Post 81 - Wetsuit testing and a cool jersey

At the start of this week I was still tired after the decent “metric Ironman” I’d done last weekend, so I knew I’d need a few days to recover from this. Yet another work trip (this time to Worcester in the UK) meant that I wouldn’t have been able to train hard until Friday anyway. I managed some easy training and a couple of days of resting during the first half of the week.

One “highlight” (if I can call it a highlight) was running along the River Severn, just south of Worcester, out into the countryside, on a sunny and warm evening. I ran past a junction in the river, where a big sign pointed north to Birmingham and south to Bristol. The sign also stated the number of locks to pass through in each direction. So Worcester is obviously an important waterway staging point. This was confirmed later in the hotel, where a small display indicated Worcester’s historical importance, being halfway between Birmingham and Bristol. I ran on to a tall footbridge over the river, where I paused for a few moments to take it all in. I wished I'd had a camera with me - that'll be a hobby for after Ironman and for when I've left London - going for adventures with a camera and taking cool photos...

On this short run in Worcester, it was good to get a sense of place and direction in a natural environment, to look at the horizon, to see hills in the distance. I love exploring in these circumstances, whether by bike or by foot or by canoe or whatever, going under my own power. In Northern Ireland, and in Aberdeenshire, I can do this. In London? I can only ride my bike on an indoor trainer in my room, and I run endless laps of housing estates, hardly knowing if I’m facing north, south, east or west. Joyless, and very mentally tiring.

Having survived the trip to Worcester, I had a bit of a chat with work to see if my work trips could be minimised in the next 7 weeks. It really is make or break time now, and if I have to travel frequently in the next 7 weeks, I may as well not bother taking to the Ironman UK start line. It was a tough question to ask, for a number of reasons, but I had a favourable response, which hopefully clears the way for a good 7 weeks and a good showing on Ironman race day.

The 2015 Giro d'Italia has just finished. In 2014, the Giro started in Belfast, and went along the Causeway Coast - amazing, scenic roads I ride all the time when I'm at home. The Giro was awesome in Northern Ireland. I wrote about it in Post 21. I didn't go home for it, as I was too concerned with training. With hindsight, with what happened in the run up to Ironman UK last year, I wish I had gone home for it. Anyway, I bought the jersey below and it arrived this week. How cool?! I think I'll wear it to Bradley Wiggins' hour attempt in the Olympic Park velodrome next week (yep, I managed to get a few tickets for it,,.)

Cringeworthily posed... but a cool jersey...
The "BELFAST" writing is designed to look like the Titanic Quarter exhibition
centre in Belfast, where the Titanic was built and where the Giro started.
The building itself is designed to look like the Titanic.
See below, Titanic-shaped Titanic exhibition centre in the background:

I’ve also been doing some reading on turbo trainer resistance and power output. It seems there’s a school of thought that even though a watt is a watt, not all watts have an equal toll on the body. My turbo trainer’s resistance is set quite high, so when I am riding, I generally don’t need to use high gears to produce high output. It’s very noticeable that when I stop pedalling, the high resistance of the turbo trainer slows the back wheel to a complete stop very quickly, within a second or two. Although I often practice single-leg cycling drills to ensure I am applying power throughout the pedal cycle, it is inevitable that there will be points on the pedal cycle when power application varies. At the “pushing down” part of the cycle, I’ll be applying more power than on the “pulling back” part, when one pedal is at the bottom and one is at the top. I’ll call this low-power phase of the pedal cycle the “weak spot” – it’s not quite a “dead spot”, as my single-leg drills prove.

So for the “weak spot” in every pedal stroke, the back wheel will be decelerating markedly, and for every new “push”, I will be re-accelerating the back wheel, and wasting energy to do so. On the road, the back wheel would coast for ages during freewheeling. With my turbo setting, it was coasting for one or two seconds if I stopped pedalling. So I have decreased the resistance of the turbo trainer away down to a low level. This means I’ll need to use higher gears to produce comparable power outputs, but it also means that the back wheel of the bike coasts for much longer before the resistance of the turbo trainer brings it to a stop. Now, instead of coasting for a couple of seconds, it coasts for maybe 10 seconds. So the back wheel slows much less during the “weak spot”, which means less power and effort is expended in re-accelerating it with every pedal stroke, which should have a cumulative effect of helping to keep my heart rate and breathing rate lower, and making it easier to output the same wattage for a given length of time, when compared with the high resistance setting. I’m interested to see the effects this will have, and I’m also very interested to actually get out on the road to see how different it is.

I also spent some time thinking about what data to display on my bike’s Garmin computer when I am racing. It can show a maximum of 8 data fields on a single screen, but it can scroll through 5 different screens at 5-second intervals. In total, maybe 40-50 different data values are available. I want to keep things simple, so ideally I wanted only a single screen. I decided on the “vitals” that I deemed were essential to know during an Ironman. These essentials were time, distance, speed, average speed, cadence, heart rate, average heart rate, power (3-second average power rather than instantaneous power, to provide a smoother reading), average power, normalised power, and intensity factor. That’s 11 pieces of data. 11 into 8 doesn’t go, so I had to work out how best to display this over 2 screens. I decided that 3-second power and normalised power will alternate, as will time/average speed and distance/intensity factor.

The thought process...

...screen 1 of the results of the thought process

Screen 2 of the results of the thought process

On Friday, my swim was a bit compromised. I wanted to do a critical swim speed (CSS) session of 18-20 x 100m in 1:30 with 10 seconds to recover between each. I know these 100s are tough, but I got myself mentally ready for it. And the pool turned out to be packed, as it was half-term. Full of youngsters. There was only one swimming lane, and it was quite busy. I can’t get into a single busy lane and blast up and down at top speed, it just ends up annoying everyone including myself. You can’t swim a proper session in these circumstances. So I ended up doing kicking drills and arm drills – basically whatever I could to make my swimming speed as slow as possible. It’s interesting to note how slow kicking-only actually is – so much of the swim power and speed comes from the arms. After the swim, I did single-leg turbo drills, then had a wetsuit-fitting exercise.

One of my friends recently did an Olympic distance triathlon in preparation for the Staffordshire half Ironman in a few weeks. He abandoned the race after one lap of the swim. He sent me a forum link, where he had posted a description of the problem – he felt his arms were really heavy and he literally could not swim properly. Some forum trolls called him a bottler, but he’s not a bottler. I guessed it was a problem with the fit of his wetsuit. So he came over and I had a look at his wetsuit. He was able to put it on in 5 minutes flat – far too fast. It was hanging off him. I kept telling him to pull it up, and he kept trying to pull it up, but it just kept slipping back down. He looked like the Michelin man (albeit black rather than white). The suit was far too big, and must have completely filled up with water when he was swimming. Water is heavy. No wonder he couldn’t swim. It would have been like cycling with an open parachute trailing behind.

I then put my old wetsuit on. I’ve never swam in a wetsuit with a tri top underneath, so I wanted to see how it felt. It took me ages to get it on, working it up the legs, up the chest, up the arms, getting the shoulders as loose as possible. I don’t think I would get it on at all without my Suit Juice and BodyGlide. It felt good, and I didn’t notice the tri top underneath, it wasn’t restrictive at all. Chris watched with interest. He then tried my suit on. I knew it would fit him and I knew he would get it on, but I knew it would take him a while. He has bigger muscles than me. So he spent the next 30 minutes squeezing into it. It was a good fit, I’m sure he’ll swim a lot better in it. Wetsuits should be very tight on land, the magic happens in the water, you hardly notice them. They take a while to put on properly, you need to spend a while working all the material up as high as it will go, getting it all into the shoulders, to give the arms freedom of movement. They should seal really well too, and not let water in. Hopefully he’ll go well at his half Ironman in my old suit.

Bit of an effort for Chris to squeeze those massive arms into my old wetsuit

On Saturday, I was quite looking forward to the turbo session with lower turbo resistance and higher gears, to see if it would be less tiring to maintain a typical output. However, it was difficult to compare it with previous sessions, as I had decided to do a shorter but tougher turbo session of 2-and-a-half hours. It went quite well and I was pushing around 280-290 watts for the final 30 minutes. I look forward to doing an exact comparison next week – I can replicate one of my previous long turbo sessions, ride at the same power output, and see if my heart rate is any lower.

On Sunday I hit the pool as usual and did drills with my hand paddles. The session went as follows: 250m normal swimming, 500m with paddles/leg float, 250m normal swimming, 500m with paddles/leg float/ankle band, 250m normal swimming, 500m with hand paddles only, 250m normal swimming, 500m with hand paddles/ankle band, 250m normal swimming, 100m slow swimming. Tough enough. I was unusually knackered after the swim, so I went for a sleep when I got home. After an hour and a half of shut-eye, I really had to force myself to get out and run. I was really very tired, and not looking forward to a 70-minute hard hilly run. But it had to be done, so I went and did it. My legs are still sore after this run. It was tough.

I’m at the stage now where I really don’t need to take any risks and will try to ever-so-slightly tone down the maximum intensity, hopefully this will help me to get through the next 7 weeks without any problems. For this reason, I’m not even 100% sure if I’ll do the Bristol triathlon as planned in 2 weeks. I’d love to do it and it would be a good warm-up race, but the Olympic distance race will be very fast and the hard 10k run at the end will hurt my legs. It’s risky. I’ll see how I go in the next week, and decide if the benefits of competing outweigh the risks. Maybe I’ll do it, but not flat-out. But this would be difficult. A race is a race. I’ll see…

Training done this week was as follows:

Mon 25 May: Rest
Tue 26 May: 30 minute turbo
Wed 27 May: 20 minute run
Thu 28 May: Rest
Fri 29 May: Swim 2.6km (leg/arm drills), 1:05 turbo (single leg drills, 7 x 3mins R, L, B)
Sat 30 May: 2:30 turbo (246W NP, 148bpm), 25 min run
Sun 31 May: Swim 3.3km (paddle drills), 70 min run (1 hour hard, 10 hills)

Totals: Swim 5.9km, Bike 90 miles, Run 18 miles.