Week 15 RR - Stefan Reiter
Like a lot others I've done my first RR today here in California.
I choose to ride on Highway #1 as it is pretty flat and there are no traffic stops - starting at Santa Cruz heading north for 45km then turn back to my car to refuel and do it again 
I was expecting wind on my second turn but not much on the first .... oh man how totally wrong I was at this point! Head permanent heavy headwind all way up north which even got a little worse on the second turn. The way back to the car was funny because I often ran out of gears averaging well over 40km/h for both 45km turns!!! It's obvious that it's hard to keep up the power when having that much tailwind and no more gears
I tuned down my power on the last 20km and especially on the last 5km taking in a GU gel to prepare for my run.
Here are the most important metrics:
When looking at my Quadrant-Analysis chart I had 70% in Q3 and 27% in Q4 so that's also looking pretty nice.
All my metrics look great for the ride but nevertheless I felt not like I could run a whole marathon with that heavy legs down there. Managed it quiet easily to dial into that slow jogging pace and finished my 10k in around 52 minutes.
Nutrition wise I ate half a powerbar every 30min (so a total of 5 bars) + an additional Gel shortly before my run started. I drank about 3.5 liters of Gatorade Perform and never felt thirst but at around 4:45 I started to get dizzy and my concentration started to drift faaar of so I thought I need more salt and was lucky to found 2 little bags of it in my bento-box from todays breakfast. I really helped me at that point and I cound focus again and the dizzyness was gone completely!!
After reviewing my nutrition it turned out I consumed 327kCal/h and around 280mg of Sodium/h (not including these salt-packs I put in).
Every input appreciated! ....
Comments
Also, I use 600 mgs of sodium per hour, so your 280 mgs looks way to low to me.
BTW, I race around 67 kgs whereas you are a far bit bigger than me.
I wonder whether your dizzy spell was fuel related?
Perhaps those power bars were not all being absorbed?
Also, was there enough fuel?
How did you develop your fuelling plan?
Fluid , salt , calorie intake is so individual and needs to be developed , fine tuned, and practiced over and over again. Its really hard for me to correlate in metric but I do agree with Peter that 5 power bars maybe a bit much , even for a big guy. Not too many calories but possibly too much solid food and protein that is slower/harder to digest specially as it gets hotter and harder.
Your power file show pretty steady for 2hrs , some pretty good dips between 2-3hrs??? what was happening there??? , then steady again from 3-4.5hrs , then a significant drop in power during the last hour. Sounds like you purposely turned your power down the last hour. I think its important in training and specially during the RR's that you hold target power right to the very end. This is where you find out if you rode too hard or not, if you can't hold the power until the end the target should probably be lowered. I also read your comment on the board that you think you may have rode too hard. Perhaps a little easier at the beginning and a little harder at the end to try and come up with the same .73?
Having said all that I have a history of riding just a tad hot at the beginning and fading just a tad at the end. This year I made sure to do every single longride at or above target watts all the way to the end . Race Day I allowed myself to "turn it down" near the end to spin, eat, drink , cooldown and get ready for the run. This gave me an "easier" bike than I was used to in training!
Comparing your splits. Split# 3 was 2 watts higher than Split #1 and 4minutes slower (musta been a wind change) Split #4 was 21 watts less than split# 2 and only 1 minute slower..... So overall only 5 minutes slower the second lap... Not too shabby on a high wind day! Bike TSS was in check and it appears you ran well on your 10K. Don't think your ever gonna get off your bike and say I can run a Marathon LOL , I bet the remainder of your run would have been fine!
I can remember riding on Hwy 1 @ 26 mph, and feeling no wind on my face - meaning I was going with a 25 mph tailwind!
I agree with Tim - you nailed your RR, and should expect to do well on the marathon, provided to use the first 4-8 miles to run easy and hydrate well. Use the "I don't think I can run" feeling to remind you to just cruise easily during the first hour or so of the marathon. I've done 100+ triathlons, and EVERY time I feel during the last part of the bike there's no way I will be able to run ... and then I always prove myself wrong.
@Tim - You are totally correct I just for the Powerbar stuff. I think I will change to a Gel/Powerbar combination for my next RR ... something like 1 gel every 30min + half a powerbar per hour were I just eat bit by bit slowly across time.
Well the thing with the power-dips between 2-3hrs where point where I just went out of gears ...on the last split it was even worse as wind got stronger I had to coast more (just look at the speed at these dips)
Basically I plan to ride IMAT around 5 hours so I tried to keep up my power output until that time and then turned it down as all that coasting areas came up. I've seen from a lot of powerfiles from many PROs they are also turning down the output towards T2 so I thought it would be a nice test.
As on IMAT the bike course into T2 is also a veeeery long slight downhill I plan to reduce power there and pull in the last nice ingredients for the run
@Al - Damn Al how the hell did you manage to do over 100 Tris?? I still can remember my first one .. was an OLY and I was really badly prepared. I stepped of my bike and after 10m of running I was thinking of giving up ... but we all know "DNF is not an option"