Next stop… San Diego

This coming Saturday is my first race of the 2012 triathlon season.  The ITU World Triathlon in San Diego. I am racing the Olympic age-group race.  This event also serves as an Olympic qualifier for many countries.  The women’s pro race is on Friday afternoon, age groupers race early Saturday and the men’s pro race is Saturday afternoon.  The location for the race is Mission Beach/Bay, San Diego – the same location where the first triathlon was held almost 40 years ago.  I can’t wait to get out there and experience all of it.

The picture below shows the bike course (in red).

My main goal is to get out there and have a lot of fun, with no real time goals other than to go hard for the whole race.   I hope to get out of the swim in 28-30minutes, bike the 25 miles in 1:05-1:15, and run somewhere in the low 40’s for the 10k.  Looking at the course profile (picture below) there is a challenging hill that we climb on both loops of the bike.  My plan for the bike is to go hard for the whole ride, and see what I might have left on the run.

I think USAT have done a great job with this race, especially by offering free bike transport for athletes from the DC/VA area, as a part of the world club challenge.  I took my bike to the truck on Sunday afternoon and got to meet Siphiwe who is driving the truck across country.  He is a triathlete, and recently finished IronMan South Africa.  I am sure the bikes will be well taken care of.   They have created a twitter account (@FitnessTrucking  & @kanebicycles) , and a blog so we can follow their progress! (http://sandiegoorbust2012.blogspot.com/).  They are making good progress and we all really appreciate that they are making this possible.  Here is a picture from the blog post, showing the 55 bikes from DC all nicely packed.

I wouldn’t be traveling to this race had it not been for the free bike shipping.  Getting to see the pro’s fight it out for Olympic spots, especially the Australian and USA teams should be a real highlight.

2011 OutSeason review/results

This year I decided to switch things up a bit, and join in on the Endurance Nation out season.  I had listened to a number of their podcasts, and their philosophy on training and racing fit well with my thoughts.   The basic idea is to get fast first, then add far on top of the fast.  This is completely opposite to many other training plans where you start with volume, and then add speed on top of that.

The plan is a simple concept.  Low volume (6-8 hrs / week), high intensity bike and run workouts. No swimming.  The workouts are really hard, but they produce results. 

I started my OutSeason training in November, shortly after my last race of the season.  I had high expectations for improvement, and was starting in the best shape I have ever been in.

The OutSeason is a 20 week program, broken down into sections for functional threshold work (FTP) for 8 weeks, then V02 (much harder effort for shorter periods of time) for 6 weeks and back to functional threshold to finish the season.  Included in the mix are test weeks after each section so you can monitor your progress.

Throughout the 20weeks, I completed as much of the plan as I could.   Sometimes I would have to skip sessions due to travel and other commitments, and on 2 occasions I took 3 days off due to illness.  Other than that I stuck to the plan very closely.

Here is a chart I started keeping with weekly training volume.  It shows that I averaged under 6hrs per week. 

I stuck to the no-swimming part of the plan for November and December, then added  some  shorter sessions in January.  My rationale for adding swimming was I needed to work on my technique and I was not traveling much at the time.  This allowed me to add some swimming without compromising any bike/run workouts.

Another thing I started to focus on after following some of the EN forum posts was body composition.  My bike power and run speed were coming along nicely, however I realized I would get a boost in power/weight ratio if was was also able to shed a few extra pounds.  During January I weighed in at 184lbs – a little over my racing weight from last year.   I downloaded the LoseIt app on my phone and started documenting my food intake.  I soon realized that I could cut down just a little on rest days, but I was not really eating enough on hard training days  It really helped identify my total calorie intake, and the mix of carbs/protien/fats.  Over an 8 week period I managed to drop 10lbs!  I think this is the lightest I have been since my mid-20’s.  I am already under the weight that I was hoping to be by IM Lake Placid.  It might be time to set new goals!

The results at the end of the season were:-

	Start	End	Diff
Bike FTP	256	283	+27watts
5k Run	20:11	18:50	-1:21
Weight	182	174	-8lb

So that equates to a 10% increase in bike power, and 20% in power/weight ratio.  My run times have gotten significantly faster, and more importantly I managed to consistently run well for all 20 weeks.  The other interesting thing is that my swim time did not drop by much from last year, and will easily be made up (and hopefully exceeded) when the swim volume begins.

I am very happy with these results and exceeded any expectations I had.  I hope to continue to make progress throughout 2012.  For me it proved to be the perfect platform to start the 2012 season.

USAT Rankings - 2011

USAT does many great things for Triathlon.  Part of the service they deliver for members is a ranking system, so you can see how you stack up against people in your age group across the country.  Here’s my take in my performances for 2011, and how it translated into the ranking system'.

After mentioning that USAT does great things – I have to point out that there is something they do very poorly.  The website/page for rankings is absolutely awful.  I tried again today to see where I landed in 2011 – it took many page views to figure out that I was #708, with 83.3876 points, out of 5,015 (based on the 2011 Unofficial rankings as of March 12th 2012).  I found my results were on page 36 (when race details are shown) or page 9 when just the totals are displayed. I knew roughly how many points I had, so I could narrow down the focus, but surely there is a way to search and get the page that I appear on with only a few clicks.

The ranking system is complicated, and I am not even going to attempt to describe it.  If you need to find out more about the calculations, I heard a great podcast about the subject – the Tri Talk Podcast, episode's 66 and 66a. 

The basic requirements are that you complete 3 sanctioned races – your top 3 performances for the year are used for your ranking.

Here’s a list of the races that I completed, in chronological order:-

Race	Points	USAT order	My order
Kinetic Sprint - May	76.82689	5	5
EagleMan 70.3 - June	81.76985	3	4
Luray Sprint – August	80.94807	4	3
Nations Tri – September	82.85825	2	2
Beach 2 Battleship 70.3 – October	85.62872	1	1
Total Ranking	83.3876	709

Looking at the numbers, the rankings reflected how my season progressed.  I got a lot stronger and faster throughout the year.  Part of that was a slow start from injury recovery (calf strain), the other part was that I started following a training plan for the first time in July.

I added 2 columns to the table above, one showing the USAT order, the other showing my order.  This ranks my events in order of best (1) to worst (5).  The only difference in USAT compared to my perception is that EagleMan 70.3 was ranked with more points than the Luray sprint – however I had a much better race at Luray than Eagleman (click links for race reports).  I know that the ranking points are calculated based on time, and a athletes with known performances, this may account for higher points at EagleMan, it is possible that while I felt my race was worse, it was better than others at a similar level (they might have suffered even more than me).  And for the sprint race, I may have been competing against people who specialize in the sprint distance.

Overall it is I find it interesting to see how I stack up, not that it really matters, but it is something that I occasionally look at.  For the 2012 season, I hope to move up the rankings – hopefully into the top 500.  That would get me into the ‘Honorable Mention’ category (the top 250 have ‘All American Honors’).

• #1 Points  - 106.2325
• #250 – 89.08105
• #500 – 85.3765

Note:  this ranking includes some pro athletes, like Tim DeBoom, Jason Shortis – so the results may change a little when they are removed.  Edit:  just as I was posting this article, the final official results were posted – I went from #709 down a whopping 5 places to #704.

As a side note:  today I learned what All American means… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-America.

The ranking points are calculated based on your race time, not place – so every second counts, after pouring through the results, I found the following:-

Luray Sprint (750m/18mi/3.1mi)

my time:      1:30:22 - 80.94807 points, 
competitor 1:27:04 - 84.0161
                        3minutes ~ 3 points

EagleMan 70.3 (1.2mi/56mi/13.1mi)

my time:      5:16:22 - 81.76985 points, 
competitor 5:01:10 - 85.89681
                        15 minutes ~ 4 points

Beach2Battleship 70.3 (1.2mi/56mi/13.1mi)

my time:      4:49:49 - 85.62872 points, 
competitor 4:58:57 - 83.01264 points 
                        9 minutes ~ 2.6 points

I guess there is one other thing i can deduce after looking at the rankings.  It is possible that I am am either a little better than others in my age group at longer races, or less willing to suffer on the much shorter sprint races – perhaps a little of both.  Either way, I have some improving to do this year.

1,000 miles in my Newton’s

This weekend I hit 1,000 miles of running in my Newton Gravity’s.  While it is customary to change into a new set of shoes every 300-500 miles, mine have been still going strong and not showing a lot of wear.  The wear pattern is even across the lugs too, showing that my foot strike/form must at least consistent.

Until now I didn’t really see a need to get a new pair.  I have raced in them a few times, but recently only used them for training (using the Distance lightweight trainer for races).    Of course lugs have worn down over time, but the rest of the shoes are still in great shape.

After hitting the 1,000 mile mark – I think it is time these shoes entered retirement. The good news is that Newton just released the new model of the Gravity training shoes, this time in Red!