On July 26, 2011,
in 
Do you remember the first time you finally were able to balance, pedal, and move forward all at once on your first bicycle? If you do remember, it was no doubt a magical moment after weeks of frustrating crashes.
Some children will never learn how to ride a bike or how to swim. Once these youth reach adulthood, it is very difficult to learn. Many children don’t learn due to a lack of resources, including not being able to afford a bike, lacking an adult in their lives able to teach them, and/or just having no interest since people around them do not use bicycles. This blog will discuss an innovative solution for this void, ACHIEVE Kids Tri, and how you can help support it by convincing friends or family to sign up for the Sold Out Nation’s Triathlon through an ACHIEVE Kids Tri charity slot.
Support a great cause and register through the Nation’s Tri Charity Option!
ACHIEVE Kids Tri, Inc. is a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to enriching the lives of youth by introducing them to the sport of triathlon.
Athletes learn how to train for the swim, bike, run, and transitions of a triathlon in a free six-week camp open to youth ages 9 – 14. At the end of every ACHIEVE camp, the athletes put all their hard work into action at a USA Triathlon-sanctioned Official Kids’ Triathlon. As youth navigate the challenges of a… Read the rest
On July 19, 2011,
in 
It’s about half way through summer and that means that you are either gearing up for your first race of the season or for most of us you have just completed your first summer triathlon and are wondering what’s next!? Depending on your capabilities, you may prefer to stick with another sprint race, or try something a little longer like an Olympic. Before you decide what’s next, focus on your latest race and answer the following questions:
- What area was your strength?
- Which part did you enjoy the most?
- Where do you need the most work?
- How fast were your transitions?
- Did you make any mistakes?
- How was your nutrition during the race and leading up to the race?
- How were your stress levels and sleeping schedule leading up to the race?
These seven questions hit on some of the key factors that can influence how your race went or is going to go. The important thing to remember if you have already raced, is taking away what you have learned from your race. Sure you may have had a terrible swim, but maybe you had a great bike. Keeping positive thoughts about your race will help motivate you to keep going.
Also, transitions may seem like the easy part, but particularly in a sprint race where these precious seconds can make a difference in your final standing, it is important to know what you… Read the rest
On November 17, 2010,
in Last month I read an article called “How to Wrap Up Your Racing Season” on Active.com, and I thought it would be a fun exercise to run through their process of reflecting on this season and planning for the next. I know I’m a little late on this, considering that my race season ended over a month ago, but I figure better late than never.
1. What were the best parts of this season? Try to list at least three items. The items might include your favorite race experience, speed improvements in events or training, staying healthy, consistent training, traveling to new events, finding new training partners or purchasing new equipment.
The best parts of my season were bumping up my FTP number, shaving 4 minutes off of my mile swim time, and the first two thirds of my Chicago Triathlon race.
2. Get specific on the highlights. For the items you listed in step 1, try to state them in a way that someone else could easily identify what you’re talking about. For example, if you wrote “Had a Great Race at the Round the City Crit”, expand that statement to say what made the race great. Did you place high in the field? Did you help a teammate do well? Get on the podium? If you wrote “Had a fantastic century ride”, describe what elements made it fantastic?
- Bump in my FTP number – After an almost year long plateau on my FTP number I finally… Read the rest
Not sure if everyone has seen the RunTri website that has Ironman race data analysis and graphs showing some really interesting trends. My favorite bytes of data are the Ironman Wisconsin 2010 charts and the North American Ironman DNF Rates chart.
The Ironman Wisconsin: Correlation Between Bike and Run Splits chart shows just how well the racers paced themselves on the bike and run legs of the race. They basically plotted bike splits against run splits and broke down the racers into four groups: Fast & Balanced, Energy to Burn, Left it on the Bike Course, and Smooth & Steady. You want to be in that first group but I guess most people would settle for the last group too.
The North American Ironman DNF Rates: Finishers and DNF by Race chart shows the DNF (Did Not Finish) rates for the 2010 North American Ironman races. Ironman Wisconsin had a 6% DNF rate, but Louisville and St. George led the way with 16% and 14% respectively. I know Louisville was super hot this year and St. George is supposed to be ridiculously challenging so those DNF rates don’t surprise me. I actually have some friends who just signed up for St. George next year. I wonder what they would think of this DNF rate!
There’s a great article over on Active.com that has 10 performance tips from Chrissie Wellington. I wonder if they wrote this before or after she pulled out of Kona this year. They may have to add on one more tip, #11 – Stay healthy and try not to get the flu before your major A-race of the year! 
Kidding of course, I love Chrissie and was disappointed that she was unable to defend her title this year.
Here are my favorite tips from her list:
Performance tip #1: Passion gets you further than gear.
“You’ve really got to be passionate and enjoy the sport and never lose sight of that. Amateurs sometimes get caught up in the minutia. You’ve got to have the latest bike and this, that and the other thing. You have to keep the love for the sport in mind.”
Amen to this, too many people get caught up in the latest gear and forget what got them interested in triathlon in the first place.
Performance tip #2: More isn’t always better.
“There’s always a tendency to think that more is better, especially with regard to Ironman training. People think, ‘I have my log book and I have to be a slave to it and log as many hours as I can.’ Whereas for me, people are always surprised that I don’t do as much volume as they think. Don’t get me wrong; I work incredibly hard. But always err on the side
So if 19:00 is not a realistic goal for me at the 5K right now, what would have been a more appropriate goal? For that I turn to the McMillan Running Calculator, which uses your running time at a certain distance to estimate your times for other distances. I decided to use my best mile time, which I just recorded over the summer during track practices. We did the mile time as a performance indicator and I believe my best mile time was ~5:40 (I didn’t write it down, I was ~5:50 the first time we did it this summer and I know my second time was faster). So, if I plug in 5:40 for my mile time into the calculator I get back a 5K time of … 19:38! Awww, that’s not good! I know I’m faster than that! Shoot… maybe my mile time was just slow… I thought I went all out but maybe I had a little more. What if I plug in 5:30, what’s my predicted 5K time then? 19:03! Hmmm, maybe I still have a little bit more to go before I can break 19 minutes at the 5K distance. Or maybe this calculator is wrong!
Well, that didn’t go well! I missed my goal by a whole minute so I wasn’t even close. I would say it sucked, but even with a crappy performance I still pulled out a respectable time. My official chip time was 20:37 but the course was long (it was 3.2 miles according to several Garmin wearers), so my average pace came in at 6:27.
It was a chilly morning (~50 degrees) on Sunday, but at least it wasn’t raining like the forecast indicated. I laced up my new Lunaracers and did a quick warm-up before lining up near the front for the start.
The horn went off and away we go! I started out a little hot (sub 6) but quickly settled into a 6:00 minute pace like I had planned. Things were going well but I noticed my speed dropping a bit and I kept having to kick it up a little to hit my target pace for the first mile. By the time I hit the clock display at mile 1 it said 6:10. Crap, I was already way off pace! (Btw, I wonder if this is where the “long” part of the course was… my friend said he heard a lot of watches go off early before the 2nd mile marker… I didn’t compare my Garmin watch distance to the course until the end, when I realized it was .10 miles long). I tried to stick to my plan of doing a 6:07 pace for the next… Read the rest
Armed with a fresh pair of Nike Lunaracers I had a great tempo run on Monday with Fleet Feet and a good track workout earlier today. I’m feeling ready to PR my 5K this weekend. The goal at the Bucktown 5K: sub 19 minutes. This is a pretty aggressive goal for me, considering my 5K PR is 19:38 (set two years ago), but I do feel a lot faster this year. We’ll see if all those track workouts and hard tempo runs will pay off.
Alright, so to go sub 19 I have to average a 6:07 pace. My game plan for the race will be to start out a little fast, settle into my goal pace, and then hold on until the end. I think my breakdown of mile splits will be 6:00 for the first mile, 6:07 for the second mile, and 6:15 for the last mile. I’ll sprint out whatever energy I have left in the last quarter mile.
Hopefully I don’t blow up before the end. Even if I start losing steam before the end of the race I should be able to beat my 5K PR easily so it should be a good day. I would be happy with anything under 19:30, but I’m still going to gun hard for that sub 19 finish time. Might as well go for it while I still can!
I compared the power files between my 4-Man TTT race and my 2-Man TTT race back in July to see what went wrong last weekend. What’s interesting is that both races lasted about the same amount of time (~1 hour 30 minutes) but I actually averaged a *lower* wattage at the 4-Man than I did at the 2-Man. How is that even possible?
One thing that can explain that is the sharp spikes in power at the 4-Man race. At the 2-Man race I was basically in two zones all day; either I was pulling at 90+% (but not above 100%) or drafting at 70-80%. At the 4-Man race I was all over the board. Some of this was due to the fact that when I was drafting in the group I didn’t feel comfortable dropping into my aero bars until I was in the 2nd position, so I wasn’t taking advantage of the draft as much as I could have. I see my peaks when I was pulling at 100-110%, but more telling I see peaks shortly after that at 120% as I accelerated to latch back onto the back of the group after a pull. Overall all those spikes took a hard toll on me and that resulted in me popping. It was definitely a hard workout for me that day and now I see that I should have tried to keep a smoother power output going instead of being so erratic. Next time I need to work… Read the rest
After the 4-Man TTT on Sunday we piled into the van and headed up to Madison, WI to cheer at Ironman Wisconsin. It was a long drive from Lenore, IL to Madison but we made it there by the early afternoon, just in time to see the front of the pack racers come in off the bike. We joined a crowd of fellow VQ spectators in front of Frida’s Mexican Grill on State Street and started looking for our friends. Dave had a big bullhorn and we all quickly found cowbells so pretty soon we were making a lot of noise whenever we recognized anyone approaching our section. We kept this going for several hours until slowly our cheering section thinned out as people started heading home. It was awesome seeing so many friends having great days out there. I love being a part of VQ and CTC at large races such as this one because you get such a rush from cheering your fellow teammates on, and I know on the other side of the fence how energizing it is to have people you know cheering you on. After almost everyone we knew made it to the finish line we decided to pack up and head home. After a seemingly endless drive we were back in Chicago by around midnight to finish off our super long day (although it was nothing compared to everyone doing Ironman that day, ha).
