Hard drive crash

It's official, my hard drive crashed a few days ago on the other laptop. I'm in the process of trying to figure out if I can recover anything from it now. I have made a backup of important files in January but I may have lost the recent information. If anyone has any relevant information on recovering a hard drive let me know. I have tried the "freezer" trick without any success. My next step is to find a cable to attach the hard drive our other laptop via a USB port and copy files.

The blog posts have been rare I know. We are in some deep training right now for Ironman Austria and my fatigue has been making extra tasks difficult to accomplish. Today was the dreaded 90/90/90 workout. For those not in the know it's a 90min run, 90min bike, and a 90min run again. Afterwards I took a small cat nap and later we iced our legs in the ocean to help recovery. Tomorrow is an easy bike with a little swim in Thetis Lake. And then we have tickets for Cirque Du Soleil at the area downtown.

I gotta bounce, time for bed.

Cheers

Cervelo Bling

New chain, new look....

Sick Day

It would appear that the quick flights to and from Florida has wrecked havoc on my immune system. I was fighting it yesterday (I was in denial) but it's very evident now that I am sick. So today is all about staying home, getting lots of rest, eating good foods and drinking lots of water.

The Gulf has not been kind to Tammy

It's now the day after the race and the race was interesting. My race stories are dwarfed by Tammy's incredible day. So I'll start with her race first.

Last year on this race course Tammy wasn't able to run for months before the race so during the race she made it the best she could while walk/running the run portion. Then 6 months later at IronMan Florida she had to DNF on the run due to her Asthma breathing. So this race was going to be vindication for her. She had a very strong swim portion since it was really choppy in the water. Then on the bike she was starting to rip it up but had to stop at the base of the bridge (~25km into the ride) because she had a flat front tire. She quickly changed it and started to move on. She made it almost to the top of the bridge when it went flat again. She changed it a 2nd time, and didn't find anything inside her tire that could cause another flat. She got moving a third time and made it out to the final turn around point when her front went flat again! Without anymore CO2's or 650 tubes to change a 3rd flat she weighed her options and didn't want to have her race end there (she was 35km from the transition). So she started to pedal back at 24-29km/hr into a headwind with a flat tire. Just about every athlete that passed her or that she passed (yes she still was passing people) felt they should point out to her that she had a flat tire. She also lost a water bottle cage on the rough roads and had a salt stick come out of her aerobars. She made it back and hit the run course and ran the best she could after suffering a lot of setbacks in the race. Her finishing time here is not a reflection of her fitness level. I don't think that a lot of people could have done what she did. I know I wouldn't have. We looked at her rim after the race as it has held but pretty well, aluminum rims are better than lightweight carbon rim if you plan on riding a flat tire for 35km's. She's mentioned something that she is going to fire her mechanic as everything seems very suspicious. We are in negotiations now to resolve this.

My race was better than Tammy's, I went into the swim at a decent pace. However with it being so choppy and wavy I was a couple of minutes down from where I would have liked. I was only a minute slower on the bike versus last years calm conditions. And I was able to run most of the course, when the sun came out I slowed really fast. I was slower than I wanted to be but I know what I have to work on for IronMan Austria now.

Here is my heart rate data from the race, take a look at the altitude profile for the swim. The altitude for the bike and run is dead flat besides the little blips on for the bridge we have to cross on the bike course.


Note that the swim has more elevation gain than the rest of the race.

Florida again

The trip to Florida was good overall, I flew into Seattle then to Memphis and finally Panama City. My longest flight to Memphis was a rough flight, it was jam packed with no availability to upgrade to 1st class. I find Northwest flights to be the worst. There are no extras on the flight (no food, no TV, no in-flight music headphones, no blankets), if you want snacks you have to pay $3 or $5 for garbage junk food. The seats are very close together and the staff seem to be very harsh and lazy. One stewardess seemed to be on break for our 4 hour flight.

So now we are here again in Florida. The temperature is nice outside, not too hot but definitely very warm. The wind has been blowing steady for at least a couple of days. The bikes are assembled and are working beautifully.

The gulf water looks pretty rough and is keeping a lot of swimmers out of the water. We are heading down to the water for a quick swim shortly. It should be interesting.

Tam's race starts at 6:25AM and I get to start at 6:50AM.

Bike is race ready, but am I?

The Gulf Coast Half is 6 days away now. I tried out the race wheels and aero helmet for today's ride to check that everything will work for race day. I know that training with an aero helmet makes one look like an idiot. Well I was able to give everyone a show with it today. When I pulled into the driveway at the end of the ride I placed my foot on the driveway and attempted to swing my leg over my bike to dismount. About halfway through the dismount I knew that something was wrong. My foot on the ground started to slip downhill (towards the bike). Our driveway is quite steep where I did this, so I knew that I wouldn't hurt myself if I did go down as it would be like falling into a sitting position. I like to think it was a controlled sit down, but in reality it was probably quite different. My bike was still nearly vertical as I held it with one hand but in the end I was definitely "sitting" at the edge of my driveway, I couldn't help but laugh. Traffic had come to a stop at a light to watch the guy in the aero helmet fall while dismounting his bike. And our nice neighbour lady walking her dog had seen the entire event. She asked if I was ok, I just laughed and reassured her that I was fine, just very much embarrassed.

Next time I'm going to try to dismount without falling. I'm blaming it on the aero helmet.

Demetri Martin - "The Jokes With Guitar"

Vomit effort

Yesterday I got home from work and I knew the bike workout that coach had sent me had said, "vomit effort". I was actually looking forward to this, I must like seeing just how much pain I inflict on myself. The plan was a 30 min warm up with 9 x 2 min above threshold (at vomit effort) with 3 min recovery between and a 15 min cool down. I geared up and headed out the door. During the workout I found it was really difficult to get into a vomit effort within 2 minutes. The first minute my heart rate is trying to play catchup and the last minute is over with so quickly it's only like 15 seconds of vomit effort. It was pretty neat to constantly see over 42km/hr on the speedometer when I was pushing the gears. At one point of the ride it showed over 62km/hr, of course this was a huge downhill that was during a vomit effort. The 3 minutes recovery was considerably slower when I had to climb back up.

We are heading to Florida's Gulf Coast Triathlon (Half-Iron distance, 2km swim, 90km bike, 21.1km run) within a week now. Race day is May 10th. We both did this race last year and I have some high expectations for this years race. Last year Tam was injured and she was forced to walk-run the race, and I was doing great until the heat of the day made me melt at mile 4 of the run where it turned into more of a walk than a run. This year we are staying out of the injury arena and should do well this year. The weather here has quite cooperated with given us warm temperatures to train in. But we will do our best.

Here is the race website, where you can look up our results after the race.