Week 33 summary

Some solid work this week, only missed a couple sessions due to boy not sleeping, 686TSS and 10.1 hours.

Guelph Lake: I talked to Bryan about this on Friday, he had a couple suggestions.

1) Nutrition: Eat your regular pre-race breakfast, then instead of sip sports drink before the race like I normally would, just take in water, but then 15 minutes before the swim start, take two gels. The theory behind this is that waiting avoids the insulin rise that constant sugar will provoke, leaving more sugars available in your system (and also avoiding raising your insulin, which is really designed to tell your body to store the sugar, not leave it around to be burned). Then, on the bike, take one gel after you've settled in and gotten your heart rate down (say somewhere around the first third), then another gel somewhere around the last third/quarter. This should set you up for just taking in whatever sports drink is on the course, or just water, going by feel.

2) Pacing: I was planning on racing at about 85% of FTP (so 230-ish). I was advised to break the ride down into thirds, first third stick to target watts, middle third go up if you feel good, last third either fall back or continue at higher wattage depending on feel. The other pacing suggestion was to try and negative split the run.

Execution of these two suggestions was sort of 50-50. I got the nutrition part down, no problem. It felt good, and I actually didn't take anything in on the run, just a few mouthfuls of water (it wasn't nearly as hot as predicted, so I wasn't concerned). The pacing execution was not as airtight, alas. The course is pretty hilly, and occasionally I would lose focus, so my average watts were lower across the board than they should have been. The first third of the course felt like a struggle to maintain anything close to 230, lots of burning in the quads, but that faded in the middle and last thirds of the race. I ended up chasing a guy in my age group and beating him into T2 (but then was swiftly passed by him on the run. boo.). The run ended up being not so much of a negative split (the first 5k were faster), but the last mile of the race was my fastest mile, so not a total disaster. Average HR was pretty much right at threshold, so I guess that was appropriate, the last 2k were a lot higher though as I was worried about being caught up by some other guys in my AG.