I think this is my fourth time doing this race. Coming into the race I was feeling pretty good about my level of fitness and my shot at breaking 5 hours. That was my goal. Sub 5 at a half-ironman distance event. I knew I could cruise the swim and still have a decent time of around 31 to 32 minutes. The bike was going to be the question mark though. In years past I was never really able to hold the Watts I wanted to and feel good coming off the bike. This would usually lead to me averaging around just over 20 mph. Anyway, here is my story of the race.<\/p>\n
This year was the first year I would experience the new swim start they implemented. It is a rolling start, where 3 athletes start every 10 seconds. It is still broken up into age groups, but it does help space out the swim start. I felt pretty comfortable the entire swim and kept my breathing under control. Nothing exciting happened and I ended up going 31:30. A pretty good start to the day. I was happy with that.<\/p>\n
SWIM NOTE :\u00a0<\/strong>My friend Jan beat me in the swim again.<\/p>\n This is where the race became frustrating for me. The last time I did this race my goal was to hold 200 watts. I couldn’t do it, barely held 185 average in 2013.<\/p>\n To compare 2013 and 2015<\/p>\n Weight: \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0157 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0158 All this on the same exact bike. I barely picked up 2 minutes for pushing 30 Watts more. Obviously I really need to look at my bike setup and my position on the bike. That was just a huge disappointment to me. I knew after the first loop there was a problem when I only averaged 20.3 mph. I managed to finish at 20.5 mph, but at that point my goal of breaking 5 hours was pretty much shot.<\/p>\n The run was just a long run for me. My head wasn’t into it and I was thinking about what went wrong on the bike. My total time was 1:46:16 for average pace of 8:07. Not that great.<\/p>\n Overall I actually ended up with a PR by 14 seconds. 5:07:39. I’m happy that I was able to get a PR, but I was looking for about 10 minutes faster. Especially on the bike. I will do some testing with different positions over the next few weeks to see if I can figure out how to get the extra speed while maintaining the watts. I’m happy with the fact that I’m able to hold the power numbers, but I need to find out why I’m not getting the speed out of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I think this is my fourth time doing this race. Coming into the race I was feeling pretty good about my level of fitness and my shot at breaking 5 hours. That was my goal. Sub 5 at a half-ironman distance event. I knew I could cruise the swim and still have a decent time…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-race","category-triathlon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeeh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeeh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeeh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeeh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeeh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeeh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeeh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeeh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeeh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Bike<\/h2>\n
\nAvg Watts: 185 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0215
\nMax Watts: 397 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 502
\nNP: \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 195 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0222
\nAvg HR: \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 141 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0142
\nVI: \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a01.07 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a01.04
\nTime: \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a02:45:39 \u00a0 2:43:53<\/p>\nThe Run<\/h2>\n
Overall<\/h2>\n