It's 1am... Duh, that's all I have left

So here's where we are. Everyone is still standing, the race is over, t-shirts and medals have been passed out and it's now 1 am. If you've ever done/trained for one of these things you know one inescapable truth. What is it you ask? Simply put, when you're done you're hungry... duh. Me? Not this time, but everyone else absolutely.

What's open at 1am in the outskirts of Coeur d'Alene?... A Mc... yup. one of those. And that's where they went. Probably got a shake too.

Dean's short recap of the experience goes a little like this:
A calm mostly perfect looking morning in Cd'A sent a few clouds and a robust sustained wind through the town of Hayden (where the hills were). Dean wrote as much as he could about everything that he was seeing and hearing, not to mention texting updates to family and friends, and family of friends who where here in town unable to read the blog from the street.

Weather is one thing on a long list of things that are not in your control. You have control over yourself. Not water temperature, not cloudy nor rainy days, not the slow ass guy at Dennys that forgot your pancakes, just yourself... That's why we train/practice.

The unpredictable causes us to adapt and change. Some days it produces uncommon results both large and small, good and not so good. Today it produced all of these in both amounts. At the end of the day though we have finishers, whether you finished all or pieces, we have finishers. Each person putting themselves through as much of the day as they have control over, and adapting as best they can to the rest.

Perhaps this ramble is longer than I meant it to be, and perhaps it's because I'm tired. It's not the brief piece it was supposed to be.

So I'll close with this, from a coach of mine. It was a good day, no one drowned.

Peace. Good night.
-dean

IM C'dA 2008 - What Dean's Bike Would Look Like

Let's say hypothetically that I was to go out and "look" at a new bike... Here's what it might look like...

IM C'dA 2008 - Here we go

It's Saturday night and the work has been done. Workouts completed. Nutrition dialed in. Bags and bikes to transition. Practice swims nailed. It's 630pm and dinner has been take care of. As of now we're T-minus eleven hours to the starting cannon and we're down to last minute prep. Think, night before any major workout. Mixing bottles and getting in a good nap.

This is my third trip to Idaho, and every year the town seems to grow a little bigger. Thankfully the race distance remains the same 140.6 miles. Weather tomorrow looks pretty good. The paper this morning projected that tomorrow would have a high of 75 degrees and not be raining. Not bad considering that it snowed here less than ten days ago.

The good news is that it felt like the lake was warmer today than it was yesterday. I have to say that I'm a little bummed that I'm not racing. For reasons that are all my own, it's good that I'm not, but that competitive part of my brain still objects; softly.

This is my first year as a spectator at an iron distance event and I expect it to be killer. I have the advantage of having completed the course twice so I know where everyone will be and where the best burgers are.

Heart Rate Monitors : The Beginning

Hello out there in the land of multisports. Today, and for the next few posts I'm going to be talking about what may, after a good pair of running shoes, be the single greatest piece of gear to have in your arsenal. It is the heart rate monitor. Many make them, some are better than others, and here I'm going to do my best to write objectively about a few of them.

Let's get a few things out of the way first. A heart rate monitor is a device which, through the use of a piece of diagnostic equipment, be it a chest strap, finger clamp, wrist strap, just to name a few, can read one's pulse and transmit the useful information to the interested party. Short answer for us is something that can tell us how hard we're working and display it in a manner that is easy to read at a glance.

There is a point of diminishing returns on adding gear to our kit. It is the point at which the bulk, or added features, reduce our enjoyment of our activity. For everyone this is a very different point. Some people (perhaps myself included) would want to know every wheel turn on the bike, correlate that to a series of heart beats, and then extract the effect of the force on the chain to determine how hard I need to be running after T2. For others the intrusion of a wrist watch detracts from the simple pleasure of running. So I leave that completely up to you. Know that your choice is right, because it's right for you.

That having been said, let's talk about heart rate monitors. I'm sure that you've heard by now that, and if you haven't allow me, during training your ability to work withing specific zones (ranges of beats/minute) allow you to train more efficiently over the long term than any other piece of gear.

I will be talking about heart rate monitors from the perspective of a multisport athlete as opposed to a general fitness athlete. I believe that the best way to track someone's actual heart rate is to put a strap around their chest where the heart is.

While there are many brands of devices that do this, I'll be looking at the following:

• Polar


• Timex


• Suunto


• Garmin

...and perhaps a few others as they come up in discussion.

Stay tuned for the next episode.
-dean

Again, again, to Base Training

Fitness Journal was kind enough to provide me with my latest distance so far through this period of my base training. It's been 358 miles in riding, running, and swimming and I feel great.

Check out my latest map.

Triathlete Magazine talks about odd running form in triathletes

In an interesting observation, Matt Russ, in an article written for Triathlete magazine , talks about why triathletes as a group seem to have a different running form than runners. The reason for this, as cited by Russ, is that triathletes swim, and there for have a more developed upper body, in particular shoulder muscles that change the way the upper body moves thus affecting our running form.

http://www.triathletemag.com/Departments/Training/2007/Why_do_triathletes_run_funny_.htm