Saturday

October 2012 San Carlos Tri awards.
Another fun workout. None of this stuff is rocket science but a coach helps work WITH you to develop workouts that are interesting, functional, and take you to another level within your sport. One thing I love about doing intervals like this on the bike is that I can still push myself to the limit.

Tuesday

4 x 10 minutes

I seem to have a love/hate relationship with this 4 x 10 minute at 80-90% threshold power. However, this workout always tells me where my fitness is at. Around this time of year I can usually only pull about 225 average watts for the 10 minute interval. As you can see from this power file above my pacing was a bit rusty since this was my first 4 x 10 minute effort in about 2-3 months. On the first 10 minute effort I almost blew up at the end of it and had to struggle to maintain my goal power output....then I smartened up gradually as I went along. Most athletes hit the first half of an interval with too much power and then fade out towards the end. What you want is to hold back just a bit during the first half and the gradually build especially in the final half of your goal interval duration. Training with power really helps let the athlete know where they stand when it comes to comparing themselves to previous fitness levels as well as comparing themselves to other athletes. But,,,don't forget the other construct in this equation...which is body weight. Power to weight ratio is king here. Losing weight at the cost of losing muscular strength is self-defeating. You want to find that optimum weight where you have max power and minimum ass drag. For me I never seemed to gain power as I gained weight probably because when I am gaining weight it means I am not biking as much and in turn my power is also going down. I think you just want to be cautious of losing too much weight at the expense of power...which I don't feel has ever happened to me....but is possible if an athlete gets carried away with losing excessive amounts of weight in the belief this will make them even faster. This usually doesn't work over the long run and tends to end a season prematurely due to illness, fatigue, you name it....

What has Pete been up to?

This year's 2012 San Carlos Triathlon was at a new venue with a much more challenging swim. The race took place at the Marina Terra Sports Club in San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico. Here I am above warming-up for what was to be a very challenging swim. the swim was about 750 meters but felt more like 1500 meters due to currents and difficulty sighting in the open ocean. Overall, this race was a lot of fun. I was able to squeeze out a second place finish in my age group (mainly due to a decent bike split) but I haven't really been worrying too much about placing these days. I have decided to stick mainly with the shorter Sprint and Olympic distance races while competing in local time trials on the bike. I delved into a 12 hour mountain bike event this past May and have lately been focusing on building my strength and muscle tone back-up again after years of racing competitively at the 70.3 distance.