I am about to do my second oly this weekend. The first was one was a little short and the bike was downhill quite a bit. I did well because of that until the run. I had not run at all since the half marathon and my stress fracture.

The good news is that it healed and I have run a bit since, but my overall training has dropped off a bit. I am fearful I won’t finish this real oly in under 3 hours.

wish me luck

Go to nearly any restaurant website and you can find nutritional information on their menu items. Not Applebees! Are these bafoons in the dark ages? The shoot extra fat in everything and don’t want to admit it? Here is what they say about it on their website in their FAQ:

We do not provide nutritional information on other Applebee’s® items, except where required by law.

By other they are talking about weight watchers points items they tell you the points. So no they don’t really give you any help unless you are doing the WW points. Oh but they will be happy if required by law, isn’t that special. I have a solution. Never eat there. Then it won’t matter.

That is my solution.

Never Eat At Applebees.

Oh and for anyone still following my epoc journey I think I have a stress fracture in my foot from the half marathon, so I will be swimming and biking only for at least a month. I ran 4 miles the last two Wednesdays and by mile 3 I got the pain back in my foot and had to walk/run and adjust my gait to make it go away. I read up on stress fractures and found that mysymptoms indicate a mild stress fracture. which requires 3 to 8 weeks to heal. Since my foot doesnt hurt except when I run and the day or two after I can solve my problem by not running for a 3 weeks and then start out by running 2 miles a few days before upping it to 3 or 4 as a test to see if its healed. Wearing my running shoes all the time is helping my foot to feel better too.

It’s terribly embarrasing to pull on my new speedo trunks and waltz out into the public. I realize that people don’t really care, they may notice and think something but they really don’t care if some dude is wearing a suit he has no business wearing, or at least they think that. They may shake their head and think why do people do stuff like that. Well, for this case anyway I have an answer.

I swam a test 500 meters for time this weekend since I didn’t properly measure my time on my triathlon last week. I got a confirmation that swam my fastest time yet. I did the test in 8:55. This was after my 1 hour bike class that I like to swim before not after because it wears me out so much. So I got a better result in me if I start rested.

I set a goal a while back to swim 500 meters in under 10 minutes for my sprint triathlons this year. I beat 9 minutes on the first one. My goal, after I got 10 minutes in this swim was to extend it out to 1000 meters and 1500 meters at the same pace which is the length of my two longer triathlons. I think I am there now, again just from changing my swim suit. I will have to run a test next weekend for that.

I often train with a couple of people that are doing the Ironman Couer d’ Alene coming up in two weeks now. When I started swimming back in September, I was in the slow lane because they didn’t have a bumbling idiot lane. Then I worked my way up to earning the right to take up space in the slow lane. All the while these other two were in the fast lane. There were a couple of times new people came to class and I got bumped to the fast lane, but I had to work my butt off to try and not get lapped in a set of 200. Eventually I became a permanent fixture in the fast lane, though as little as two weeks ago I was struggling to not get lapped in sets of 400. What this means of course is that they could swim 7 laps faster than I could swim 8. My “100%” time was just dipping below 50 seconds a lap which means they were just below 44 seconds a lap. The last two workouts I was nipping at their toes so they let me pass and I was finishing sets of 150 a good half length in front of them and not only that but I was able to maintain a pace fast enough to be about even with them as we finish up. (usually as we finish up a 3600 yard workout I was trailing off and not a threat to keep up with anyone.) So I am now the fastest person in the fast lane (only because truly fast people are not showing up mind you) which is something I would have found hard to believe if you had told me back in September, or even a month ago for that matter.

All of this thanks to my new speedo. So yeah, when you see me and think, “why is that dude wearing a suit like that?” the answer is the same if you see me experimenting with shaving all my chest hair off (no I haven’t tried it yet and likely wont for a while). Because I can go much faster.

My first triathlon of the season is now under my belt, and it’s the best T-shirt from all my races so far. This one I will wear. The key is that I like the color, dark grey, and more importantly it is not covered with sponsor logos. I hate paying for a shirt that is then a walking billboard for all the guys that gave you a cup of something to drink. I would rather pay for the cup of something so my shirt can remain wearable.

I was waiting for the results so I could post the race distribution. I got the 39th percentile (that red bar is where I am counted) with a 1 hour 16 minute finish time. I was only able to estimate my pace for each leg, but they are pretty close. (1:39 per 100 yards, 18 mph, 9:40 min/mile)

The race went much better than I thought. I had fears of being passed a lot again. The swim was in a pool so they divided out the heats by speed. I apparently put down a fast enough time to get into the first open heat. The actual first heat was reserved for those that took the class at the college. So I was 13th or 14th out of the water of 16. I was not lapped by more than a third of the field so I was less than a minute behind most in my heat (out of the water, it only got worse from there). I really got screwed up in the water though. The pool is in an L shape, with the long side being 8 lanes and the L part being the deep end with diving boards and such. So the last 2 lanes once you get to the half way mark drop off. It is not even though. On one side it has only dropped to say 8 feet deep but on the other side of the lane it is more like 12. So the nice plain boring stripe on the bottom of the pool is tilted severely. Its from side-to-side, not swim into the deep and then back out like it is for most pools. Then the sucker (of course that was me) in the very last side of the last lane has the corner to deal with. There is no rope to the deep end, so if you stray off course, smack into the concrete corner you go. I didn’t but I spent extra time making sure I was not veering off that direction. I got a weird vertigo type feeling in my head from the tilted bottom coupled with the fact that again I started out too fast and felt like I couldn’t breath, it took me about 4-5 laps to shake the feeling. Problem is I am only swimming 10 laps. By the time I got it figured out the person in my lane had made 3/4 of the lap on me, but I held her off the rest of the way and basically stayed even. So I think I was in the right heat had had things gone well.

The transition was a long walk/run from the pool to the indoor track/fieldhouse (no running on the pool deck or the locker room even if you are racing). I had a good spot for my bike near the bike exit and right underneath a basketball hoop so it was very easy to find. I didn’t spend too much time thinking about the layout of my area, and I didn’t waste any time getting ready to go. So all is well on that front for the rest of my races. The key I think is to have a towel laid out and another to dry with and then have the clothes to wear as though helping a three year old get dressed. One more thing about the swim. I finally wore my speedo in public. Embarraressed? a tad, but faster for it, even if only in my own mind. I didn’t like the effect it gave my love handles and belly, but it was very comfortable. It had an internal piece that made it like a pair of shorts and attached underwear which is also comfortable for the run. I pulled on my padded bike shorts over it and then took them off for the run. This worked out so well I will be skipping the zoot suit or equivalent I thought I was going to buy this year for the longer triathlons. I just saved $80 and the elastic on the bike shorts comes off right over my shoes too, and that is a good thing cause that is exactly what I forgot to do during T2. I also did my normal swim routine this morning and the people I usually swim with that are faster than me were slower than me today. They had a long workout over the weekend, with their ironman tri coming up in 3 weeks, but none-the-less, I am never able to keep up with them for the workout and after a few laps they stuck me in the lead I was going so strong. That streamline swimsuit makes a world of diference on the speed thing. I think I am swimming 4-5 seconds faster per lap which is nearly a minute faster on a 500 yard swim, that is about 10% faster, just by changing my swim suit!

The nice part about the bike was that there were 3 people behind me from my heat (I beat one person out of transition) and then the 10 minute swim leg separated me from the next guys. So I only got passed twice in the start and then again twice near the end of the 10 mile bike. I rode in the aero position for everything but turns and hills at the start and end. I felt like I was cruizing, but my bike computer was not something I could get figured out. So I had to deduce my time by estimating it for everything else. I had finally gone for my first outdoor ride the day before my first triathlon. Yeah, I got procrastinator written all over me. I found that I was able to take what I have learned from my spinning class and triathlon coach and it transfered to the outdoor bike perfectly. The only thing that didn’t transfer, cause it was never a concern, is getting out of the damn clips at a moments notice, without having to think about it, as easily as lifting your foot off of a normal pedal. The foot is stuck there and you got about say 50 miliseconds to get it figured out or the ground is going to welcome you. Yes it happened the day before during my first ride, and no it didn’t happen during the race. Although my dismount at the bike dismount line was a close call. Let’s just say that a lot of eyebrows were raised as I fought with all my will to not be caught dead lying on the ground still clipped to my bike. To buy myself a little more than the 50 miliseconds I hit the front brake as I was twisting my left foot. I had already swung my right foot over and so as the twist finally worked I was standing on solid ground still moving, my front brake still engaged the back tire had no reason to stay put and jumped up above my head. The bike is so light I just grabbed the whole thing and set it back down. And to avoid any further gawking I calmly, yet quickly, walked back to my transition spot. It is safe to say that the bike, as of yet, is not an extension of my body. I shall be much closer if I can get a couple of rides in per week.

The transision to run went well only because the bike shorts can be removed over my shoes. If not, I would have had to take them off again. So it’s a good thing. This is part of the reason I think I have found my gear for the year. I started the run quite unlike all of my other runs this year. I always read other people race reports and they often comment that it takes a while to get the legs into gear. This was not the case at all for me. I was fine to run right from the start. The problem is I was tired, all the races so far just included running so I was always fresh. There was no starting fast and then slowing as I went. I actually started slow. I am pretty sure I beat 10 minute miles, but only barely. I had started my watch a couple hundred yards into the run and stopped it after I had stopped and wandered over to to the water and fruit table and ate a banana. So I think I was dallying around for about 2 minutes which makes the run about 30 minutes. Ten minute miles would be 31 minutes, so I am certain I beat that. I was starting to feel that my foot was going to be sore again but I don’t think that made me do anything differently until today. My shoes I normally wear to work actually make the problem worse. I figured out that between yesterday in running shoes and today in work shoes. So that is why my foot had the long delay in healing, the work shoes are not helping. I will wear my running shoes for a few days and see if that gets me well faster. I ran pretty consistant the whole way. Right up until the end when I sped up. A person that was run/walking but managed to stay ahead of me from the halfway point and back. I would gain and she would start running again and pull back out, then walk and I’d get close. She finally took off running with half a mile left about the same time I sped up to catch her. The end result is we just finished faster but with her ahead. I also heard someone pounding the trail behind me with about 500 yards left. I was not about to be caught after all that and took off basically sprinting a little downhill section and then running the few hundred feet at a 7 minute mile pace. I came blazing around the corner and down the final stretch looking good and impressive. I was probably running the speed of the people that were a heat or two behind me but strong in the run. So that was nice to finish strong. The person behind me fell back after I kicked it in gear.

I don’t think more than 4 or 5 people passed me during the run. Again this is because of the structure of the start. How ever you slice it though, it is nice not to get passed by a constant train of people.  With how much time I have spent getting good at swimming I am destined to get passed a lot at mass start triathlons. This will just allow me to mumble under my breath as they do go by, “slow swimmer”, and they can wonder how the “chunky” guy got passed them all they want.

A while back I made some discoveries in my diet that helped immenselyto control my appetite. Still working on applying them all the time, but at least I know about it. I will let you in on my little secret. I still have the days where I find myself in the kitchen eating item after item. It used to be getting up from the couch or whatever other sedentary non-activity I was doing. But I am now finding it happens more when I work out more. I basically use up a lot of muscle glycogen and then my body wants to replace it. No problem really as long as I eat the right foods. Therein lies the problem. Here is an excerpt from a blog I wrote a while back but did not post for some reason.

I have been struggling with the calorie counting for 11 weeks or so now. OK, struggle is not the right word, it has been very successful, but it is a battle to do better. My goal was initially to eat 1800 a day and it didn’t happen, I was still successful at 2200 calories daily but it takes longer that way to lose weight. I have been getting it down close to 2000 on average for a few weeks now. This last week I intentionally added some fiber to my diet and the meals are not only making me full, I sometimes feel stuffed. These days where it happens I am eating less than 1800 calories and I have the feeling of being stuffed! I can hardly believe it.

The discovery was that fiber keep you feeling full. And it is even better if it is the bulky stuff like a cup of carrots, as opposed to something that sounds goofy but many people do, like eating a granola bar that wasn’t all that great for you but is laced with several grams of chickory root that was dried and ground up and added to the bar. Yeah this is what a fiber one bar is, only 140 calories and 10 grams of soluable fiber. Soluable means two things, to those with even a little high school chemistry it means that it will dissolve in water. But the real way soluable fiber is classified that way is that it ferments in the gut. Thats right, you can hear it talking back later. Eat a fiber one bar in the morning and evening for a couple days if you need to win any contests.

Now it is recommended to eat several times after a hard workout at short intervals.  The first item is a liquid recovery drink followed by small meals at two hour intervals. Ideally these would be chosen for their nutritional value and they would involve fruits and vegetables and protien and even some good fats. My problem, is they are trips to the cupboard for a snack not a meal. I eat cheese crackers with a glass of milk. Then I am back later for ritz slimed with peanut butter and another glass of milk. Then that weight watchers popsicle for 140 calories calls me out. Then that wasn’t really a meal so I prepare a small sandwhich to go with it.

The thing is I am supposed to eat meals at these intervals when I work out long and hard. The last two Saturdays I did quite a bit. 1.2 mile swim, a 16 mile bike and a 3 mile run here for 1500 calories. Or a half marathon and a 1050 yard swim for 2100 calories. It takes over 2 hours and I get very hungry. I need to skip the dense caloric foods that come prepackaged for quick eating and take the time to eat more like I do during the week.

I eat breakfast during the week, then pack up a snack for the morning, lunch, and a snack for the afternoon. By the time I am out the door for work I know exactly how many calories I will have eaten before I sit down to my dinner, barring unforseen circumstances of course. Things like donuts using Jedi mind tricks to make me scoop them up off the plate when idiots bring them in to work thinking they are being nice. I usually avoid them cause they are not around, but sometimes I am weak. Who the hell needs to eat a 400-500 calorie deep fried pastry slathered with superfine ground sucrose mixed with a liquid and flavors like maple? Maybe I should cut the donut into sixths and take one bite. One 60 calorie bite that is still not worth it. Or better yet take a donut, take a bit, and toss the blasted thing in the trash. That will be what I try the next time, it gets rid of one more donut from the pile so they are gone faster, I get a little taste, and I still only eat 60 calories. I will head out like I am refilling my coffee so no one sees me and gets offended.

On Saturday I have no concept of planning. The only thing I do lately is make sure I get the recoverey drink. And then plan to eat 3 times after each of the next 2 hour periods. I shall plan all the meals the next few times. One of the items should be a soup that has lots of fiber. Another should include veggies, and another should include a piece of fruit. Here is the plan:

1. after workout: revovery drink (Endurox R4) 270 calories
2. 1 hour later or when hungry: 1/2 c plain yogurt, 1/2 c fruit, stevia sweetener, with added fiber (T ground flax) and 1/4 c of a crunchy cereal.  200 calories
3. 2 hours later: 8 ritz crackers, 3 slices lunch ham, 1 slice cheese, 1/2 c baby carrots, 1/2 c raw brocolli. 300 calories
4. 2 hours later: large bowl of lentil and sausage soup with veggies. This recipe is one of our family favorites and we use turkey sausage now. 200 calories.

Now this 1000 calorie blitzkrieg might sound like I am going overboard. But I tell you I just burned 1500 calories and only ate 1400 (breakfast of 400 plus 1000 recovery) and I am sitting at just about dinner time with a negative calorie balance for the day so far. If I am not just raving hungry I have accomplished my goal. Besides looking back over my calorie counts I notice on Saturdays I have been doing better since I started doing a recovery drink alone, so this is the easy first step to a successful workout and not eating too much later. But I still do poorly when I eat unheathy snacks by the time I get to dinner I still have big hunger cravings. Granola bars, cheese-n-crackers, cheesy-crackers sandwiches, and those darn weight watchers cookies-n-cream popsicles, and the skinny cow ice cream sandwiches are the typical things that find their weigh into my belly. (yeah I spelled it wrong on purpose).

There was one saturday where I ate 300 calories for breakfast, 200 in gel and sport drink during the 1700 calories workout (1.2 mile swim, 14 mile bike, 3.2 mile run). Then went on to have 550 calories for lunch, 600 calories in afternoon snacks, and found myself with such an urge to eat that I ate 1400 calories around what should have been dinner time in snacks that consisted of: girl scout cookies, ice cream sandwhiches,crackers n peanut butter, popcorn, and cereal. Good thing the day ended there.

 I really do think fiber, by way of eating it in naturally low calorie high bulk foods is the key to not being hungry and eating too much. I will leave you with a little more from that blog entry that never got posted where I was dicussing what I learned from eating fiber.

 I am skipping an afternoon snack here and there not because of will power but because I don’t feel hungry. I can really pack away the calories when we go out and eat for example at Red Robin Burger a couple of months ago I had the banzai burger (1000 calories) with steak fries (hundreds more) and then a tase of the kid’s milkshakes and birthday sunday for a total of 1500 calories in one meal. Granted I was full, and a little uncomfortable, but it is the same feeling I had the other evening when I ate about 600 calories of lentil and sausage soup which had about 18-20 grams of fiber in the one serving (lentils are amazing). And get this, less than half of the calories came from the soup, the crackers and milk were more calories. I did not even consider a late night snack and ended the day on 1760 calories stuffed and wanting no more. Every other time I ate 1760 calories or less (11 times about once a week) the following day I ate (2145, 2420, 2320, 2460, 2570, 2000, 2620, 2260, 1935, 2165, 1950) which is an average of 2260 and this time I ate 1920 the lowest followed by another day that was better than my goal of 2000. (It is cool to have the spreadsheet of data for comparisons like this.) And this second day the heaviest workout day of my workouts at 2300 yards swam in 64 minutes and 4.7 miles run in 44 and a half minutes. That is 1380 calories burned and still I sit here without hunger writing this, full for the day on 1850 calories. This fiber stuff is magic I tell you.

I hate how marketers use the nutrition labels to display unrealistic information. They are following the rules sure, but the biggest thing they love to do is make the portion size so small they can put a big fat zero for everything. You are thinking silly am I being? (Yeah I love Yoda, so what)

Take this example. Pam spray, which is an oil, has zero calories. This is oil, pure oil, nothing else. Oil has 9 calories per gram, so they make sure that the hole size on the can does not spray out more than 1/18th of a gram in a third of a second so they can round the half down to zero. Then they tell you the serving size is a third of a second of spray. Well I spray about 2 seconds to cover a small 6″ pan to cook an omelet, maybe it is more like 1.62 seconds on further reflection. So let’s see, 6 times zero, oh that’s easy, zero. I am sure marketers are telling the food engineers, packaging engineers, and whoever else is involved to come up with certain numbers. Gosh if you could just make this 5 calories per serving then people will write it off as nothing but if you have to put 13, then we are not only going to lose those people that read labels for weight loss but anyone that is supersticious as well. Oh, well that is easy the group of engineers says, we just replace 15% of the sugar with erythritol and cut the serving size in half.

Now I am willing to bet there are much worse things going on than the simple serving size example of Pam spray. I have no proof, but if I thought of it after thinking about it for a total of say a few minutes then certainly someone in a position to do something about it could have. And one of them probably did it. So what might they do? How about sending a batch of food for testing that is not the same as the one they sell. Now outright lying is probably not a good idea, let’s say they get a batch of avacados for their guacamole that are not so creamy. They grew in less than idea condition or were picked too early or something and they have less fat content than the norm. Well send this batch off to test for the labels and voila, we have the lowest fat content in our guacamole of all the leading brands. There is variance in all foods that grow, it can be seasonal, it can be a bad area or bad farming techniques or just bad weather that year. It would be easy to alter the content of a test batch to get the results desired. Even if by accident this will be happening all the time. This is part of why buying your herbal remedies is frowned upon, no matter what you think you are getting if you are not going with a company that actually has to charge more to do it right, then you are getting junk quality, which is certainly not what they sent in for testing. We are talking billions of dollars in this business every year.

So now for one other example. Weight Watchers points is the perfect example. I did weight watchers way back when and got the little slider to figure out the points of a meal. Well, the handy dandy pocket slider tool was not something I was going to carry around. So I figured out the formula.

ww_points = (calories – 20 – 10 * fiber_grams + fat_grams * 50 / 12) / 50

So there are a few things to notice about the formula, first off each 50 calories is a point once you are past the free 20 calories and the fiber and fat modifiers. If you calculate 5 items separately you get an extra 100 calories. This is not only silly, but the Weight Watchers tells you to do the whole meal not item by item. Another thing to notice is that you get bonus calories for the fiber. It is supposed to stop at some number but I cannot remember what, I seem to recall 4 grams. It would depend on how much food you are talking about I think. You can’t just add fiber to a yogurt until it reaches 0 points and then suffer the abdominal pain, you can only count so much per item. If you are doing the calculations for an entire meal then obviously the limit would be higher and 4 grams would not be enough, but then who knows. I don’t use the program anymore so I am not going to look it up again. It should be very clear that if you are designing a meal to be labled with the weight watchers points you could easily do some things to make it look better. That is by reducing portion size to round down. Points were not meant to be broken apart.

Now for the product we are going to pick on. Progresso Soup, I have two cans, one each of Light Italian-Style Vegetable / Light Chicken Noodle. The label says 0 / 1 points and 60 / 70 calories. All of this is per serving of course. The serving size is 1 cup which is 242 grams/236 grams. Yeah, each soup weighs a different amount. The label says about 2 servings on both.

<<About?>>, what the hell!

Who is going to open a ready to serve can of soup and not eat the whole thing. It appears to be 120 or 140 calories which is not too many calories for anyone, so just put 1 serving on the darn label guys. Each can of soup has 524 grams in it. So the actual servings in each can is 2.17 / 2.22. I wish I could pay my taxes like this. $3225 tax bill is about $3000. Better yet let me pay about $125 every two weeks from my check and wind up paying $100  x 26 times.

So each can has

veggies: calories = 130, fiber = 9g,fat = zero of course,

chicken: calories = 155, fiber = 4.4g, fat = 3.3g

If you ate a can of soup for lunch you think you either had 0 points or 2 points if you just read the label, or you would probably assign the whole can of veggies 1 if you had any sense that they were tricking you. But in fact you would be eating 2 points for the veggie, or slightly under if you were not willing to round up, and 3 points if you appropriately round up the number for the chicken noodle. And if you just ate the soup every day for lunch thinking it was two servings and therefore 120 /140 calories, you would be surprised to learn that you ate an extra 3650 / 5475 calories during the year. Yeah I am using their “skewing data” techniques against them but they do it all the time so they can’t really complain that I am now can they?

Now all said and done I love the soup and didn’t buy it because of the weight watchers points or the exact calorie counts. It simply lets me fill up on soup and eat my crackers too. An easy way to get a meal under 400 calories is all I am shooting for when I grab a can.

So what can we take away from this? Besides the fact that I am long winded? One should always take advantage of a poor situation. I do this by math exercies in the store as I shop to work my way through all the obfuscation and to stay sharp so I can live longer.

Oh and another thing. Let’s all force the beer and wine and hard liquor companies to put the nutrition labels on their product too. It is, after all, something we ingest, although using the word nutrition is kind of an oxymoron.

I hurt my foot a bit the day of the half marathon. I am not sure how cause it never hurt during or after the run until later that day. I did a bunch of stuff around the house and much of it involved standing while doing it so my theory, which my wife does not approve of course, is that I need to rest off my feet after a race. I guess the other option is only to do race distances that are not a stretch.

Speaking of which, I just entered a sprint triathlon the last day of this month. 500 meter swim in a pool, 10 mile bike, and 3.1 mile run. This will actually be an easier workout than I have been doing on Saturdays when I do a much longer swim and bike and about the same run. All of the workouts are at a not all out pace with relaxed transitions that involve a trip to the locker room. So this should bring me my first chance to practice the transitions. I still need to go buy some triathlon shorts that can be used to swim and then bike and run too. With a short race I might be able to make do with what I have and adding the bike shorts over the swim suit. We’ll see if I make it to the store or not.

I am not treating this like an all out effort, but I still have some expectations. I will see how good I can guess this stuff. Assuming my foot is completely fine by then here are my expectations:
9:00 swim: (I did this pace the other day and think I can repeat it)
3:00 T1 : (I don’t know how far the walk to the bikes is and I also have bike shoes now)
33:20 bike: I hope to go 18 mph avg, but I don’t know about this
2:00 T2: I have to change to running shoes so I can’t just dump the bike and take off
27:00 : I would like to think I could hold the 9 minute pace for just 3 miles

1:14:20, this seems fast. I can’t find previous years results, but I did find a triathlon club that listed it’s members results. That time would put me in 6th or 5th place. So either I can’t estimate well, there is more to the race that I don’t know about, or the course is shorter than it used to be. I guess maybe only newbies might show up or there are only 20 people in the thing as well. I guess I will wait and see.

I finished and I ran the whole way, except for the water stations to drink it without sloshing it about.

I did the race in 2:14 and change but with a very huge positive split because of my plan to run it under 2 hours. I had some timing issues because I was expecting to run across a starting matt but instead it was a wire and I missed it in the crowd of people. So I started it about 40 seconds late, but thought I had started it a minute or two late. So I still don’t even know where the official start was.

In the crowd of 618 people I sort of ran even faster than I had planned because they were too and it didn’t really feel like work and it was a little downhill. I hit the first mile mark and hadn’t even felt like I really started yet. This was in around 8:10 as best I can estimate. The next mark I remember glancing at my watch was at 3 miles where I was on a 8:43 pace. I hit the 4 mile mark without knowing my exact time but there is a strong likelihood it was under my best time for running 4 miles which was 35:24. This is slightly faster than I wanted to start out but I just felt so good I had no urge to slow down at this point. But a couple of little uphill sections, and I mean little, had me starting to slow and this is about the point where I started getting passed slowly at first.

It was amazing how fast the miles went by. I got off the section I had never run to the point I ran a few weeks back around 5 miles and it was nice to have the familiar terrain. The third point I remember my time is at mile 7. I got there in about 1:06. I knew I was off my pace, 9:27 miles which was only 2 minutes lost at that point, and the only way I could make it would be to pick it up that minute. So I tried a bit. I had been running and making sure my heart rate never went over 170 or if it did I slowed down. Between mile 5 and 7 I got some pain in my chest. It was likely indegestion or whatever but that made me nervous, so I slowed down till it stopped which coincided with a heart rate more like 160. So that last try at mile 7 to speed back up brought the pain back so I decided to slow down and just finish with no chest pain no matter how slow. It made it hard to push myself to my limit with the worry about was I really ok or not.

Somewhere between mile 7 and 10 I started to get the feeling of lead legs I read about but never experienced. A mile after that I felt my muscles getting real tight and felt like it was constricting my natural form. I was fine to slow down a bit it was a mild pain. If I were out an a morning run and started feeling like that it woud be the point to stop. But in a race I have been looking forward to it wasn’t even an option. I also felt like I was getting a blister but at that point it was mild as well and I knew I would make it before it got too painful so I just ignored that. The first 7 miles I averaged 9:27 and the last 6.1 was 11:09 to get to the overall average of 10:17. I was out fast enough at mile 7 to finish in 2:04 had I held the same pace. So there was a parade of people passing me judging by finish times from 2:04 to 2:14 there were 98 people between those two times. Sure some of them were ahead and slowing down too and so never passed me but it sure felt like I got passed by 100 people.

The last 3 miles were on the trail where I ran all my 4 mile runs at lunch with the group from Sept to April, so I felt good about knowing all the bumps and turns, though it didn’t speed me up any. I was just happy to finish and stop running. My legs were very tight as soon as I stopped and I had to walk slowly to the runner hospitality to gobble down bagels and bananas and oranges and grapes and grilled chicken and soup and HEED and water. I was hoping for a bin of hammer gel to grab a few extra packets but there was none. I had taken one at mile 10 and it didn’t do anything for me except taste good and give my mind a boost for about 1000 feet or so.

My wife and kids were there to cheer me the last 100 feet and the kids had a fun time wearing my finisher’s medal for me. Here is the distribution of finishers by minute, I am in the yellow bar. The peak bar was 2:04 with 19 people finishing that minute.

I now have my first half marathon under my belt and can make improvements the next time I do one.  My first thing to improve will be how to not feel like I am walking on a broken foot the next day limping around like an old man. The answer to solving that one is to log more miles and lose more weight.

And if this race report didn’t quench your appetite for race reports, I have been checking out this adventure race that is ongoing from the RacingThePlanet Series. You might be interested in reading about it. I know it sounds like quite the chalenge and in reading some of the blogs on the site it is amazing how many of the people are just normal people looking to challenge themselves. The race is 250 kilometers in stages like they do the big bike tours, except you carry everything including your food for the whole trip the whole way. No I am not doing one any time soon, they are just fun to read about.

http://www.4deserts.com/beyond/namibia/

Half Marathon

I am looking to getting this half marathon over tomorrow. I can’t believe I have been so worried about it. I do not like training shorter than the full run, I wish I had gone on a long run longer than the race so I have an idea what to expect. Oh, well, this is a new experience I get to have and I can decide how to do my next one after this. I plan to start out with a 9 minute mile and see how I am feeling. I hope my worst case is slowing down to 10 minute miles but again, who knows. I don’t know if they mark every mile and the start is a bit murky on the map, so I will gauge this by the first water station which is listed at 1.8 miles. So I should hit it at 16:12 if on a 9 minute pace. They have marked the miles on the map as 4/17, 6/19 etc as the full marathon joins the course in the middle. Since I don’t know and didn’t ask, although I may at the expo, I have to assume that any number is up to a tenth of a mile off (the half should meet the full at the 13.1 mark and the miles would be off by .1, since its officially a boston qualifier I have to assume the miles are marked for the full more accurately so when I hit mile 13/26 I actually have .2 left not .1 cause I am probably at 12.9 really), meaning should reach mile markers 1 minute earlier than of than my planned pace. I didn’t have much kick at the end of the 10k, so I doubt I will be able to pull out an 8 minute mile at the end to make up time. Either I am steady and can keep the pace or I will slow down the longer it goes and drop off my goal. We shall see tomorrow.

UPDATE:

I found out that there are 800 people entered in the half marathon so far, and they said that a lot are signing up as the day goes by. So I found another nearby half marathon one week later and looked at the results from last year. It took a bit of work but I graphed the distribution of the finishers by minute. The biggest spike is minute 121, 32 finishers of 1006 entrants. This is quite a spike for a group of people that likely tried to push to beat the 2 hour mark but couldn’t quite do it. (Or at least I envision they would have tried to.) Assuming they pick up another 200 entries today and get to 1000 as well, I can expect a finisher every 2-3 seconds at the peak of the bell curve where I am hoping to be. At a 9 minute per mile pace, that is 30 people spread over 1/9th of a mile or roughly someone every 20 feet. There should always be a person to try and keep up with or catch for extra motivation.

 
Last Nights Swim:

At swimming last night I broke my best time for 500, 8:14, which is 49 seconds and change per lap. My original goal was to get down to 52 seconds and maintain the pace for triple the distance. So I need to do another 1650 to see if I can break the half hour mark. I suspect I will without difficulty now. Considering I have 9 weeks to go before my first olympic triathlon I can probably decrease my swimming and hit the bike harder.

I had a strange experience during my swim. I started out my first 100 at 1:30, which was too fast (I thought it was 2:00 though). I always try and create a gap so the person behind me isn’t nipping at my feet. But I started to feel like I couldn’t breathe well. I was weird as I felt like I was able to breathe in as often and as much as I needed but that my body wasn’t getting enough. Its like I could breathe the air in fast enough but I felt oxygen deprived like it wasn’t getting into the blood stream fast enough. Sort of the same feeling you get if while sitting there reading a computer screen you start breathing fast and deep even though you don’t need to. Hey you are sitting there reading a computer screen. You should try it, take 10 fast deep breaths and feel your heart start to speed up and you might even get a funny light headed feeling. This has to be a kin to having your mouth water just thinking about a fresh lemon being sliced on a cutting board and popped into your mouth. Now this is different in that I didn’t have enough oxygen and doing this makes too much, but the feeling of not needing to breathe as fast as you are is certainly the same. I have no explanation as to what happened other than I have been freaking out about this half and this workout in the pool was my last before I run and I was concerned with if I was going to hard or not hard enough and yada yada. I am going to do this same thing on purpose one of these weekends to see if I can get the same feeling and try to figure out why. I just need to to a set of 500 and start out way too fast and then speed up more. I could do several one Saturday and see if I can fix it. The reason I am so concerned is I lost my focus completely. I wasn’t watching the line on the bottom of the pool and seeing my arm pulls go by, I was worried if I was getting caught, I was worried why I was having so much trouble while going so slow. I was almost in a panic and thought pretty seriously about pulling up at the end to breathe some. This is just not me and I don’t like that feeling. I need to stay focussed on the task. The main thing that will help me in a real triathlon is that if someone catches me its not a problem, they can just go around and I won’t care.  I actually thought my time was going to be worse, we started at the bottom of the clock and after 100 yards I peeked and saw it at exactly the top. I thought we had started on the top cause I was already freaking out then and realized I was on a super slow pace of 60 seconds a lap. So I tried to speed up a bit. I had actually just swam two 45 seconds laps and was now trying to go faster. This didn’t last long and I eventually slowed and got caught by the person behind me with 75 to go.

Fixing the whole panic problem is probably going to be as simple as making sure I don’t start too fast and build a giant oxygen defecit right off the bat. This is easier said than done with pre-race adrenaline and all, but I will work on it.

OK, so yesterday I said I was going to run a mile and see if I could beat my best time. I did, but I also have some bad news. The memory isn’t as sharps as it once was. Followed by good news, I did it in the worst possible situation which of course implies that I can do better… which means there is bad news: I have to do it again. OK now let me explain all that.

I remember my best time wrong. Darn good thing I am recording all this stuff in a spreadsheet to go back over. It was on a YMCA treadmill not the one at home which is stuck at a min of 1% or 1/2%, not sure which as each percent is lit for two changes, it either starts at half and goes to 1 while lighting 1, or starts at one and still lights 1 for 1.5%. The whole thing is on a carpet and a pad anyway, so I should, like a good engineer, just measure the darn thing accurately. Now that I thought of it that is likely what I will do. But anyway, my best time before was 7:40 on a true flat treadmill. I think I was predicting that it meant I could run outside a 7:20 is where that got stuck in my head.

As far as the worst conditions, you know the first. It was on a uphill treadmill. I hate that thing when looking at my pace and dread trying to run fast on it. Oh, and then there was the lunch thing. I ate a bowl of kung pao chicken and brown rice, a nice healthy portion fitting someone that was hungry due to swimming 3200 yards in the morning workout from hell that boasted an 8×50 I swam at 45 seconds with 5 seconds rest sending off on the 50 second mark as the last bit before the cool down. I can sure tell you the 4 deep breaths taken during that 5 second rest did not feel like rest. In other words, I was probably running in a slightly muscle-glycogen depleted state, which is great for my training, but not so great for best times. And the side ache from lunch was minor and didn’t ever get bad, but was there a bit.

Now with all that I did it in 7:25. This was not quite what I was hoping for (due to faulty memories), but like I said it just means I have to do it all again here one day. I may just have to go out and find a nice flat one mile long spot and do it with my MP3 player. That should give me my best time no having to explain the situation. I should probably just do it every other week and start graphing it.

It is amazing that a mile can seem like no big deal and then you try and cover it at the fastest speed possible and all of a sudden it is a long way to go. All I can say is holy crap, if I have to run that fast for over 26 miles. There is no way I can do what I did times 26. I couldn’t even do it over 3 miles, or 2 or even 1.5. It would take me a month to run a marathon in Boston Qualifying time, one mile a day with a day of rest here and there. Ah, but I can improve one small step at a time. Soon I will wonder what the fuss was all about.

So the pounding made my shins sore right after the run. In fact I had that same sensation that got worse and worse as the day progressed after the 12k run on Sunday. On Sunday it became increasingly difficult to walk down the stairs to my basement and appear normal toward the evening. Then on Monday, boom, gone. After the crazy mile run, whamo, back, and two hours later boom gone. No it’s not a tinactin commercial. I am just amazed at how fast the shin pain can come and go. When I first started running back in September and for the first two months the shins basically hurt constantly. It is nice that now the pain is gone shortly thereafter and is not as strong as it was before. I lose another 10 pounds, ramp up on the plyometrics training, and start the hill training days and I should see it dissappear forever. Well, except for right after those hard sessions anyway.