June 5

Today was my due date. And I rode 35km in Richmond Park, mostly to say that I did it. Total of 75km ridden this week. Goal accomplished! No pics to mark the occasion but I can verify that I'm now wearing one of Jim's medium-sized KW jerseys, my quads hit the bottom of my bump with every pedal revolution (giving me an unintentional bowleggedness) and afterwards my ribs feel battered and bruised from having a 8-pound baby's legs squashed into them. An hour to 90 minutes is my max these days on the bike then I've had enough.

Ironically I feel fairly fit still -- in fact, I put in the highest peak 1-minute and 5-minute power I've seen in about six weeks, though that was partly due to my annoyance at how many slow and silly cyclists were in my way today! -- but riding a bike is ceasing to be much fun now. Glad to have ridden as long as I did but the time has come to stop I think.

So... the other day I finally relented and bought a swimsuit to fit my giant whale-like shape. Tomorrow or the next day I'll visit the pool for a swim. Looking forward to it actually, as it'll be a novelty to swim with such a huge belly -- will I float more than usual or start sinking? What'll work best, freestyle, backstroke, or breastroke (dare I say butterfly)? All of this will be interesting to discover and it'll give me something to keep my mind and body occupied while I wait for this now-overdue baby to make an appearance.

But sorry, no pics of me in said swimsuit will follow. It was bad enough seeing myself in the changeroom mirror when I tried it on!



For those with no imagination, I'll probably look something like this.

Milestones and Benchmarks

Yesterday was my birthday and I've now hit that (magical?) 35-year mark. Halfway to 40, a "veteran" category runner, and apparently I should be starting now if I want to have kids someday. A lot to think about! Of course I benefit from aging up to the 35-39 category for my Ironman, and I get to use the excuse that the girls who thrash me soundly in my cycle races are young enough to be my kids (not that I was much of a sprinter when I was their age regardless!) In the sense, I should be glad to be aging, as not only am I genetically more inclined to the endurance side, I've got nearly 20 years of base-building behind me to support it. Put them in a 6-hour race against me and I'll win every time, right? So why am I racing those one-hour crits again?

Otherwise I've had a reasonable training week, getting over the cold I had last week and setting some new benchmarks and best times:

Cycling

• Tuesday: a hard clockwise lap of Richmond Park on the road bike, setting a new best time of 19:31. Had I really wanted to set a big PB, I should have ridden the other way to have the wind at my back on the long draggy climb up to Richmond Gate, but mostly I wanted to get a 20-min baseline power level.


• Wednesday: my first ever 10-mile time trial, a low-key event put on by my club every other week. It consists of riding 5 miles as hard as possible down a divided highway, turning at the roundabout, then riding the same 5 miles back (again as hard as possible). I put down a respectable 25:33 time, not bad considering I've never ridden the course and I was on my road bike with no aero bars. I wanted to get a baseline wattage from the Powertap so I could compare and contrast with later TTs on my TT bike (alas I'm still waiting for my Powertap 650c Hed wheel to be built).

Interesting to compare the 2 sets of data (taken from WKO+). The peak 20-min power numbers were also fairly similar (250NP/240AP for Richmond Park and 247NP/242AP for the time trial), though the shorter effort had a higher VI as I was resting in the 30 seconds immediately following the 19:31 effort!

	Club 10-Mile TT				Richmond Park lap
Duration	25:31 (25:37)				19:30 (19:31)
Work	369 kJ				283 kJ
TSS	41.8 (IF 0.992)				32.4 (IF 0.999)
Norm Power	248				250
VI	1.03				1.03
Pw:HR	5.48%				-0.6%
Pa:HR	-1.37%				6.07%
Distance	16.121 km				10.834 km
Elevation Gain	274 m				294 m
Elevation Loss	290 m				289 m
Grade	-0.1 % (-17 m)				0.0 % (5 m)
	Min	Max	Avg		Min	Max	Avg
Power	0	519	241	watts	0	397	241	watts
Heart Rate	118	182	174	bpm	146	180	169	bpm
Cadence	50	114	97	rpm	62	150	96	rpm
Speed	2	52.8	37.9	kph	14.5	54.1	33.3	kph
Pace	1:08	30:00	1:35	min/km	1:07	4:08	1:48	min/km
Altitude	79	119	100	m	3	57	30	m
Crank Torque	0	64.1	23.8	N-m	0	43.6	24.1	N-m

Judging from my data in the power distribution chart in WKO+, my FTP is around 250 watts, though I have yet to formally test it on a good, rested day. Both the efforts above run a little low if my FTP really is 250. However, I felt during both of them that I "could have gone harder but just couldn't" if that makes any sense. On Tuesday I was still feeling the effects of my cold, as evidenced by my low average HR, and on Wednesday my legs felt a bit tired from Tuesday. Still, it's good to set some numbers as a baseline.

My plan for next week is to complete two 20-min efforts in the park with a two minute rest between, to try and get a solid idea of my peak 60-minute power or FTP for training purposes. I'll probably do this on Tuesday after a reasonably easy Monday. The next club 10-mile TT is the week after that, when I'll (hopefully) have my tri bike PT wheel finished, or if not I'll pop some clip-on aero bars on my road bike and reverse the seatpost to approximate my TT bike position (not sure how much effect it will have on my wattage, but it should make me a bit faster!) Then at the beginning of the taper for my Ironman I'll do a 25-mile TT to get my real and current 60-min FTP to set my race wattages for IMLP accordingly.

• Saturday: a long ride with Jim into the Surrey Hills to tackle a couple of our favourite climbs (my first such ride with the Powertap). I managed to get up the nearly 1km 10% Whitedown in a new best time of 4:00 flat, average watts 281, knocking nearly a minute off my previous fastest. Since my peak 5-minute power is 294, I think there's room for improvement there too (and I'm already wincing at my next date with Whitedown, that's gonna hurt!)

Running

Probably part of why I was a bit tired on Wednesday was that I did some hard 1-mile running intervals earlier in the day. I've recently become a paying member of Endurance Nation again, as I felt I needed that extra little push in doing my best at Lake Placid. According to the Vdot calculator, I've got a Vdot of 48 these days (not having done a 10km race for ages, I had to use my most recent 3-mile club handicap for the calculations). According to EN's formula, my running paces are as follows:

Run Zones
Zone	HR	Pace Mile/km
Z1/EP	< 151	8:49/5:28
Z2/MP	152-161	7:32/4:41
Z3/HMP	162-170	7:14/4:30
Z4/TP	171-177	7:05/4:24
Z5/IP	> 178	6:39/4:08

Most of the workouts in the EN plan call for longer intervals at Z3 and Z4 pace, not a whole lot at Z5 (intervals of five minutes or less). Lo and behold, my mile repeats were exactly at Z5 pace which more or less confirms my Vdot zones, so that's useful. Thankfully I can now do the lion's share of my running at the more reasonable Z3 and Z4 from now on!


Swimming

Erm... nothing to report here yet, but I will be tackling some outdoor swims at the Princes Club on Monday evenings from now on. Apparently the water is a balmy 15 degrees Celsius, just cold enough to make me want to swim pretty hard, wetsuit or not! Yikes. Fridays I'll be hitting either the indoor pool in Kingston, or the heated outdoor pool in Hampton.


Racing

As I've been writing this, the Grand Prix criterium at Hillingdon was taking place (i.e., an hour of pain and punishment at the hands of the country's elite female crit riders and sprinters). I'd signed up for it, but once I found out the course was going to be run backwards from what I'm used to -- meaning the normal uphill finish becomes a flat tailwind sprint -- I decided not to bother going, in favour of getting in that 90-minute run I never did this week. I went through a major review of my training schedule the other day, and with only 10 weeks to go before Ironman Lake Placid, I think running today is infinitely wiser than racing a crit, from an IM training point of view. So today's run will include two 15-minute intervals at Z3 in Richmond Park, which is a great ipod pace for my first post-35th-birthday run.

10 weeks to go! Holy @#$%!

Sunny weather, back to the grind, and why I love/hate cycle racing

After last week's sort of blah post-DNF-marathon feelings, the rainy cold weather over Easter weekend served to demotivate me even more from training (though I did get in a good 12km run through Bushy Park on Saturday at a 4:33 pace that felt dead easy). But the sun finally came out on Monday, both literally and figuratively.

Since then, I've racked up 10 hours of training, nine of which on the bike. When the weather's nice and the sun's shining, I just want to be out riding my bike! The running will catch up later this week as I've got a flat 6km planned for today, a hilly 17km tomorrow and another short fast run on Saturday (maybe a 5km parkrun in Bushy Park or Banstead Woods). As for swimming, well... my schedule's been calling for it since April started, but as I'm not a member of a local triathlon or swim club these days, I've been putting off getting to the pool. In a few weeks, the open water sessions at local lakes will start, plus some of the unheated outdoor pools will be open for prime wetsuit swimming. Triathlon London has the full list of training venues. In the spirit of it, though, I'm going to hit the Kingston pool today for lunchtime adult lane swimming for a quick few kms.

The week so far:

• Monday: Afternoon spent crisscrossing the Surrey Hills in the toughest ride I've done in a while. Started out strong as I'd had nearly 2 weeks of limited training and my HR showed it! My legs were so fresh for a change that my heart and lungs were the only limiter, and they weren't doing much limiting at all. But the 21% Winterfold climb got the best of me, shattered all ideas of ego and fitness and left me a shaking mess by the top. After that, I was determined to power up all the climbs I could in the big ring as I just couldn't stomach that sitting and spinning and feeling like I'm going nowhere feeling anymore. Box Hill was a new record for me with a time of 7:21, not bad considering the 80km we'd already ridden and the little headwind on the long 1st and 3rd sections of the climb. The roundabouts heading home were fast with a tailwind and I hammered it pretty hard, nearly dropping Jim in the process. 111km, 4:40, 1200m total climbing

• Tuesday: Decided wisely to do a flattish ride, so I pulled out my TT bike (Cervélo P2SL, renamed this year to the P1) for a spin out to Windsor, through the Surrey Heath and back along the Thames. I haven't been on this bike very much yet this year so I'm still getting (re)used to saddle position and comfort. Once we got out past the M25 I was able to sit in the aerobars quite a bit as the roads were quieter and better quality. We took a little detour up to Windsor Castle as I'd never seen it up close before, then blazed back through the Great Park towards Chobham at 30km/h average. The wind had picked up a bit, making my aerobars all the more advantageous (and for Jim disadvantageous as I'm so low on that little bike that his entire upper body is exposed to the wind when he tries to draft behind me!) 82km, 2:50, for a 28.5km/h pace

• Wednesday afternoon: This was the first real true spring day to me, as it was 20 degrees with a hazy sun and stiff but warm easterly wind. We headed to Richmond Park for some unstructured laps to see how we felt. The popular 1-lap challenge was out for today as my legs felt a bit trashed, but having not ridden the 3-lap challenge ever, I decided to set a base time for it at a moderate pace. We did the first lap clockwise, then 2 laps counterclockwise, then Jim headed for home and I did one last lap clockwise again. Total for the last 3 laps was 1:05, averaging 21:40 per lap. My goal is to get under an hour for 3 laps, which I'll probably only be able to do some quiet and still evening on the TT bike. 48km, 1:40, 400m of climbing

• Wednesday evening: Our running club does a hill intervals session once a month, either on a longish not super steep hill, or a shortish quite steep hill. Tonight's was the latter, and I hadn't done it since cold dark December so I was curious to see how I'd get on with my recent bit of weight loss and the summer weather. Two sets of 7 reps with a 3 min rest interval between them. Going up the first rep, I discovered a good trick for maintaining momentum through the 10% grade bit through the last 50 metres: running on my toes, not letting my heels touch the ground. It was here that I made up the most ground on my fellow clubmates, as they all seemed to go off like rockets through the initial shallow climb, then slow down considerably on the steep part and drag through the flat at the top. I consistently hit each climb at about 38 seconds, which is nearly 5 seconds faster than the previous outing, so quite happy with that. 6.6km, 40 min, avg uphill pace 4:14/kmh

Between the riding and running yesterday, I managed to catch the last hour of the Scheldeprijs pro race with its promised sprint finish. Last year, Tom Boonen sat up and celebrated somewhat prematurely, as Mark Cavendish came through under his arm and nicked the win. This year, however, was mass carnage for the big boys as van Avermaet sprinted too early, Petacchi overtook him and cut across a bit soon, and McEwen tried to follow, tangled with van Avermaet and took down half the field including Boonen (Cavendish wasn't racing). The only bright light to come out of it was a 3rd place finish for Canadian Cervélo TestTeam rider Dominique Rollin, his first Euro podium ever. And a nifty 2nd place for the Dutchie Kenny van Hummel, riding for the continental Skil-Shimano team.

The massive crash below is the reason why I love and hate cycle racing at the same time: such an awesome sport, so on the edge, so hard-core, yet so completely dangerous and insane. This is why my races at the amateur level always end on hills!

A slight bout of taperitis

A week from tomorrow is my marathon, so last week I started to taper a bit. Having done some good volume in the past few weeks -- 100km bike rides and 2+ hour runs -- it's been nice to stick to short and fast workouts instead this week. The weather helped me too; going from beautiful warm sunny spring to crappy rainy windy spring seriously curbed my enthusiasm for going outside to train. But fewer hours trained is fewer calories burned, so to stay nice and lean for the race I've had to fight the munchies a bit. I think I'm winning the battle though, as after yesterday's hard 17km run and pasta dinner, I denied myself the bread and chips (er, crisps) I was craving around 9pm and this morning was rewarded with 54.6kg on the scale. That's the first time I have been below 55kg since I moved to the UK, and hopefully I can keep up both the motivation to train hard and the willpower to eat better with results like that!

For the run yesterday, I did the same route I'd done last fall 2 weeks out from the Nice marathon: a 2.5km warm-up run to Richmond Park, a hard loop of the 11.7km outer path in the park, then the same 2.5km run home to cool down. In the fall I had run the loop clockwise (tailwind on the open flat, but ascending the steep hill) in just under 57 minutes. Yesterday in my super fast Asics Gel Banditos shoes and running counterclockwise (descending the steep hill but with a brutal headwind on the open flat), I managed 52:57! That's a 4:31/km pace, running on hard-packed dirt with 75m of elevation gain/loss, and it gave me a PB for 15km if the Garmin is to be believed. Needless to say, I was quite happy given that my last few longish runs have been somewhat painful and disheartening.

SportTracks has some cool plugins and one of them is the Map Overlay, which colours the track on the map to show different speeds, gradients, heart rates, etc. Ever the numbers and maps geek, I find it quite interesting to see where my pace slows down and speeds up relative to hills, headwinds and distance. Glad to see I finished strong in the last little uphill bit because by then I certainly wasn't feeling strong!


As for the marathon, I still haven't decided whether I should run the full distance or not, but I'm hoping that I feel good enough on the day to give it a go. I'll gauge it during my warmup and in the first few minutes of the race, and if I feel anything but completely rested and 100% ready to tackle 42.2km, I'll speed up and try to run a strong PB in the half instead.