Recreational Reading

Recently, I was timed in the pool for 100m at ~1:48. I’m not sure how sustainable that is over distance, but it’s an interesting number. My swimming speed goal has been to get to around 2:00/100m and it appears that may be an attainable number which makes me very happy. I’m also hoping that, recent efforts withstanding, I can average ~20MPH on a reasonable bike leg. Hopefully, the bike portion of any race will work out, presently it seems to need work. Lastly, I’m hoping that I can maintain something akin to 7:30’s in the run leg of any given sprint triathlon.

Here’s what that implies for Pigman sprint. Distances are 500m swim, 25K bike, and 5K run. The bike leg is listed as “challenging”.. whatever that means. Here’s a guesstimate breakdown:

• 500m swim @ ~2:00/100m; 10 minutes
• T1 (no basis, just a guess); 4 minutes
• 25K bike ~20mph; 47 minutes
• T2 (just a guess) 2 minutes
• 5K run ~7:30 miles/min; 24 minutes

for a grand total of *Cha-ching* 1:27. Round up a little to create a little “ain’t gonna’ happen” cushion, and my goal time is 1:30. There you go folks, made that up as I went along. Now, I just have to execute on the.. um.. plan.

From a numbers perspective, I’m not really worried about the run. Hopefully, unless I’ve turned myself inside-out on the bike leg, I should be able to better that by several minutes. The bike leg worries me. Actually, it worries me a lot. A couple of weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been sweating the bike at all. I guess these things have a way of turning into monsters even when they shouldn’t be. The swim, which would have kept me awake at night last year seems like no problem this year provided I can get some open water swimming in. There’s still the whole problem of waves, wind, sighting, and a couple hundred of my best friends churning up the water to deal with. I suppose that’s plenty to worry about. Whee!

In other news…

My current swim golf score is hovering around 75-77. That number is split at around 30-32 strokes and about 45 seconds per 50m. Man would I like to take some strokes out of those numbers. I seem to remember having a 25m count of 12 at some point, but I can’t get down that low now. When I’m trying to swim golf, it’s really interesting at how you can feel when you loose momentum. The whole pool slows down to a crawl (no pun intended) to the degree that you can hear the change of pace. I’m thinking that it will be important in the swim leg to minimize those slow segments and to not panic when one occurs. Time will tell.