2014 Round up Pt. 2. Outlaw & the Midnight Man

Hello again, I have returned to the blog to finish up my 2014 round up.

July

• I should have mentioned that in June I managed to secure an entry into the Outlaw Triathlon, an iron distance race in Nottingham. I did this race the previous year but high temperatures over 30C and possibly cycling too hard on race-day meant that I fell far short of my goal of 10 hours, I turned in splits of 59 minutes, 5:30 and then a 4:37 (!) hour run to complete the race in 11:11 hrs. Very disappointed with the result I vowed to get my revenge on the course that had ruined me that day. Unfortunately most of my training up to June had been for olympic distance triathlon so I had some work to do during my time at La Santa and in the remaining 5 weeks before the Outlaw! 
• The work involved a lot of cycling, pretty much every day and riding at least 2 hours at a time (I got through A LOT of chamois cream in those 5 weeks!). I did some swimming, luckily I don't really need to swim a lot to maintain sub 60 min fitness, and several very long brick runs (an 80 mile ride and 18 mile run being the longest of those). Which were something that I completely neglected the previous year, and probably caused my disastrous run split. After quite a relentless 5 weeks I followed this block of training up with a 1 week 'taper' and the end result was 9hrs 58, 1st in M20-24, and 18th individual overall at the Outlaw!

The Outlaw

• Swim - 57:45
• Started on the far left in the 'fast pen', still surprised how many people never fail to absolutely smash the first half and then implode after 2000m. Quite a bit of argy-bargy and leg-grabbing this year, I resolved this by turning around to simultaneously do backstroke and yell profanities at the offenders. I probably wasted a lot of energy doing this but they backed off.
• My GPS reckons I swam 4041m instead of 3800, I need to learn to swim in a straighter line!
• T1 - 4:00
• CRAMP
• Forgot my cramp curing banana
• Bike - 5:26:53
• 194W AP, 200NP, 33.3 kph, 85 rpm
• Windy as you like, the course is pancake flat though so I can't really play this up too much.
• Rode very easy, felt a bit annoyed with how easy I was going by the end but it paid off I think
• T2 - 3:07
• Nothing to report, put socks on which I noticed a few people around me didn't seem to bother with.
• Straight into the portaloos before starting the run properly.
• Run - 3:26:37
• Overall I was happy with the run, I smashed the first half in 1hr 33 to try and bank as much time as possible but inevitably faded soon after 14 miles and it was quite a struggle from there. I like this tactic though as I feel that I would never speed up if I went out at 8min/miles and probably go way slower overall.
• However, I spent about 10 minutes in the loos, I actually 'ran' a 3:18 according to my Garmin file. I need to sort out my stomach problems or even my entire diet as it was quite dire towards the end as I had to make a pit stop in the last 2 miles which required a mad dash to the line to make sure I went sub 10!

Also a bottle opener!

August

• The day after the Outlaw I felt very good indeed as I had just moved into my new pad in Wimbledon, my legs were in tatters but my spirit was high!

The south of France is beautiful, unless you're a coeliac!

• The next week I went on a family holiday with my parents and brother, it was the first family holiday in many years and I was very excited as we were all bringing our bikes and embracing the smooth tarmac and cycle-friendly drivers of Southern France. The drive down was something I think we were all silently dreading as memories of our childhood holidays came bubbling to the surface of our minds like bubbles of swamp gas in a bog. Luckily we all survived the trip and had a cracking time. I managed to put in about 550 miles of cycling during the 12 days we were there.

S'mores in the new pad

• By the time we came home from France I had barely swam at all during the 3 weeks since the Outlaw. However I decided to do another iron distance triathlon as I felt very fit still, especially after the training I did in France so I thought I should capitalise on my good form. Enter, the Midnight man, a race around a dual carriage way in Dartford with 1/4, 1/2 and Full distance races starting at 6pm with the full distance cut off being 11am the next day (in contrast with the traditional 6am and 11pm times of most ironman races).

The Midnight Man

• This race probably deserves an entire blog post of its own but this post is getting quite long now so I will summarise the race like I did for the Outlaw:
• Swim - 57:10
• Somehow, despite not swimming for 3 weeks I was 45s faster than the Outlaw. Or maybe I just managed to swim in a straight line this time!
• Bike - 5:21:29
• 215W NP, 211 AP, 33.6 kph, 88rpm
• 20 laps with 4 dead turns each lap.
• No lighting on 2/3rds of the course.
• THE single hardest thing I have ever done. It was wet, it was windy, it was dark and it was relentless. The first 10 laps were okay, the last 10 were desperately lonely and testing.
• Absolutely bonkers, some nutters were riding with no rear lights. This was annoying but coming up with a new threat or insult to yell at them each time I passed gave me something to do and kill time.
• Run - 3:22:23
• Started out in my customary fashion with 6:45/min miles for the first 10k and then faded down to about 7:45s.
• Plagued by stomach troubles again, probably lost another 10 mins in the porta-loos although after a week in France eating predominantly butter, bread and beer I was not surprised by this at all. I still reckon a sub 3:10 IM marathon is in me if I can manage to sort my stomach troubles out.
• No GPS file for this one, my Garmin decided to corrupt the file :(
• Total - 9:46:53, 1st overall (there were only about 100 people entered though)
• After finishing this event I realised a few things: 
• A sub 9:30 is definitely in me, 
• I need to work on my aerodynamics and increase my power on the bike, that I am putting out consistent sub 60 min swims and sub 3:30 IM marathons shows me that I have the fitness to produce a quicker bike split. If I could ride around 5:10 and follow with a 3:15 marathon I'd be knocking on a sub 9:30.
• And finally - swim training is unnecessary (kidding!!)

4am, just finished an ironman yo

Recommended

The rest of the year

• In September I started my MSc in sport, health and exercise sciences, my dissertation will be on the mechanistic basis for the decline in stroke volume during whole body exercise and extravascular dehydration (fancy eh?).
• I ate a lot of cake, chocolate and booze over Xmas, I am very fat now. However I'm working it off during my preparation for the London Marathon this year!

Happyness is a warm cake

Hello one and all. Christmas has started already in America on Friday the 23rd of November! It's this day because its the day after thanksgiving (which I wish we could have back at home) the Giant trees are up the lights are on and the smell of Christmas biscuits (not 'cookies') and other delights are everywhere to be enjoyed. I can't believe it's started so early but it's making things a bit more scenic and generally smell better around here which is always nice.I've managed to finally do some bakery for the first time in ages, I decided to do my favourite blueberry-lemon drizzle cake with a twist- using 60/40 almond meal / regular flour. I would have used 100% almond meal but it doesn't hold together terribly well, but I'm working on a master-baker strategy to overcome this!

The reason I chose to do this is because I've been trying to follow a 'no grains' diet for the last couple of months, I decided to do this mainly for training purposes as by the process of elimination I have found grains to be the cause of a number of cases of the dreaded 'runners' trots' (which have caused more than a few close shaves in the trouser department mid-run). But there are also a number of general health reasons that make me think this diet is the way to go, the basic premise of it is that you eliminate most sources of carbohydrate in the form of grains, refined sugars, starchy veg etc. from your diet and instead replace them with animal fats, eggs, nuts (not peanuts) occasional fruits, and lots and lots of vegetables. The idea behind this is that because we evolved as a species as hunter-gatherers our body's are used, evolutionarily speaking, to digesting and utilising these foods for energy.
The effects of the diet make sense when you think about it, we were given the ability to store fat as fuel so it seems quite logical that we'd eat it for fuel as well, carbohydrates are found more generally in slow releasing fibrous forms like vegetables and the only naturally occurring sugars are things like fruits and honey which we wouldn't eat a lot of normally.




The facts are, according to Dr. Tim Noakes, that eating (naturally occurring) fats isn't what makes you fat, it is eating sugars and, in some people, too much carbohydrates in simple forms such as grains that makes you fat, I say some people because there are genetic dispositions towards laying down some types of food as fat more than others, for more information on the topic there is a great interview with Dr. Noakes here which is well worth 20 minutes of anyone's time.


The only drawback to this way of eating is that it is expensive! They really advocate eating a lot of grass-fed beef which runs at about $15/lb! So to get around this I eat a lot of coconut oil and almond butter for energy before and after training instead, it's way tastier than it sounds..!

Red bull Flugtag contest, most of them were crap.

Training has been going very well, I'm back running properly at last and wont make the same mistakes I have done in the past that have caused me to get injured e.g. too much too soon, no conditioning, no massage/stretching. Swimming is going okay, I am making good progress on my quest for a 60 second 100yard doing 6 x 75 yards last night as 2 in 55s 2 in 50s 2 in 45s. Cycling is going quite well apart from the fact that my bike is slowly falling apart, I've had to replace nearly everything on it but it still keeps breaking down on me, next on the to-buy list is two tiny plastic pieces for the crankset which make the whole thing useless if they are broken :( I did a 100mile ride in 6 hours though this weekend and it wasn't as terrible as I thought, maybe 112 wont be impossible after all. Oh wait there's a marathon to run after as well..

The couch fairy visited us

Thanks to all for reading I hope you enjoyed and found the nutrition stuff quite informative.