Report on final week of crescendo training. Run, swim intervals on Tuesday, bike intervals on Wed. These all went smooth, meaning I felt very powerful, and fully within myself hitting all the paces with relative ease. On Thursday, I ran 12 miles, with the final 4 being first an uphill mile to the local middle school track, then a few miles at “MP”. Even though my HR and RPE were sitting at MP, my times were a lot speedier – HMP, then TP for the last one. Again, I felt powerful and able to handle this workout with a feeling of ease, both mentally and physically.
Friday was my RR swim in my local lake. I was nearly two minutes faster than the last time I was there (six weeks ago), even though I did the whole swim breathing every third stroke instead of the every other stroke I usually use. My distance was shorter, if you believe Garmin, because I think I was able to swim straighter. Best of all, each length ( 6 = 3800 meters or so) was pretty much the same time, discounting the tailwind on the way out, headwind on the way back.
Then today, Bike/Run RR #2. My three primary areas of focus were:
- Stay aero as much as possible. Check
- Try and average 0.68 IF for the ride. Check; throwing out the first five miles and the last five, my IF was 0.683. This despite a low battery on my Di2, which kicked in @ 4:45 into the ride. That meant I had only the small chain ring up front, with all gears in the back. Upping my cadence allowed me to keep speed, but it meant a bit more coasting than I would have like on downhills.
- Get as close to 300 cal/hour as possible. It was a cool, overcast day (temps in the 60s thruout the ride), and I stopped to pee 4 or 5 times, meaning I certainly was topped up on fluids. My cal intake was diminished a bit, as I only drank 88 oz in 6 hr 12 minutes. Overall, I had 6 Perpetuem solids for 200 cal, 8 oz of EFS for 720 cal, 44 oz of Infinit for about 440 cal, and 16 oz of Gatorade Endurance for about 100 cal (rest of fluids were water, to wash down the EFS). Total of 1460 cal, for about 240/hour. For me, that’s about average for an IM.
Physically, as I have noticed for the past two weeks, I felt as if I had a continuing supply of mojo and strength thru the entire time of the ride. I did notice after about 3.5-4 hours that my left knee left collateral ligament started to hurt a little. I decided to just live with it, and think about pedaling more with my right leg, as well as keeping my left knee as straight up and down as possible. But the end of the ride, and especially on the run, I was no longer noticing this at all. Once again pointing out to me that tiredness, aches and pains during the bike which seem significant, almost always do not present me from having a satisfactory run. It;s just part of the distance of doing Ironman.
The run was like I was a machine. The first mile – a little bit downhill – went by in 9:24, right on target for LRP + 30 s. The next 4 were all a tick above or below 9:00, right on LRP. My breathing was slow and even, and my HR was still in the 11X range, so I thought I would see what happened if I did that last slightly uphill mile a tick harder. 30 seconds faster than going out, despite the difference in gradient. I wasn;t overly tired, and rewarded myself with a large chocolate malt from Dairy Queen.
I think I’ve met the target of building a fit, racing machine. Now the focus has to turn to race day execution, which is an equally hard, and equally important piece of the Ironman puzzle. Next week I’ll post a Race Plan, with a fair amount of emphasis of my process goals and measures of success. FYI, Patrick put up in the wiki last month a TEN PAGE Ironman “checklist”, which I may just reference instead of having to write out all the gory details of what to do and pay attention to outside of the actual racing. Should save a lot of electrons.