Internal Mono(b)log

Went to Welland today and pre-rode the bike course for the sprint tri next week.  Went down with @marciomrqz and we did the Forks Rd, Feeder Rd parts of the course twice.  The Canal Rd and in town portion once.  Here’s a quick review of the course for those of you who are doing the race, but haven’t the time or ability to get down to pre-ride it.

General Course Notes

The course is very flat – perhaps 2-3 meters of vertical play throughout the entire course.  The multi-sport site says to expect some wind and today we definitely experienced that.  In Welland, there was no breeze, but out on the course it seemed to come from every direction: one minute a head-wind, the next from the side, then it’d swing around to be a tail-wind.  Odd, but fun.  I was riding my disc rear, but think that I may race with my 808 due to the variable nature of the winds.

Start & Canal Rd Section

I’d rate this section of road 6/10.  It’s pretty rough and chewed up for city streets.  There are many potholes, lateral and longitudinal cracks and just before the turn to Feeder Rd there are a set of tracks that are worth special note.  I anticipate that these tracks are going to be the site of at least 1 accident and at least 1 flat/broken wheel.  The break in the pavement around this 1st set of tracks is huge and largely unavoidable.  Expect there to be a lot of emergency braking, jockeying for position and general “mess” around this 1st track crossing.  I.e. BE CAREFUL approaching these tracks, it’s going to be “exciting“. [Edit: Having exchanged email with John Salt, I understand that mats are to be placed over these tracks removing the hazard from the course.  This is so awesome!  I’m so happy to hear that Multisport Canada is so on the ball and miles out ahead of me on this.  Way to go folks!!!]

Forks Rd. Section

Forks road is a pretty nice stretch of road.  Soon after the corner you cross a somewhat narrow bridge that may be a bit of a squeeze if too many racers hit it at the same time.  Shortly after the bridge, you cross the 2nd set of tracks.  This 2nd set is MUCH better than the 1st, but will still probably present a bit of a hazard as people try not to shred their carbon wheels on the bumps.  Be defensive and you should be ok here.

Feeder Rd Section

Feeder Rd is an interesting stretch of the race course.  The 1st 1/2 of the road is typical country road “tar and chip paving”.  There are no lines, and no defined “shoulder”. Off the sides of the road, rather than a paved shoulder, there’s mushy loose gravel, then a little green space and then either ditch, canal or trees.  Don’t get too close to the sides here or you may find yourself being pulled off the road by the “mush”.  The 2nd 1/2 of Feeder Rd is a 10/10: freshly paved, lines, well defined shoulder, smooth.  In short, a joy to ride upon.

I’m fortunate that my GP is athletic and “gets it”.

How to Choose A Sport Med Doc

Peter Reid’s Triathlon Training Tips | Active.com.

Great read… definitely worth the 2 minutes to read and digest it.

I can hardly believe that its been so long since the Milton tri. On one hand it seems like forever ago, on the other its still so fresh in my mind that it seems like yesterday. Such a dichotomy! 🙂

Milton was my 1st tri. Sure I’d completed each of the events individually (many times at significantly longer distances) but this was my 1st experience stitching them all together, racing the combined event, and dealing with the transitions.

What a BLAST! I had SO much fun it’s silly!

I’d planned on a full race report, but at this point, I don’t think it makes sense anymore.

My results:

I placed 31/64 in my age group in the swim.  Middle of the pack.. ok with it, but can do better.  Started the swim wayyy too hot and had to really slow down to regather myself and find my stroke.  Once I was in the zone I felt good, but had to overcome a moment of initial near-panic and self-doubt.

11/64 on the bike – destroyed.  Happy with this.  There were a lot of people blocking and drafting on the bike course, which frustrated me, but I still had fun.  My bike time could have been better if it hadn’t been for blocking and for dropping my chain and having to stop to fix it.

35/64 on the run – wasn’t very happy with this.  Need to do more bricks and more speed work on my runs.

Great weather, great fun.  Happy with 1st time out for sure.

Today’s ride was a 3 hour, MAP (max aerobic power) heart-rate zone 3 ride.   Not having really planned and not knowing where to go, I did the lakeshore toward Burlington route that I’d previously done.  It’s a good ride, with generally good roads and generally good traffic.  I forgot to start runkeeper on my phone until I was already part way back, but here’s a view of a snippet of my ride @ runkeeper.com (add about 5k out on lakeshore from the where I started recording and turn the route into an “out and back” (rather than just “back”) you get the full picture).

On this ride, I’d planned a nutrition experiment: In my speedfil I had just water, in each of 2 waterbottles I had 1 packet of HornetJuice and 1/2 scoop of Carbo-pro. For primary fuel, I had a flask of Hammer Gel Espresso and for electrolytes (this is the real experiment part) I used SaltStick salt tabs.  Because it wasn’t super-hot and I didn’t feel like I was sweating a lot, I decided to do 1 tab every 45 minutes.  Spread the 2 waterbottles evenly over the ride, and drink water generally when riding.  This is a change from my normal protocol of 1 HornetJuice, 1 Carbo-Pro and 1 scoop of EFS or other electrolyte sport-drink.  My thinking is that this approach allows me to hydrate without electrolytes or fuel.  Generally, this protocol seemed to work pretty well.  Definitely an experiment that I’ll continue to work with.

I also made a discovery on this ride – completely unrelated to the nutrition protocol experiment… well, maybe not completely unrelated… Ok.. on with it:

I ride, when training, with bib-style cycling shorts.

They are super comfortable and I love the feel of my Sugoi Bib shorts: they’re so comfortable and padded just right. But!  When you need to pee, and you don’t want to take off your jersey, and the shoulder straps, and pull down the shorts (and like today, sometimes there just isn’t time!) a much easier way to approach the problem, and sorry ladies, this probably only works for guys, is to pull up one of the legs until you can access your plumbing and pee through the stretched out leg hole.  So simple and efficient 🙂

Went for my 1st OW swim since Milton last week (oh yea! still owe you a race report for Milton… will write it tonight!), and noted a few small nicks in my wetsuit.  Probably from fingernails or something during T1.  Regardless, want to get them patched before they get worse.

Steve Fleck over at Nineteen Wetsuits pointed me at their repair instructions.  Good reference to have handy!  Thanks Steve!

Nineteen Wetsuits | Repairing Fingernail Cuts on Your Wetsuit.

How To Analyze Your Own Swim Stroke.

With thanks, from competitor.com, a nice intro.  I’ve done this.  Definitely worthwhile.  While not as good as live 1-on-1 coaching, if you can’t afford coaching or it isn’t available to you, recording your swim and analyzing it or sharing it online for comment, provides a really inexpensive and useful resource.

Do you bike train with a power meter?  If you can afford to get one, I strongly recommend it.  Heart-rate is ok, but it’s decoupled from the level of effort you’re putting out and just time and perceived intensity is way too subjective.

If you are training with a power meter, I encourage you to checkout Golden Cheetah: Cycling Performance Software for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

It’s an open-source analytics package for cycling power data.  It provides a LOT of great information AND it’s FREE!

How many of you, when mixing your powdered sport nutrition end up with a slurry of clumpy, unmixed product glued to the bottom of the bottle, that seemingly won’t dissolve, no mater what you do?

Annoying? Yes! But I have a solution to get it into solution 🙂

There’s more than 1 of you frustrated souls out there I know it!  Because I used to be one.  Until I figured out this sure-fire method for mixing that hasn’t yet let me down.  I’m going to give instructions based on 1 bottle, but the process is the same for more (obviously).

1. Collect your water bottles and lids, powdered supplements, measuring devices, near your water source before you start.  Having a large time gap in this process almost guarantees problems.
2. Fill the water bottle 50-60% full of water (or whatever your liquid substrate layer is – I almost always use water, I expect you do as well)
3. Add 6 to 8 ice cubes
   

   Image via Wikipedia

4. Add your powdered nutrition, electrolyte, aminos, supplements, etc. quickly after the ice goes in
5. Once the powder and ice are in the water, get the lid on the bottle and shake vigorously.  The ice cubes act as an agitation aide in the bottle and help to get the powders mixed quickly without clumping.  Note, if you use a LOT of powdered supplements, you may need to do steps 3-5 multiple times with less powder in each step, than doing a lot of powder at once (which will almost guarantee problems again).
   

   This doesn't work very well...

6. Once the ice cubes and water have successfully dissolved the powder, you can top off the bottle with additional water

Enjoy!  This has worked flawlessly for me since I figured it out several months ago.  I find it much easier than shaking my arms off 1st thing in the morning when trying to get that last bit of product to dissolve.

Try it out and let me know how it works for you!

As many of you may know, a few years ago, before I started on my Iron Journey, I tipped the scales at over 250 lbs.  A strict medically supervised diet, followed by a lot of exercise and a changed relationship with food has brought me to where I am now (about 155lbs and 8% bodyfat).

When I was switching off the supervised diet and onto my own behavior management, I invested in a BodyBugg.  Bodybugg is a “personal telemetry” device that measures your body’s temperature, movement, galvanic skin response and determines your actual caloric expenditure with (according to their site) 95% accuracy.

Now, I’m all about data.  I’m a career geek and firmly believe that strong data helps make strong decisions.  Having data driven data about caloric burn just seemed a natural choice compared to the estimation data published everywhere.  Imagine my surprise when after a rock climbing session, where the tables say I should have been burning 800 calories/hr, I discovered that after 2 hours, I’d personally only burned 400 calories!!   Similarly surprising was that my caloric burn walking briskly was higher than that of cycling and because cycling was a fast mode of transport I’d get from A to B faster, but with less of an overall benefit as I’d expected.  I was hooked!  I was already weighing and tracking my nutrition now I could tailor my diet to my actual expenditure and completely dial in my caloric deficit to keep me loosing consistently without pushing my body into starvation mode! Win!

As I’ve started training more and generally being more fit, my relationship with the Bugg has evolved.  It’s rare now that I need to worry about eating too much.  Rather, these days, it’s much more the case that I’m concerned about making sure that I’m putting enough calories in my mouth to keep my energy levels high for the next workout and to provide my body the nutrition support it needs to repair and build.  The same disciplines are in use, but now, with an emphasis on making sure I get enough, rather than too many, calories.

So enough background.  Let’s talk about the BodyBuggSP:

I started with the bodybugg3 and wrist display and “upgraded” to the BodyBuggSP about a year ago, when it was released.

The BodyBugg3 and wrist display provided pretty much the same data as the SP, but the wrist display (like a watch) was cumbersome since I already wore a watch and it’s styling was really pretty utilitarian.  When the BodyBuggSP came out with it’s ability to display data on a paired blue-tooth enabled smart-phone (iphone or android) the “upgrade” path was clear for me and as soon as I could put my hands on an SP I took the plunge, sold my Bodybugg3 and bought the SP.

Well.. it’s been a rocky road for the BodyBuggSP.  In their desire to get to market, Apex pushed the SP out too soon and the software (especially on the Android platform) was, at best, in Beta.  It would crash, functions didn’t work well and most annoyingly, the “trip” functionality didn’t work until a recent software update about a week ago.  The basic functionality was there, steps, calories/day, goal setting, etc. but it was all pretty fragile.

I’m happy to say that it appears that the Beta stage is behind us now.  The BodyBuggSP and it’s android software seem to be working well together now.  Functioning as expected and not crashing regularly.  Makes me a happy camper 🙂

Generally I really like the bodybugg’s and love the data they provide.  A few things that I’d love to see improved to make the offering top-notch in my opinion:

• make a device that I can swim with so that I can get the same data in the pool – may not be possible given the design of the bugg, but it’d be sweet
• on the smart-phone software, show me the battery status of the bodybugg arm-band
• currently, in order to clear the bodybugg memory, set goals, etc. you must pay for, subscribe to, and use the Apex fitness bodybugg website.  For me, this is just a cash gouge. I don’t use the site for anything that couldn’t be done with a local piece of software.  Certainly the site has a lot of value for people who need the educational and motivational support of the site, but I don’t.  Having to pay for the site membership to clear the memory on my bodybugg once or twice a week is nearly insulting.