s good to train the actual transition period; jogging to your bike and putting on your gear without falling over or passing out. I haven’t heard of anyone having any serious issues with their legs once they were on the bike.

Brick training can also give you an opportunity to practice your transition strategy. Making the most of the seconds in transition can save you, well, seconds. Or minutes, depending on what you do in T1 and T2. Personally, I feel that I’ve done a good job making my transitions efficient in the sprints and olympics that I’ve participated in. The only thing I can do right now to make them faster is to not wear socks. I’m not up to that point yet.²

Ironman training is proceeding apace. I need to concentrate on the pool this week.

¹: Why do we call them “bricks”? No idea.
²: Once you stop wearing socks, you can also attach your bike shoes to the pedals and get into them while actually on your bike. That shaves a few seconds. First, no socks, though.

June 14, 2009
Anatomy Lesson: Multifidus

Today’s lesson in anatomy is the multifidus spinae, an important muscle you may never have heard of. It consists of a number of “fleshy and tendinous fasciculi, which fill up the groove on either side of the spinous processes of the vertebrae…”¹. Basically, it’s the part of the deepest muscles underneath your thumbs if you’re giving someone a backrub and you press into the fleshy groove just to the left and right of the spine. For a brief overview, wikipedia is your reference (although I really like my copy of Gray’s¹.

The multifidus performs the role of vertebral stabilization. It keeps your spine in line. It also happens to be one of my trunk-muscle achilles heels, if that’s not mixing my metaphoric anatomical references.

The reason for today’s anatomy lesson is simple: This is my first official injury of ironman training! As injuries go it’s pretty minor, but it caused me to alter the training plan. Therefore it counts. I strained the lower bit of my multifidus enough that I can feel it during normal activities (like sitting on my butt at work). Ironically, it hurts less when I’m running then when I’m walking. This might seem strange to you, but it’s a fact that muscles activate in different roles between walking and running; this must be an example of that².

This is not the first time I’ve strained this muscle. This was the same injury that caused me to run really slowly during the Peachtree Road Race three years ago..

No worries. It’s already getting better. I’ll let you know how it goes.

¹: Henry Gray, F.R.S., Grays Anatomy, 15th Edition, 1901
²: The best example of a muscle having vastly different roles between the walking stride and the running stride is the gluteus medius. During normal activity, the gluteus medius is a hip rotator, but during running its role changes to a pelvic stabilizer. I know this because the gluteus medius is a muscle that usually is severely neglected and underdeveloped in triathletes.

June 13, 2009
Aerobars Need Practice
Today (being T minus 2 days until I go back to work) I took my brand new aerobars out for a spin on the Silver Comet trail. I’d used them before, here and there, but I hadn’t gotten on them and cruised for a couple hours. I figured that this would be their shakedown ride, and I was right. This included a saddle move.

For those of you who don’t know what these contraptions are, aerobars are a device designed to get you more bent over, more narrow and more aerodynamic for triathlon racing or time-trialing. In triathlon you are not allowed¹ to draft and in time trialing there is no one to draft off of. Therefore, the more skinny and smooth an aerodynamic cross section you can present to the wind of your passage, the better. An excellent illustration of this is by Olmi, here on Flickr.

Two hour ride, 35 miles. Some lessons I learned:
- No matter whose advice you use, your aerobars will probably not be setup correctly for you. Bring a tool and be ready and willing to make adjustments. I made a few at the turnaround and I was delighted with the change.
- Don’t expect to get slapped into those aggressive triathlon positions that you see in the magazines. You’ll need to work into it, if only to get the back stretched out while pumping your legs for hours.
- One thing I discovered about my bike setup was that I kept sliding forward on the armrests due to the resultant forward force from the angle my upper arms were making. I tilted the bars up about 4 degrees and that made all the difference for keeping me in position.
- My neck is killing me after spending two hours in the aero position, only getting out for the roads I crossed. This will take some building up. Pushups should be good for that, as long as you look forward during the reps.
- I’m confident that I’ll be tweaking this bike setup all summer as my training rides get longer and I ease into the position I’ll need for the Ironman.
It was a good ride today. I’m looking forward to the next one.

¹: Some triathlons allow drafting but the majority do not.
April 27, 2009
"That's not a pool…"

“This! is a pool.”

January 28, 2009