Different class

My bike functional threshold power (FTP), the power I can output for an hour, is 184 watts. I'm working on getting that up to 250+ over the next year. I'm currently 83kg so that's 2.2W/kg. I've averaged 33km/h for a mainly flat 40KM triathlon bike leg.

Mike Rogers, pro cyclist and stage winner in the Tour de France, produces slightly higher figures:

• After averaging 444 watts, 6.09w/kg. for 16 minutes during the previous climb, Rogers dug deep and produced 458 watts, 6.27w/kg. for 7:28 going up the Col de Grosse Pierre. 
• It's not just during the climbs that Rogers had to go hard. In the 30 minutes leading up to the first climb, Rogers had a Normalized Power^® of 336, or 4.03w/kg. That produced an average speed of 49.5kmh (31mph).

Tour de France week 2 power analysis

Bike workout Thu 24/07/2014

Goal: FTP maintenance/improvement

Notes: I've moved my TrainerRoad setup to a new laptop and it took a while to get it going properly - I had to shift from Bluetooth to ANT+, BT kept dropping out. (I had previously moved from ANT+ to BT because ANT+ would drop out.. sigh).

I had an hour to use at lunchtime and wanted to run/swim tomorrow and ride long on Saturday so did the TrainerRoad workout 'Kingsbury'. You can see that I found it hard to keep power at the right level, I often feeling 'in between gears'. My legs felt sore from run intervals yesterday and bike intervals the day before, but I got it done.

Garmin stats (only HR/cadence/power are useful)

Cairns 2011

2011 was a busy year. First up was Cairns in June.

Challenge Cairns was an iron distance triathlon, an ironman in all but name ('Ironman' is a trademark of the World Triathlon Corporation and they guard use of it fiercely). An iron distance triathlon is a 3.8km swim, a 180km bike ride and a 42km run, in the shortest possible time. Male professionals finish one in around 8 hours with the cut-off being 17 hours (the start is at 7am making cutoff at midnight). If you don't finish by the cutoff, you aren't classified as a finisher - no medal, no towel or t-shirt.

I trained using the 30 week 'Just finish' plan from Don Fink's Be Iron Fit book. The plan is time (and heart rate) based rather than distance based which I both like and dislike - good because you know in advance how long your training session will be, but bad because the race itself is distance based, not time based. I trained fairly well, I did probably 90% of the training sessions with regards to duration but plodded along rather than doing the fast interval sets that the plan prescribed. I don't remember exactly what my goal time was - 'just finish' is probably what I told people - but sub-14 hours may have been on my mind, made up of around a 2 hour swim and transitions, 7 hour bike, 5 hour run. I have done a stand-alone sub-four hour marathon so that felt about right, I got to the start line uninjured and was confident I could finish without any problems.

The two lap swim was slow as expected.

I trained with High5 gels, bars and sports drink with no issues on any session - long rides and runs were all fine. However on the morning of the race, for no known reason, I decided that I didn't need any sports drink on the ride - I could manage with just gels, bars and plain water.

Idiotic.

Did I mention that it was 30 - 32 degrees C and that I'm English, sweat a lot, and always do better in cold races?

The result: my quads locked up at 150km on the ride, so badly I had to stop and stretch them out. (Oddly enough this is a cherished memory - I stopped on a small creek bridge, in the shade, and there was no-one in sight or sound, forward or behind me, I was near the back of the pack. A small breeze rustled the trees as I went 'aargghhhh' and tried to stretch my legs out).

I made it to the end of the bike ride, ran about 7km - then the rest of my body started cramping - first legs, then arms, shoulders, hips and, infamously, my tongue. Yes, your tongue can cramp. I could barely walk (due to leg cramps, I don't walk using my tongue) and was asked a couple of times by an ambulance crew if I was OK to continue. I had worked out that I had enough time left that I could walk most of the marathon and still make the cutoff so that's what I did. I collected my medal, the smallest towel that could be given that name (it's known as 'the bar runner' because it's just about the size of those bar towels) and my t-shirt. I was miserable and a complete grumpy sourpuss to everyone who came to support me and was rightly given a good talking too afterwards. It's a long day to spectate too. Lessons learnt: (a) be nice to your supporters however you may be feeling, and (b)  while there may be no scientific evidence to support the use of salt to avoid cramping, my n=1 experiment said differently.

Results:

Swim	Bike	Run	Finish	Gender	Gender Place	Category	Cat Place	T1	T2
1:36:54	6:57:23	6:24:55	15:15:30	M	450	M4044	80	0:06:17	0:10:18

I finished in the 96th percentile - i.e. 96% of the entrants finished before me.

Garmin stats: Swim, Bike and Run (the Garmin cut out before the end, also the heart rate strap wasn't working properly throughout).

The race only ran one year - in 2012 WTC took it over and it became an Ironman branded race. This means I'm one of only about 1500 people worldwide who have a Challenge Cairns finishers medal. Sweet.

Pre race, about to wetsuit up - this may have been the last time I smiled that day.

 I like that one because you can't see my moobs.

This isn't fun any more. Can I go home now? No, you still have another 15km to walk.

I didn't say 'never again' though - how could I? I was already entered for Ironman Western Australia in December 2011. But before that there was a multi-day bike ride to do..

Beginning in triathlon

So, mid 2007. I had run a few half marathons and marathons when my brother-in-law suggested trying a triathlon. He had done one at Cronulla and suggested we do one in Mooloolaba, Queensland in 2008. I liked the idea of riding a bike - I hadn't learnt to ride a bike until I was 14.. hadn't ridden one since 2000.. swam a little when a small child, on holidays and at school. How hard could it be?

I bought a bike, much like this one - a Giant hybrid flat bike bike. Sweeeeet!















I went swimming at the local pool. And I discovered that swimming is very hard. 50 metres is a long long way, and putting your face in the water is unnatural. But in the same way I had with running years before, I started small and worked up. 50m non-stop, then 100m, then on. 20 minute bike ride, 30mins, 40mins.

In late November 2007 I did the first race in the Kurnell sprint triathlon series, a 750m swim, 20km ride and 5km run. I was so slow at swimming that the event organisers were following me in a boat, picking up the buoys as I passed them so they could pack the course up. Looking at the results file now - wow, that 750m took me 30 minutes. I finished around 1h45m and remember saying at the finish that it was the hardest physical activity I had ever done, including the marathons.

It was fun though, and I was bitten enough by the triathlon bug that I did another couple of sprint tris in January and February 2008, leading into the Mooloolaba Olympic distance triathlon in March 2008. A few of us stayed together in a unit in Mooloolaba (a beautiful beach resort) and we had a real athlete village feeling going on - we practiced our transitions (changing from the swim to the bike, changing from the bike to the run - putting on socks and shoes etc). The Olympic distance is a 1500m swim, 40km bike and 10km run and I was very happy to finish in just under 3 hours. A year later I got that time down to 2h50m but also did a long course triathlon as part of a team - I did the 83km bike leg and while I was happy not to do the 2km swim, I was a little jealous of the runner doing the 20km run leg. In 2010 I did the full long course event by myself in just over 6 hours.

Mentally I've always had a problem with events that are 'half-' something. When I was doing half marathons I was fascinated by doing a marathon, it was an itch that wouldn't go away until I had done one in the goal time I had set myself. The same thing then happened with triathlons..

Having done the long course (close to half ironman distance) I then had my first DNF (did not finish) at Half Ironman Yeppoon. I had not trained for it, and had a bad migraine the day before. The 1.9km swim took me 1h20m, I was exhausted and pulled out before the bike leg. [I always meant to go back and do the event again - unfinished business - but unfortunately the event no longer exists].

In October 2010 I did the Gold Coast Half Ironman and I think it was at that event that we had the 'family meeting' where Graham (my brother in law) convinced our families to support us in entering Ironman Western Australia, taking place in December 2011. After we entered that event, another race organiser, Challenge, announced a Ironman distance event in Cairns in June 2011. With Graham having links to Cairns we decided to enter that one too. I later entered a charity bike ride from Melbourne to Wollongong, taking place in October 2011 - making 2011 the year of 2 x Ironman triathlons and a 100km bike ride.

Beginnings in running

It's all the fault of my brother-in-law.

I was happy just being a runner. I  started running about 15 years ago - I was an average inactive IT worker, desk bound. The most physical activity I had was lifting a server into a data centre rack. But I was fascinated by long distance runners and one day in the pub the London Marathon was on and I bet a work colleague that a year later I would run it.

I started from a zero base. I've read books by people who say 'oh I started in triathlon from nothing' then you read on and you find out they rowed competitively for 10 years, or they were school swim team champions. I played some rugby union when I was about 14, a bit of football (soccer) around the same age, that's it. We did have cross country running at school but I hated it and mainly finished last. I started smoking when I started work at 17, then became asthmatic after an accident involving a chest trauma when I was in my late twenties.

So running was tough. I started by running around the park near where I lived in Epsom, in the south of the UK. The park was roughly square so I ran one length, walked the next to recover, rinse and repeat. It started that simply, and I just built from there. I think I was reading Runner's World magazine and picked a 10K training plan, and eventually I ran a 10K in December 2002, finishing in 52 minutes (this was the Leeds Abbey Dash, and in researching this article I see it's still going).

It was a real buzz to be in a race with thousands of other people, and yet a lot of the appeal of running is the solitude. I found running to be a great time to think, I would play conversations back in my head, solve work problems and personal ones, just.. think. This is something that has continued until now - I still prefer to train alone and am not a member of any clubs. This is something that may have to change but I'll talk about that another time.

So I continued, doing the Brass Money half marathon in late January 2003 in a time of 1:55. (I keep a spreadsheet of my results - it's few months out of date but is here. Then I did another half in March 2003 and shock! I was slower. It was the first time I had gone backwards, and the first time I found temperature an issue - it was unseasonably warm for March and I suffered in the heat. But I had a goal - I was going to run a sub-four hour marathon.

I remember I applied for the London Marathon but it was so oversubscribed places were allocated via a ballot and I didn't get in. So I entered the Shakespeare Marathon, taking place in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 2003. It was a pretty place to start a race, with part of the course running along a long straight track that had been a railway line before it had been closed and the tracks ripped up. I don't remember much else about the race but there must have been a fair amount of walking involved as I finished in 4h40m, a long way off my goal. I do remember eating two huge ham and cheese rolls at the finish line.

Fast forward to 2005 and I had moved to Australia. I had also taken up drinking more and smoking again. I was sharing a unit in central Sydney with a couple of active people who convinced me to enter the Sydney Morning Herald half marathon, I ran about 500m before starting to walk and ran/walked the rest of the way to a 2h25m finish. I remember celebrating with a beer and cigarette on the unit balcony within 30 minutes of finishing, and it was another 2 years until I did another race, the SMH Half again, 2h15m. I was motivated again to go for the 4 hour marathon so kept up the training and racing, getting faster, attempting another full marathon in September 2008 but wilting in the heat of a 30+ degree centrigrade day and finishing in 4h20m.

In 2009 I finally did it - a 1h53m half marathon in May followed by a 3h53m full marathon in September. I remember it being fairly comfortable, of knowing I would need a bathroom stop at about half marathon distance so speeding up from 10km to 20km so I had enough of a time buffer to stop. I reeled off a long sequence of sub-5m30 kilometres and had enough time in the bag for some walk breaks after 35k. Through the wonders of online logging you can see my race splits here.

So that was that goal done. But go back to 2007. After doing a half marathon that year my brother in law said he was doing a triathlon and maybe I should do one of them too..?