Internal Mono(b)log

My blog has been getting a bit ignored lately as my training schedule has been getting more demanding. Sorry about that! Life happens, you know 🙂

Anyhow, I’ve been meaning to write up a review of SportQuest’s Carbo Pro nutrition suppliment.

This stuff is pretty amazing. It’s like putting high octane fuel in your engine. It’s tasteless and colorless, but really packs an energy wallop!
1 scoop = 100 calories of mixed-duration easily accessible energy.

My typical long-workout/race blend is: 1 packet of Hornet Juice, (maybe) a scoop of Amino Vital and 1 or 2 scoops of Carbo Pro. With this high-test mixture I can run 20k and feel like doing it again! It’s pretty amazing actually. 🙂

This morning, for the 1st time, I used it in the pool for my Friday long-swim. I’m not sure if it’s purely psychosomatic, but when I start to feel energy dwindling, a swig of this blend seems to pick me right back up again. My 2 hr swim this morning just flew by, and had it not for having to get to work, I’d have kept going.

Definitely a fan! Definitely a long-term addition to my training and racing arsenal.

Of late I’ve been noticing that my swim workouts, while of the same duration as planned are covering less mileage (rather than the anticipated increases one would hope for). I attribute this to multiple factors, certainly fatigue plays a part, but also not really having any way to measure targets and guage my workout performance until I’m almost done the 90 or 120 minute workouts.

Well, that recently changed. I don’t, yet, have a measurement device other than my sportcount (which I love for it’s simplicity), but I have now added a FINIS Tempo Trainer to my arsenal of training tools.

In a nutshell, the tempo trainer is a waterproof metronome that you tuck into your swim cap, or attach to your goggle strap and it keeps the beat of when you should be stroking. Again it’s a very simplistic device, but it works so very well.

1st thing I noticed: my stroke is (was) very inconsistent. It’d spead up and slow down depending on whether I was breathing or not. The inconsistency caused the fast strokes to seem harder and the slow strokes easier. To me this seems generally inefficient, as I’d imagine moving at a consistent speed through the water to be the ideal.

2nd thing I’ve found: My slow pace is to swim with a tempo of about 54 bpm. Pushing that upto a tempo of just 56 bpm gets me close to tempo pace and tempo is probably in the 57,58 range. Clearly I want to speed up my turn overs. The tempo trainer will help me do this: now that I have it beeping out cadence for me, I can work on cranking it (slowly) up – while being careful to maintain good form in the stroke.

My only wish is that Finis would combine the tempo trainer and the swimp3. I love my swimp3. I’d likely have gone insane training in the pool without it. Combining these 2 devices would be such a boon!

This morning, as part 2 of my review (part 1 found here) I wore a Nineteen Wetsuits Frequency suit for my 1.5 hr Monday morning swim. Want to get some odd looks, don a full wetsuit in the YMCA changeroom at 5:45am and head for the pool. You’re guaranteed to get at least 1 snicker, a couple of smirks and several questions 🙂 All good fun!

As with my show-room review, the suit went on well, zipped cleanly and the leash nicely stowed away into the leash pocket. Upon entering the pool, my worst fears of the morning swim were realized: the water was warm, very warm. Fortunately I always bring a bottle with Amino Vital or some other product along, so I’d at least be able to slake my thirst :).

In the water, the suit felt amazing. I put it through every test I could think of short of doggie paddling:

• Did 1.5 hrs of mostly Total Immersion style free-style, but mixed it up with some breast-stroke, back-stroke, butterfly, skulling, treading water, mid-water sprint starts, sighting, and under-water swimming.
• In the 18m YMCA pool, there were also many many turns: did some as flip turns, some as touch turns (my normal) and even threw in some dolphining in the shallow end.
• When I got out of the pool, I did a T1 suit-peal to see how the wet suit comes off. 20ish seconds. Not bad. I was happy with it 🙂

This suit, so far, is the bomb! I haven’t yet found anything negative to report about it, and trust me I’m trying. Ok, perhaps a slight (insignificant item): during touch turns, the suit would occasionally gulp a bit of water around the neck seam. The elasticity of the torso flushed it right away, so it really was a non-issue (in fact in the very warm pool, it was a bit of a relief). I may not have had the neck closed properly at the back and this didn’t happen when swimming, just when I was tap-turning at the ends of the pool (occasionally), so… like I said… non-issue.

Tomorrow I leave for Atlanta for a week. I’ve found a YMCA not far from the hotel to keep my swims in place. I’m taking the suit with me in the hopes that I can get in an OW swim session in some cool water for part 3 of this review series. If you’re in Atlanta and know where I can go to OW swim, please reach out and let me know. You’re also more than welcome to tag along!

Stay tuned. 🙂

Oh my goodness there’s so much going on right now! It’s awesome, daunting, and massively fun!!!

1st and Foremost! Last night I was up a Nineteen Wetsuits. I met Steve Fleck and picked up an evaluation Frequency wetsuit. I’ll be trying it out over the next couple of weeks and will be posting my thoughts here, so stay tuned. Some initial thoughts below…

2nd: This weekend is the Toronto International Bike show. Thankfully for my bank account, this show, for me, is mostly about window-dressing and window-shopping. I’ll be looking for some small accessory deals, but in terms of bike, wheels, etc. I’m super happy with where I am now, so I won’t be leaving a great deal of cash behind at the show. *phew*! If you want to go drool over some of the nicest and newest bikes on the market, this is the show for you. Maybe I’ll see you there. Definitely will follow-up my visit with a blog post or 2.

3rd: My Finis tempo trainer and a drag chute arrived in the mail this week. Both devices to spice up my swim workouts. The tempo trainer should be an interesting addition for me. I usually listen to music and find my stroke cadence syncs up with whatever I’m listening to (so I tend to listen to 140+ bpm electronic music), so having a waterproof metronome may be a useful way to crank up my stroke cadence for tempo sets. The drag chute may be a solution to the “lane is filled with slow swimmers” problem, that I encounter so often. I’m hopeful that with the chute, I can work on my strength while slowing myself down and not constantly being frustrated by having my hands in their feet and not being given space to pass. We’ll see 😉

Finally: Travel. On Tuesday I leave for Pycon 2011 in Atlanta. The weather there compared to here (mid-teen’s C vs freezing here) makes Atlanta look like a tropical get-away location 🙂 I’ll definitely be running while there. In fact, I’m in the JLA Shamrock 10k run on the 13th. I’m thinking that I may take my road bike to keep my bike base building in play. Definitely taking my Y membership and swim stuff, that’s an easy one – tho finding the closest Y to the hotel may be a challenge. Finally, I’m really hoping to find open water swimming while there. I’m going to take the wetsuit and even if the water is cold (by Atlanta standards) I’d like to get out for an open-water swim or 2. If anyone knows where this could become a reality for me, please leave me a comment and let me know. I’m desperate to get out of the pool for a while.

Ok, enough blather.

Nineteen Wetsuits: Frequency 1st Impressions

Fit and Finish:
This is one well assembled piece of equipment! The seams are smooth and clean without any visible weaknesses or poor glue jobs. I’m an interesting test case for the suit as I fall right on the size boundary for 2 different sizes. Steve says they recommend smaller in this case and so we went with the medium-small. It fit like it was made for me. The 1.5mm material of the upper has good elasticity and the wingspan material is different from that of the arms giving it even more stretch. Nineteen has added a zipper-cord-pocket at the top and rear of the collar so there’s a place to store the leash and not just have it flapping around behind you for others to snag on. The pocket is a great idea as you’ll always know where the leash is when you finish the swim and are running toward T1.

Comfort:
So far I’ve only been able to judge this from the Nineteen office and my living room, but from what I can tell without yet having the suit in the water for a long period of time, it is very comfortable. The choices of material let the suit stretch (and recover) in all the right ways such that your stroke is not interfered with at all.

Clearly, in water testing will provide much more info on this suit. So far, I have to say, I’m very impressed.
Stay tuned.

Dave Scott’s Guide to Swimming Form – Road ID posterous.

Great tips – stuff to keep in mind for sure!

Ever since losing all my weight and getting fit, I’ve been obsessed focussed on better understanding nutrition, my body’s needs and, most importantly: how my body reacts to different food stuffs.

I’d long since thought about making my own carb and/or protein bars, but really, it came down to time to experiment and then time to shop and cook. Lotsa time, with no guarantees. Finding Element Bars was a dream come true. They’ve done the research, have the products (many of which are organic) and will build and ship you bars according to your desires and specific formulation.

My 1st batch arrived this week and I’m super-happy with them! They’re built and packaged like commercial product, but the ingredients are all to my specifications and they taste GREAT!

I ordered 3 different bars: 2 of their creation and 1 that I made. The 2 of theirs I ordered were “Blueberry Repair” and “Cherry Charge”. The one I made I called “Klingon Protein” (though with only 5g of protein, it really should have had more protein to deserve the name), perhaps a more apt name would have been “Klingon Warrior Food”. 🙂

If you’re concerned about the fuel you’re putting in your body, I strongly suggest you try ElementBars.com

InfinitNutrition will blend and ship you custom made sports drinks for pre, during and post race nutrition.

There are so many potential blends you could mix up, it’s hard to judge all of them, but I’ve sampled a few of their suggested recipes and am pretty happy with the quality, taste, consistency and results. I love that you can really dial in the formula to your specific needs or desires.

Place your order using discount code “monoblog” and save 10%!

If you haven’t tried Chia Chargers yet, you owe it to ourself to go to their site and order some RIGHT NOW.

No, seriously, these little pucks of glory pack quite the punch. For the endurance athlete, camper, rock-climber, or any activity where you want sustained release, healthy natural energy in a small and portable package, the Chia Charger is for you. With all the good fats and super-foods in these guys, you’ll definitely notice the difference in your longer workouts and your recoveries. Very few simple carbs here, so if you’re looking for fast uptake carbohydrate, you’ll be looking for a glucose:fructose gel blend, but for longer-term sustained output, I really like the Chia Charger.

It’s been a few weeks since I did a product review. I’ve been meaning to talk about swimmer’s conditioner for a while now, and so here and now, the two thought bubbles collide 🙂

When I started swimming in a chlorinated pool I found that my hair was really (I mean really) taking a beating. It’s already “salt and pepper” – age-grouper you know – but the pepper was getting bleached out by the chlorine and worse, it felt like dry straw: brittle, and fragile. I tried a few drug-store and grocery store conditioners and they were… alright… but figured that there had to be something out there more targeted at swimmers and those dealing with really harsh conditions for hair.

A little googling and forum reading later I found “Aubrey Organics: Swimmer’s Conditioner“. I picked some up from a local healthfood store and tried it after my next swim session.

1st impressions: this stuff is thick. Like Elmer’s glue or silicon caulking thick, that said, it isn’t greasy and works through your hair pretty easily. After just 1 use I found my hair significantly happier and after about a week, my wife mentioned that the colour was returning to my hair! Gotta like it. I’m not ready to be a silver fox yet! 🙂 I’ll keep my salt and pepper for just as long as I can, thank you very much 🙂

Anyhow, if, like me, you’re in the pool a lot and your hair is getting ravaged by it, I strongly recommend Aubrey’s swimmer’s conditioner. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed, I know I’m not.

Yesterday my ebay win for a set of bullhorn and aerobars arrived at the house. Super excited it was all I could do to finish my work day before running off to tinker with my bike. A few well placed phone calls had located a great deal on some bar-end shifters for the aerobars, amazingly, at a little bike shop just around the corner from my house called HoopDriver.

Immediately after I was done work I walked a dog up to the store, grabbed some handlebar tape, the bar-end shifters and some handlebar shims (the bullhorns are 26mm, but my stem is a 30.5mm), and zipped home to install. I’ve done basic bike maintenance before, but never anything like removing Shimano Tiagra brifters and recabling deraileurs. With a little advice from my friend Paul, it went swimmingly and in seemingly no time my bike was refit with new bars, break levers, and bar-end shifters on the aerobars. Super exciting! I didn’t bother with the bar tape yet, but will probably do that tonight. Not really so important as I wanted this configuration for spinning in the trainer and don’t want to be on my hands but rather down on the aerobars building stamina and tweaking bike fit in that position.

This morning I took the new setup for a 75 minute test spin. My coach had only planned for a 60 minute zone 2 spin for me, but the aero setup felt so good that I was happy to sit in it and finish watching 2006 Ironman Kona for the extra 15 minutes. With luck, I still hope to be picked as RacerMate‘s Desperate Athlete and win a computrainer and year’s training program, but for now, I make do with a borrowed Cyclops liquid trainer and old tv shows. Hey! It passes the time and does the job, right? 🙂

Thursdays are brick days, cycle for a while, then run to work. Running today, in the -12C and snow from the last 36 hours was challenging. I ran in my cycling rain pants, pulled out my yaktrax, and replaced my new orthotics with my older ones. (My new orthotics have been wrecking my feet and, while I think they’re better now, my feet are still pretty destroyed and so letting them heal seemed like a good idea.) I also wore my neoprene face mask to start the run. Outside, waiting for my gps to sync up, I was cool, but far from cold, so I felt that I’d dressed appropriately for the weather.

It’s funny, I caught myself with an interesting thought form this morning. While I was walking the dogs after by ride/before my run, as I was dressing to take them out, I found myself thinking: “Brr! Looks cold out there, guess I’ll judge how warm I need to dress for my run, while I walk the dogs.” and then I caught myself and laughed a bit. I think many would go outside to see if it’s too cold to run, I just wanted to know how warm to dress. Awesome! 😉

Perceived level of effort (confirmed with my HRM) this morning was significantly higher than normal. I was trying to keep mid zone 3 for the 5.7k long route to work and was generally successful I think. My legs felt like lead the whole way in, but having just watched Kona, and seeing blind athletes and dual leg amputees complete an IM, I wasn’t about to let 5.7k and some snow shut me down! I’m sure that part of my lead feet was the extra weight of the yaktrax and the snow/ice bound up in them, but such is life. We’ll just call this hyper-gravity running 🙂 Some use ankle weights, I come by it more… naturally 🙂

Which brings me to “Annoying Pedestrians”: ok folks, I know it snowed and that there’s snow and slush on the sidewalks, but nowhere on my entire run in, was the sidewalk only cleared 1-person wide. Yet, frequently I found myself having to dodge around people, (or later in the run yell at them to move aside) because they were shuffling zombie-like down the middle of the cleared path. Is it so hard to share?! Come on! Really?! Sheesh!

Something great from the Kona show this morning. 1st 2 letters of IMpossible are “I” “M”: IronMan. Impossible? Ironman: Possible! Love it!

Ok… done ranting and raving now. Coffee time. Y’all have a good day. I’m pretty pumped for a good one myself. Tonight, a 8k run home. Booya!