The Ironman in 2019 thread

The race had the feel of a small, family-run event (it is largely family-run) but wholly professionally executed. The towns all bought in as shown by the road closure of the entire bike route, bike and run aid stations. Volunteers took care of you at T1, T2 by packing your bag for you, helping as you needed (no bike catch, FYI which is NOT a complaint). Overall, really a great race. And great for families. The day before is a kids race. Things for the spouse/partner/fam to do before, after, during the race. Lots of old stuff to see, they are known for their seafood but lots of pasta, possibly due to the links to Venice centuries ago, which is also linked to their adoration of cats. And, overall, prices are inexpensive (aka “cheap”). Btw they aren’t EU but they use €.

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One cool thing we did on the camp last week was swim video analysis. Link Here; not sure this will work as it’s in dropbox. We (as a group) decided that my stroke was technically reasonable (aside from a short catch after I breathe) and my major issue is body position. This is problematic due to tight hip flexors and heavy legs; going to try and loosen up the former, kick a little harder and try to keep less air in my lungs to try and level out.

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Sounds like everybody is getting their first races of the year in while the water here is still to cold to swim in. I’m jealous. Congrats to everybody, especially @mountainrunner on the AG podium, and @liberosis on the good attitude despite the detour :slight_smile: As for me I have my first race this weekend which is going to be a duathlon. 5km run, 18km bike, 4km run. Super short, but at least it’s something and I’m hoping to see what my current fitness levels do on this one.

Aside from that I’m just pressing on with the LD-MV base plan. Things are going pretty well and over the weekend I ran my longest traning run of the year at a hair under 24km in 1:50. Super happy with that, especially since I was able to do that without exerting myself all that much. It felt like an easy run that just went on for a while.

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Got my first big race of the season in April 27 with Marbella 70.3 - swim was rough (I am an awful swimmer, but working on it!), bike was a blast (quite hilly, 4,500’ or so), and the run went very well. Great season opener and after a week of relaxing in Spain, gearing up for the remainder of the season

Marbella 70.3
Swim - 44:33
Bike - 3:00:40 (186 avg, 207 NP)
Run - 1:26:59

Upcoming Races
5/27 - Captex Olympic - Austin, TX (in town and my 1 year anniversary on triathlon)
6/9 - Escape from Alcatraz - San Francisco, CA
6/30 - Ironman 70.3 Lubbock (targeting this as a priority, previous 2 I will train through)
7/28 - Ironman Lake Placid (first full distance - excited)

Not sure what the rest of the season will bring yet, but I’m sure I’ll do some more local relaxed races after IMLP and then start zeroing in for CIM in December followed by Boston in 2020.

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Yep last weekend I had a look at the sea from Hastings beach. Just a look!
…9°c at best and choppy.

Good news on your run👍

:tada:

Well done! Marbella is one I’d like to do maybe next year.

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Off topic of racing but is there any cheatcode to choosing to not do certain workouts when adding a triathlon plan to calendar (namely swim and run).
Say low volume but don’t want to do 3 swims a weeks but to do 2, instead of manually deleting… anyone know of some trick?

Great job. Congrats on the podium

Man, that sucks! You got an extra workout in though.

I can tell you’re a runner! Holy run split. Great job on the race.

Reporting back from first race — an Olympic! Managed to place 5th in my AG out of 25.

Water was a chilly 57F with 50F air temp so they shortened the swim to 600m. Held right a 1:33/100y split, main goal was to swim straighter and sight better. Happy with each of those!

The bike was full of first race blunders :man_facepalming:t3: Coming out of swim I couldn’t feel my hands or feet and for some reason I decided to drink some nutrition down hill. Not only terrible aero idea but dropped my bottle so stopped and grabbed it since it was so early on. That was the first thing to happen, then I was nervous about another drop so only finished about a third of my planned nutrition. Realized after the race That my rear brake wasn’t disengaging fully so left with me a light brake rub all day. On the brighter side, held right at 90% FTP for the race!

On the run, set a new 10k PB at 44 and some change! Regained feeling in my feet at mile 3. Felt like I had rocks in my shoes before that. To the point that I actually stopped to check lol. Felt a cramp coming on around mile 4 so practiced some disgustingly deep breathing they talked about on the podcast and managed to run through it.

All things aside it was a great day! It’ll be a race I look back on as a race as one that has built mental toughness.

Couple questions - I’m using a left sided stages PM and had it connected to my Garmin 935. I was having a lot of dropouts throughout the race and had just put a new battery in the PM before race. Is this a common issue with the PM or watch? Would it be worthwhile to get a cheap cycling computer to avoid such drops/if so, any thoughts on entry level ones with compatibility? Thanks all!

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I agree your stroke isn’t bad. Some suggestions that might help:

  • look straight down. Your head is angled up slightly. That affects your body position.
  • concentrate pushing your chest down. Think of this the same way you concentrate on run form. Pushing your chest down will affect your entire body position.
  • break at the elbows to improve your catch. Your hands and forearms, as a combo, are a major “paddle” but if you look at the video you see much of the time the hands and forearms are pushing down and not back (ie they are not propelling you forward). When your hand enters, focus on getting the hand and forearm vertical in the water by bending at the elbow (the “break”) and then pushing that vertical paddle straight back.
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Congratulations on the first race. Well done on placing. Sounds like normal shake out issues to learn from and stress on. And a little resistance training (brake run) isn’t bad, especially for a first race. :wink:

Clearly your body got into it with your run PR.

I’d agree with your points and @mountainrunner

Improving your kick will raise your hips and legs.

A similar shot in your wetsuits might be more useful, as you’ll see the buoyancy effect.

Do you do much with pull buoys or open water?

Great job on the run and well done on the bike.

Having done Escape from Alcatraz (guiding a blind athlete) soon after the turn of the century, you already know you’ll want to continue to work on your swim. Be comfortable jumping off the side of a boat, too.

I should have commented on this in my earlier reply. This is not the right approach. You’ll need that air and the kick is to help with your propulsion and rotation. If you focus on pushing the chest into the water, like really focus and not think about your legs, and look straight down, your legs will come up naturally.

A wetsuit with more buoyancy in the legs will help this for your races as you fatigue and forms degrades, but you shouldn’t need that, just like you shouldn’t let your run form degrade, but, hey, things happen.

From a quick search, look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2B0iR2VSPg
The swimmer is clearly efficient, but he could improve his catch, in my opinion, by breaking his elbow more, which you can see Michael Phelps do in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax77_hHq9Dc.

In the first video, which otherwise has great technique tips, I have another criticism: the swimmer should have removed the wrist straps from his paddles. The wrist straps increase the margin of error, thus limit your ability to feel the need to adjust, in your stroke. Put another way, you’ll have better feedback from the paddles toward an efficient stroke without the wrist strap. (Put the opposite way: without the wrist strap, the paddle will slip around from an incorrect or poor technique.)

On your breathing, make sure you exhale before, or complete your exhale before, you are able to take a breath. Too many wait too long and thus unnecessarily shorten the time to get a breath. By the way, in an open water event, particularly when there are waves and swells and other nearby swimmers, there’s the added chance you may not get air when you try to. That should not be fatal to your stroke. If you’ll be breathing every 3 strokes, like in the video, you’ll have time for a complete exhale. Figure out that timing just as you figure out the timing for the breath.

And for more practice, try sighting the wall once every length during your workouts to get used to integrating it into your stroke. (Swimming in a community pool where I’m sharing a lane with people that are not doing my workout and are often oblivious, I often need to do that out of necessity. Coming into the wall, sometimes it’s useful to make eye contact – or ‘goggle contact’ as I wear smoke or mirror goggles – before I head into my turn so I know they know I’m coming.)

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Anyone using the tri plans finding the tss low for the runs? Even at the prescribed RPE?

Hi Andy & welcome!

It depends exactly what you mean. In the low volume base sprint plan the run starts off pretty light, and accommodates people who haven’t been running much if at all.

In Mid Volume Full Distance the first week has an 80 min run which should require an existing run volume of some sort, by the time you get to Speciality you’re looking at 3-4.5hrs running per week which is about right imo.

If you mean just the TSS numbers, then I don’t really rate rTSS as an effective measure anyway. As long as it’s a consistent measure within the plan, I don’t need to compare it outside of that so it doesn’t really matter. In my opinion of course.

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Need to adjust that head position in my opinion slightly high for you personally. Try a more neutral head position. Notice stress on your neck and eyes looking forward at times. Your body will naturally want to hold neutral but with that look forward you are forcing the hips to sit lower and thus the legs also.

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The estimated rTSS from the app is really set up for cycling, not running. Running paces are generally much closer to your threshold than just a power metric. An easy run might be closer to 75-80% of your threshold pace, but the smooth/easy RPE indicator for estimating TSS on the calendar will put the effort at something like 65%

Let’s say your threshold pace is 6 minute miles, which is pretty quick, 65% of that is 9:22 / mile, which is slower than most would consider recovery pace.

I prefer to have the metric be a good measure of overall stress, since if you go too hard on a specific run, you will affect any workout you have either that day or the next day (maybe even more), but since I started with the rTSS sort of low compared to the cycling TSS it makes more sense to be consistent with how you are tracking it.

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What fields do you have on your bike while racing?