Trip to the bike shop in my future...

I hadn't been on my trainer for more than 15 minutes when a I heard an awful sound coming from my rear gear changer. I quickly stopped pedaling, because the voice of wisdom told me there was big trouble down there. I'd previous ruined a mountain bike (and the subsequent race, riding my bike as a one-speed) hearing that exact noise.

Luckily, I caught the culprit in time - I'd managed to pop a pin halfway out of the chain.

So -- I get all the credit for trying to do the workout at 9:30 p.m., but none of the exhaustion. Yeah!

Back on Track

I did the Tejas Triathlon on Sunday, and I had pretty low expectations coming up to the event because of lack of sleep and missed training. It just goes to show you that you should make the most you have on the day of the race. For the first time in "I can't remember how long" I had a tri race where I didn't "screw up, blow up or throw up." Despite the heat, I put in 1:10:32, which was good for 49th place in my age group - the top half! (It's been almost two decades since that's happened).

I felt good and managed to a 173 average heart rate with a max recorded HR of 187. So what does that mean? I was at 92% of my max HR for over an hour. No wonder I'm happy. The actual data from a race also puts the lie on MaxHR = 220- your age, because that would make me 33. My recovery still took 5 minutes or so to drop below 130.

The moment that made the difference for me was my "smart swim." Let's just say it involved cutting the tangents to the buoys and a clever application of rule 4.2 and leave it at that. So I raced smart and hard and had a great day.

Packet Pickup

I dropped by packet pickup today, and I had a discussion with another athlete. He said, "Well, maybe you'll be lucky and your toenail will fall off during the swim..." I think I'm just going to have to tough it out. I did a little math on the shoe tradeoff. I figure I can go 1 mph faster for the 10 miles, which roughly works out to about 2 minutes. It won't take me two minutes to swap shoes. In fact, I'll be surprised if it takes me two minutes for the whole transition area. So I'm sticking with using both bicycle shoes and running shoes. On top of all this, I think I caught a stomach bug my son had, which won't take me out of the race but will probably annoy me.


I also did some figuring on how fast I will be able to leave - and it's all about the slowest bicyclist from the last wave. I figure the earliest I will be able to lay my hands on my bicycle is 8:30, so that makes making the first service a pretty tight connection. We'll see. What drama.

The Blog lives!

Now that the superbusy-ness of the race has died down, I'm back to my workout. Tonight was an hour on the bicycle. I have to say that my toenail and riding don't mix well, and it's making me think about my options for the triathlon I'm doing this Sunday. It's short enough so that I'm thinking about biking in my running shoes. You see, I've cut half the toebox off one of my old painting shoes - and it works pretty good. Does anyone have any thoughts on the bicycle/running shoe tradeoff (improves transition time, but you are slower on the bike?)