2012 Ingonish Sprint Triathlon

First sprint race of the year for me. I didn't do the others that were offered as they conflicted with Duathlons and also were pool swims. I would rather not do pool swims.

So an open water swim in Ingonish. Last year I did this race and the water was a bit cold to get into and I really needed that warm up time offered. This year the water was really quite warm, so I used the warm up time simply to get a little more comfortable in the water in general.

I am not the greatest swimmer, or even a moderate swimmer. I am a weak swimmer, but you all know that. Still I managed to do this race in just shy of 15 minutes last year so I had hoped that I was slightly stronger than during that race and could pull off closer to 14 minutes.

 

So into the water we went. Last year I was caught up in swimmers that were slower than myself, so I thought I would wade out with the stronger swimmers then fall into my proper pace (that's me in the gold coloured cap).

Well the start of the swim went well. I was tucked behind another swimmer. I received a few bumps but nothing too hard or worrisome.

But as I rounded that first buoy I realized I had gone too fast. Well if this were the bike or run, letting up means relaxing a bit but this is hard for me to do in the water. I let up the pace a bit to rest and was promptly paced by a number of swimmers. Still, I just had to finish this thing to get to the bike. So off I went.

 

Just because you have a bad leg of a triathlon doesn't mean you give up for the rest. So I picked up the pace to finish the swim hard then tore out of the water and across the timing mat.  I was 42nd at this point out of 53 people with a swim time of 16:45. Ugh. Now I will say that this year the swim was a bit longer than last year, but I don't know if it was long or correct. Regardless it was the swim everyone else did. But man did it hurt.

So off to T1 I went. For Ingonish that means a 500 meter run on a gravel path. Many people stop and put on shoes before the run. I don't. That means I do get to pass a couple of people at this point. Then a quick change out of my wetsuit and into my cycling gear and off I went.

This is a great ride, rolling hills, 23 kms and this day, cool air. I had stuffed some arm warmers into my tri suit front in case it happened to be too cold on the ride, but never needed them.

I quickly tucked and took off. Here is where I make up most of the time I lost on the swim. I know that I can't make up the 6 minutes or more on the fastest swimmers who are probably darn fast cyclist as well. But I pushed anyway.

In the end I made up a few spots and posted the 8th fastest bike split of the day. This included the run from the water as well (T1). It took me 45:57 to cover the 23 kms of this hilly course. So my 30 km/hr average was good enough to pass 27 people. Phew.

 

I am now getting more comfortable with the flying dismount. though I will admit to having a close call getting my foot out of one of my shoes and almost took a spill. But I survived and dismounted. Soon I will be more comfortable getting up to the line before dismounting. Wow, from this picture it looks like I am 500 meters away. Oh well.

 

I zoomed into T2 and luckily only saw a handful of bikes. That made me happy.

 

A quick change into my shoes and I was off. This was my second race in the New Balance 890v2. But this was my first race in them sockless. I had socks in the TZ but opted to go without to save those few valuable seconds. It turned out to be fine as these shoes are very smooth inside.

I didn't even spare the seconds to don my Garmin 305, but I did take it with me (I had turned it on before the race started). I am sure I can run without it, as I did for years. But I wanted that extra little bit of hurry up from the numbers on the screen.

I quickly caught a runner in front of me. Then I caught a hill. Ouch. It wasn't a big hill, but still, it hurt. My speed dropped from 3:50 to 4:15. Not good. So I kicked it up a notch and took off again.

The run course is nice. A 5km loop, so no laps and it is uphill out and downhill back.

I soon saw another runner in the distance and fought hard to catch him. By the turn around I was there and past. At this point I saw no one else ahead of me but kept my pace as high as I dared to salvage a good time from this event.

But then with 1 km to go I found one more runner. He was doing well enough but I could see the gap closing. I didn't care about saving anything at this point, so I picked  up the pace and passed him at the corner with less than 500 meters to go. I pushed harder and when the finish line was in sight I pushed once again.

 

I crossed the line at a nice 2:37 km/min pace for a grand total run time of 19:52. A sub 20 min 5 km to end a sprint is rather nice. My official time includes T2 and is 20:33, which was the 5th fastest run of the day. And that makes me happy as I have more speed int he run and made a few bobbles in T2.

So it seems I need to work on that swim again. I see part of my mistake as deciding recently to work more on form rather than endurance. And I just don't have the base in me yet to ignore endurance. So to the pool and lake I go before my next event, which will likely be the Bridgetown Tri this August.

Oh and I beat the rain. Whew. For those in the Olympic Distance event I feel for you as the sky opened up.

And thanks to the Sportwheels gang for getting that new chain all nicely setup on my bike. I love Shimano chains for riding, but I hate installing those blasted things.

The Benefits of the Video Camera

So I have attended both of our local triathlon training camps here in good ole Halifax (well Dartmouth really) this year. My main reason for going this year was that TriNS had purchased a GoPro camera and was going to do some video analysis of our swimming.

I was of two minds. 1) I didn't want to see how bad I was swimming and 2) I really needed to see why I was swimming so badly. Reason 2 won as I just had to know.

Well the second camp just happened this past weekend and we got to review our videos. Luckily for me I  had been taped twice and we all got to crowd around and critique loads of footage of Ian swimming.

I have learned a few things (I would have posted a video but I don't have it at the moment). I am uneven, and one arms is not too bad, while the other arm is signalling for a taxi or something. My hips sink, so my kick tries to compensate, so that looks bad. I breathe like I am drowning (well I knew that one already). And my flip turn looks like an open turn. Well I don't actually flip turn so that is fine.

Words and ideas were thrown about on how to help me correct these things. Catch, turn, rotate, head down, chest down, hips up!!! So basically, learn to swim you fool!

As my readers know, I just learned how to swim. I am finally comfortable enough in the water that I think I can start to figure out how to do these wonderful things like "catch the water." I am obviously, though, going to have to figure out exactly what all of this means. Normally I see all sorts of pictures of descriptions of the "catch." Or else full speed shots of it from pro swimmers. Great! But I still don't actually get it. What the heck is my arm supposed to be doing? And just when I think I start to figure it out I read something different.

Well I picked up a DVD from the library called "The Swim" the other day. I have watched a grand total of 5 minutes so far, but I have high hopes that it will contain some vital p[piece of info that I am missing. I plan on going through it ASAP, and will fill you in on how good (or bad) it really is. And you will be learning the truth from a mediocre swimmers.

But back to video for a second. Get it done. No matter what image you have in your head of you swimming (or  running or cycling), you really can't know until you see it through someone else's eyes. And preferably in High Def. And when it comes to swimming, below the water line because that is where you are swimming.

I hope to have a video done later this year, after I have time to digest the info given to me, and figure out what it all means. And once I figure out how I should look under the water.

Hey, don't get me wrong here, I am really happy with where I am. I couldn't front crawl at all 2 years ago at my first triathlon. And here I am coming in only slightly behind the group in a training session now. But maybe I can get to the point where I am with the slow people, and no the slow person.

Building a Better Ian - The Next Phase, Shoulders

Since I was a teen my left shoulder has hurt. Not all the time, but usually it hurts. Mild most days, darn right sore other days and sometimes I can't turn my head. It runs the gambit of achy, numb, tingly, and even itchy. But I just deal with it and move on.

Well after all the success I have and seeing my Chiropractor and having ART done to fix my ITBS issues  I thought, why the heck am I not asking about this. Perhaps it is time to get rid of this pain. Truth be told I finally came to this realization this past weekend while doing a solo ride around the Peggys Cove loop. 85kms or so and by 50kms in my shoulder was numb. Sure I changed positions, shuffled a bit, did a little stretch and things went back to being okay,  but I knew that I just had to stop "dealing" with the issue and get it looked at.

When I was a teen I saw my doctor. He said, pinched nerve and gave me some exercises to do. They didn't do much, I was a teen, and I gave up. Easy. But I am older now and darn it, I don't want to be even older and in more pain.

Well into the Chiropractor I went. We chatted about the history of the injury. This was obviously a chronic thing, so it wasn't going to be solved over night. But after a little assessment we came up with the beginnings of a plan of attack.

It turns out I have very little range of motion in my shoulders themselves. Instead my pecs have been controlling things for a long time. I basically brute force my shoulders to do what I want them to. Great, I have strong pecs, hooray! I also have very low shoulders, which is odd for many people, but maybe not so much for cyclists.

See as cyclists, we lean forward a lot. And we stretch out our arms to do so. So our trapezius can elongate. This, in my case, also lead to my scalpular muscles rotating. It all seems to just add together into one big problem.

Where did this all begin? I don't know, but of course things like cycling and swimming can make things worse. So it has been slowly getting worse over time.

Right now we are working on a huge bundle of scar tissue and muscle adhesion that has formed over time in my teres muscles (I think it is those muscles). They are kind of under and beside the scalpula, in and around the armpit area. And I am working on stretching out my pecs to get my arms and shoulders to go backwards a bit. One session and I regained quite a few degrees of motion. Hopefully a few more sessions and some exercises at home will lead to me becoming pain free and will help in my active lifestyle.

In swimming, for instance, I have the choice of swimming with stubby arms and swimming slow, or using my major muscles to force my arms into a nice elongated form. The second option means I tend to throw the rest of my body out of position which leads to dropped hips and tons of drag. This can be easily seen when I wear a wetsuit for open water. Doing so can gain me almost 4 minutes over a 750m swim, as my hips are forced to float high. We will see if freeing my shoulders will lead to an decrease in my sprint distance swim time.

Any way, that seems like enough info for now. Any of you medical-ish type people reading this should be aware that my knowledge of the human muscular structure and use of proper names for different muscles groups is completely due to the internet. I am sure I got a lot of that stuff wrong. Sorry about that.

I'll update my "condition" as my treatment continues and we will journey together to see how this may affect my life as a Triathlete / Duathlete.

ZX Aquathlon - Race 1

So it has happened. Race 1 of my season has come and gone. this past weekend I took part in the 1st (annual?) ZX Aquathlon in Greenwood. Yes, the same Greenwood that has hosted a great early season Tri and Du for the past few years.

Now what is an Aquathlon you may ask? Much like a Duathlon is a run/bike/run event, the Aquathlon is a swim and run event. Technically run/swim/run, but as that would be hard to do in a pool situation so it was turned into a swim/run event. 750 meter swim followed by a 5K run.

Being early season I was slightly concerned about what to wear and how to get changed in transition. I mean, it is April and the weather over the last week had been as high as 15 C or more and as low as -3. we had seen rain and snow. But in the end I decided to load the car with everything just in case.

By the time I arrived the temp had warmed up to 6C or so. The sun was sort of shining and the wind was picking up. So I decided to run in my Tri top and jammers and throw on a windbreaker and toque. Luckily T1 (or T only) was indoors so that was nice.

We had enough time to do a few warm up laps in the pool. That is always nice as my heart rate starts to sky rockets at the beginning of events and as a novice swimmer that generally leads to breathing issues. A few laps back and forth and a little breathing control and things calmed down. I had a nice lane mate Mallory.

Someone yelled go, or a whistle blew or a horn sounded or something. I can't quite remember that part of the event for some reason. I just remember starting to swim. And swim. And swim. Yeah, I know only 750 meters, but for me that seemed like an all day journey.

I knew I was going to be slow and as shown in the picture above, my widely spread fingers apparently don't make me any faster. Anyway, I eventually saw the board placed in the water to indicate I had 50 meters to go. So I "picked up" the pace a bit and finished. In the end I had a swim time of 18:41, which included transition time as well. So it was actually pretty much where I thought I would be. In the end that would place me 24th out of 30 swimmers for the day. Obviously for a decent result I would have to run fast.

The whole event was pretty flat. Well generally swims are I suppose, but so was the run. Sort of.

I threw on my windbreaker, number belt, toque and sneakers (socks? nah too short of a race).

Now windbreaker is a bit of a funny word. Turns out it may be good for light breezes but this race presented slightly more than breezes. It was darn windy, from what I can tell there were gusts up to 80km/hr throwing us around. That little jackets didn't do much, though at points I think it was more of a parachute.

I ran at what i thought was a comfy 5K pace, not having really ever run after a swim. Slowly I picked off a few other swimmers, then some more, then some more (well that sounds like there may have been tons of people in the swim, but still you get the idea). By the turn around (where I was offered a cup of warm water) I had passed all I was going to an down had to work to get my time down and keep those others behind me. I also thought it may have started to rain at this point, but in fact that was sand getting whipped around by the wind. Later on that would hurt.

Finally after running up hill (okay, it was truly flat but that wind was like a huge hill it seemed), I came to the finishing straight, or wind tunnel. Yes, the wind was harder here, perfect for testing out new aero devices for your bike. Not great for a sprint finish. Still I pushed through and finished. Man that was tough. 21:50 for the 5th fastest run time and only 2 1/2 minutes shy of our speedy Italian friend Gianluca. I was happy, and that wind probably meant I had more speed to give, nice.

So after all was said and done I pulled myself up from 24th to 14th. I thought at best I would be under 42 minutes in total, and I managed a 40:31. Now bring on the open water! (eek). Actually next up, Du-It-For-Shelter. Sign up now for a great race. Again, mostly flat, all fast.

Oh, when I mentioned the sand storm thing hurt later. Well it put lots of nice sand in my shoes, and as I had no socks on, I ended up with many fun abrasions. Today brings painful steps to me. Ouch.

Ooo, Training Fins

Yes, I got me some rather nice Speedo training fins for Christmas. As swimming is not only my worst event of triathlon (who can't say that), it is nice to be able to add a little something to my training regieme.

So I took these beasts to the pool a few days back. After a few warmup laps I put them on for the first time. I flew across the pool. Wow, these things are like magic. I only did 8 laps in total during my 50 laps of swimming that night but what a difference.

Overall I hope these will be able to get my kick a lot stronger and maybe add some flexibility to my ankles. Now if I can figure out how to get these things past any officials during a race (ha ha). Seriously though, these are a ton of fun.