Linda Filar Westchester Jardin Olympic
Let me start by saying that I really admire and respect all of you LC'ers out there training like crazy and executing like ninja's at IM's and HIM's. No way I could do that right now, so the local Olympic distance tri was my A race this year. I wasn't sure if I should write a report for just a SC race, but figured this was my "big" race...
I bought the EN OS plan and then the SC plan before finally trying out the team. I had been doing similar training self coached for a while, but, with an N of 1, and had clearly been making some mistakes that were costing me. First off, the no swim bit. Excellent from an ROI perspective. I had been thinking this but always felt so guilty. After consulting with the coaches in the macro thread I was to continue with the no swim training in order to hit the run and bike work (due to my limit of about 5hours/week to train) until about 3 weeks out before my first A race.
So, this has been a tough year for me, work has been terrible, winter was terrible, then it seemed like I was finally starting to show some fitness in my running and THEN it happened. A stress fracture in my foot. First in 30 (!) years of running. So, no running at all, only easy spinning on the drainer and deep water running for half the summer, then very very gradually build back. Fast forward, my longest continual run going into the race was about 4 miles, longest on pavement was 3, doing just the MS with some drills and short WU and CD at a local odd shaped cinder track. Only biked outdoors 3 times, but had been hitting the WO's on the drainer to avoid rebreaking my foot if I had an emergency stop and slammed that footdown. Then 3 weeks out got back into the pool. Worked on form, drills, shorter/faster sets.
So, race day had come and I had to do what I could with what ever I had.
Swim: 26:51 4th AG
Wow - thanks for that. I'm pretty sure that the swim was long given splits from others I know. This is a big race and to be fourth out of the water on 3 weeks of swim training, well it worked. On the return trip I was passing huge packs of people from several waves in front of me and didn't see any other pink caps, but figured that there were 3 "semi-pro" types who I thought I saw at the beginning take off never to be seen again.
Bike: 1:17:55
This bike course is somewhat hilly and somewhat technical, nothing super crazy, but I"m conservative by nature to start and not having been riding outdoors meant I was super careful on all the tight turns. Lots of TNT newbies and superfast folks all congested at times so figured better to be safe than sorry. I also wasn't sure how hard I could work for 25 miles given my limited training and still be able to run so kept the effort down a notch. So, not a bad bike for me for this course, and actually pretty good considering how little training I actually did.
Run 57:14
OK, this was the big question mark, how will I manage the run. I'd been doing the MS of the run workouts up to 3 miles of speed work from the SC plan. I had to go by RPE because I didn't want to run any test races on pavement. Paces had improved vastly from that first attempt in July to run mile reps in about 8:40 (and it hurt LOTS) to 7:40-ish for Z4 7:10-ish Z5 but I had no real mileage to back that up. Also, I'm a middle distance runner specialist with a VERY steep upwardly sloping VDot curve, so I was aware that this was going to be unpleasant. And I was right. I managed to run the whole way but felt horrible. It was more of a shuffle actually. My thought is that I would do a run focus hack before going into the OS, maybe the 30 in 30, not sure but I clearly have a lot of run to improve here.
Total Time 2:46:14, 7th AG/44 (F40-44) 404/1011 OA
So in summary I feel like I have a lot of room for improvement but based upon my limited and challenging personal experience, the SC plans seem to do a pretty darn good job getting you ready for SC, especially if you're really pressed for time. I was limited to just the MS with a very short WU/CL on a pretty regular basis and had pretty solid results on the bike and swim.
Thanks!
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