A Hard Month

In my mind, I have written several witty and profound blog posts, full of existential wisdom and the insight that I have gained in the time since my last entry. Alas, most of these posts were composed at the 3 hour mark of a 7 hour bike ride, and by the time I returned home, ran five miles, showered, and ate, I didn't really have the energy or interest to sit down and put them into print. My bad.

A highlight, you ask? Ok. About three weeks ago I was having a lot of trouble with my 112 mile bike rides. As faithful readers will remember, 112 miles is the length of the bike segment, and my assignment was to

1) Warm up for 25 miles
2) Ride for 22 miles @ race pace (This is called "an interval")
3) Ride easy for 10 minutes
4) Repeat 2 & 3 twice more
5) Ride home and run for 40 minutes. (The running after biking is called "a brick")

This wasn't my first 112 mile ride, or my 4th, so I knew that I could go the distance. My first time out, I got through the first interval ok. The second interval was hard, and the third interval crushed me. @ mile 87 I stopped at a starbucks, got coffee and coffeecake, and took a 30 minute break before limping home.

The second time out, I didn't even make it that far -- I got through one interval, and that was it. I couldn't pick up the pace for the second interval, and ended up rolling through the workout.

At the time, I was composing posts on the merits of learning from failures, or how to get through rough patches in the training, or figuring out how to keep going when things aren't going well. It was profound, I tell you. In the end, I decided that I had to back off from the pace I had been trying to ride -- slow down, basically, and mostly on the hills.

It turns out that riding up hill takes a lot more effort than riding on the flat. Well, Duh, you say, and yes, I wasn't riding 20 mph uphill and expecting to be able to hold that pace. But I HAD been pushing to hard on the uphill sections of the ride. B, who has a power meter, put me on his bike at the end of that second failed ride, and said, "watch what happens when you come out of the flat and onto this hill." A power meter measures the number of watts you are generating at any given time on the bike, and so is a better measure of effort than MPH. I went from pushing 160 watts on the flat to 280 on the hill, and that was with me being aware that there was going to be a spike and trying to gear down fast enough to prevent it.

That example, and something I read (Trying to push up that hill is like trying to insert a 6-minute mile into your 8 minute mile long run) convinced me I had to really ease off on the hills.

Result? Success. Next 112 mile ride I did the 3x intervals, and actually felt really good on the brick -- like I could actually run a marathon at that point if I needed to. Victory! Lesson learned!

That really sums up the way the training has been going. The last month has been rough, but I've pulled through most of it ok.

Alas, has been a downside. I HAD been aiming to go ~19.5 mph on the bike course, which would put me into T2 in a comfortable 5 hours and 50 minutes. Now, with the backing off on the hills, it looks like I am going to be doing a LOT closer to 17.5 mph, and getting into T2 in 6 hours and 20 minutes. THAT has been a bitch for me to assimilate. I rode 20 mph on the half ironman, yes? Conventional wisdom says double your 1/2 IM time and add 40 minutes. I finished the 1/2 in 5:10, and so was aiming for a sub-11 hour IM. That isn't going to happen, probably -- 11:20 looks a lot more likely than 10:55.

The problem, as B explains it to me, is this: It isn't that I couldn't ride the course in 5:50, rather than 6:20. The problem is that, if I have pushed too hard on the bike, I won't just lose 30 minutes on the run. I might well lose 3 HOURS. I have a hard time imagining me doing the marathon in 7 hours, but if I am so beat up that I am walking from aid station to aid station, resting for 15 minutes each time, then yeah. It could happen. Or I could end up walking off the course -- giving up in despair as the sun goes down and the time winds out.

Clearly I don't want THAT to happen. I want to finish strong. The running has been going well -- I am faster on the track than I was at the beginning of the year (nearly a minute per mile faster, which is a great deal of time), and my long runs, while they still suck, suck a lot less than they did before the marathon in the spring.

And so what about 30 minutes over 10+ hours? I don't know why, but I got 11 hours into my head as a benchmark of "competent." Or something, that's not quite the right word; recall that I was not pleased with my 3:50 marathon, because I trained to run 3:30. I feel like I've been training to go 11 hours, and because the data points to me not making that time, I feel somehow like I've failed already. (which is, of course, ridiculous. even knowing that its dumb, I still feel that way, somehow.)

All this has made the last weeks training doubly difficult. The race is only 17 days away, and I have 4 more hard days of training left before the tapering begins, as I back off of the distance and intensity to let my body heal up for the race. One more 112 mile ride, one more 20 mile run, really. Staying motivated for those - and all the workouts for the last week or so -- has been really hard. My mental edge feels really dull.

But, on the plus side, B observes that the feeling of wanting to quit during the hard workouts is pretty common, and the important thing is that I keep pushing through the bad patches and finish the workout anyway. That should come in handy on the race course, when there will no doubt be some bad patches.

On the academic front, we're back to school on Monday. I've edited and resubmitted an article for a major journal, and chapter three of the diss is coming to a nice close (hi mom!).

I'll try to get in one more update before the race!