Recreational Reading

2008 Lifetime Fitness Olympic Results, Part 2

2008-09-12T13:53:13Z

The Swim

The good news is that it was a wetsuit eligible swim. There were storms for a few nights before the event, some strong winds, and the morning of the event was quite a bit cooler then the 90s of the preceding days. I believe the combination resulted in a water temp of seventy-six and change — we had a full degree to spare.

Unlike the elite groups with the traditional mass start, the swim start for age groups participants is done time trial style with people being sent out in three second intervals. The order of release in the 150 strong late thirty something guys appeared to be alphabetical, so I was toward the end. The actual start was a bit late and since we had some time we high alpha guys did some grousing about how the alphabetic abuse all started back in kindergarten.

It was interesting to watch the line of people at the start. Some sprinted out into the water, aggressively dove in, and began with an impressive stroke rate. Others walked into the water, adjusted their goggles, wadded out waist deep, and finally pushed off to do some actual swimming. My personal preference was someplace in the middle. I wanted to be ready to swim, but I didn’t want to waste a bunch of energy trying to sprint through water.

I dove in and started swimming for a couple minutes, then remembered that I needed to start my watch. Oops. I quickly settled into my slow turnover, do less stroke rate; and after that it was mainly monotony. Along the way there was a guy who was swimming freestyle and frequently changing over to breaststroke. My freestyle was slower, but faster then his breaststroke. The result was he would swim past me, then I would swim into him while he was doing breaststroke. Eventually I could tell when I was getting close to him because of turbulent water. I haven’t ever been able to really feel another swimmer, so this was as much of a sense as I’ve ever experienced.

The only other excitement was someone requiring a lifeguard on the second leg. It was difficult to tell where they were from the water surface level. The lifeguards were converging on them as I went by, so I presume they had things under control. Once I got up toward the beach, I was able to dolphin for a while. I had a little trouble getting the sleeves of the wetsuit over the race wristband, but no real problems with the first transition other then being slow.

2008 Lifetime Fitness Olympic Results, Part 1

2008-09-12T13:18:58Z

At long last, here is a race results summary.

Here are some personal revelations from the 2008 Lifetime Fitness Triathlon:

An Olympic distance triathlon is actually quite a bit like a marathon relative to effort required. (e.g. three hours of multidisciplinary effort versus three and a half hours of running)
Training for events of this type require a specific training plan with appropriate build up, tapering, etc.
1500 meters sure feels like a long way to swim. I would have to say that it wasn’t particularly hard, but I was ready to get out of the water by the end.
Fueling — as in eating properly before hand — for these type of events is really important. Failing to do so is a bad thing.
I probably need to work on some core strength to support proper bike position since my hand were going numb from supporting to much weight when I was in the drops.

Quick Results

Total Time	Overall	Gender	Division
2:47:22.9	418/1148 (36%)	356/802 (44%)	69/150 (46%)

Here are the per event breakdowns.

Event	Event Distance	Event Time	Event Pace	Event Place
Swim	1500m	37:02.9	2:28 per 100m	769 (72%)
T1		3:02.9
Bike	40 Km	1:16:50.8	19.9 mph	383 (48%)
T2		2:39.7
Run	10 Km	47:46.4	7:42 min/mile	200 (25%)

Those transition times are not pretty, and I have to improve the swim pace. Also, I would have been nice to get a 20 something on the bike.

Details

Pre-race preparation was not as organized as it should have been. There were various things that took up a significant amount of time the evening before and the result was getting to bed late after franticly trying to get things together. Transition opened at 4:30 AM, so after a couple hours sleep I got up and started getting ready for the race. The process – in broad strokes – is get up, eat, shower, load, and travel. Unfortunately, the bagel with peanut butter I intended to eat for my morning meal was accidentally left at home. Fortunately, I did not suffer a major bonk as I did in another time trial of this distance.

Wyoming wind

2008-07-14T14:53:09Z

Yesterday, I was out on a recovery ride and had an odd experience.

At around ten till five, I was at the top of the high bridge in Saint Paul. I rode down the bridge with a furious wind coming the other way at a speed of around 14 MPH and actually shifted down at about the half way point.

I suppose I should be glad that I could keep the rubber on the road rather then taking a flying leap into the river below.

2008 Lifetime Fitness Olympic Pre-race

2008-07-20T15:30:46Z

I am attempting to set some expectations for the race this weekend. I
have not done this recently because it scares the crap out of me.
My expectations for this race are not really all that high, but
I suppose we have to have something to shoot for.

I have looked at the results from last year and done a little calculating
based on results at Pigman sprint and Minneman sprint. Here are some
pace goals that seem reasonable: roughly 2:15 / 100m in the swim, roughly
19.5 MPH on the bike, and roughly 7:30 minutes/mile run. Here are the
calculated time goals:

Swim (1.5K)	T1	Bike (40K)	T2	Run (10K)	Flub time	Total
33:45	2:30	1:16:30	1:30	46:30	5:00	2:45:45

I’m not sure what I’ll do if the event is not wetsuit legal. I’ve been swimming
much more comfortable in open water lately, but I’m not sure that I can handle
my longest open water swim ever without it. More to the point,
I don’t want to have to try 1.5K without it. *sigh* I’ll probably wear
it regardless.

Well, that’s the plan such as it is. I have high comfort expectations for the swim
and low performance expectations for everything else.

Lottery Loser

2008-06-09T00:03:59Z

The New York Road Runners sent me the official news the other day:

Dear …,

Thank you for applying to the ING New York City Marathon 2008. We’re sorry to inform you that…

The email goes on to politely say that I should contact various charitable organizations who — for a few thousand dollars — would be glad to get me into the race. *sigh*

Unfortunately, this throws a monkey wrench into the fall marathon plans. Marine Corps is already closed which leaves some other smaller events as options. I believe there are events in Philadelphia and Baltimore in there someplace, and I’ve heard rumors that there may be something in Seattle as well. Looks like there are also events in Monterey and Folsom/Sacramento California in the November/December time frame which may be possibilities.

I’ll have to figure something out soon.

MidYear Report Card

2008-05-20T03:17:56Z

Over here I expressed some intentions. Now for the reality:

Frozen Half, (1:53:11, ~8:39s) check.
Human Race.. skipped.
Get-In-Gear, (44:55, 7:14) check.
Pigman Sprint Tri, registered.
(extra) Minneman Sprint Tri, registered.
Lifetime Olympic Tri, registered.
Time Trailing?? not so much..
Twin Cities Marathon, registered.
New York Marathon, entered into the lottery pool.

At this point, I’m two to the good, with three extra events (there will probably be others), and one missed goal. I suppose that’s not horrible. I would feel a little more confidence if I had better fitness. The Pigman sprint is now only 13 days away. I haven’t been in the pool for over a week; have yet to get into actual lake water; have ridden the bike some but nothing that would resemble riding fast; and my run training is merely decent bordering on below average. All of those items are not a recipe for a PR, but I’m going to give it the old college try.

MnTriClub announces My First Tri Clinic

2008-04-20T18:45:38Z

The Minnesota Triathlon Club is sponsoring a “My First Tri” clinic at the Midtown YWCA on Saturday, April 26th from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM. Here are the details from the email announcement:

It’s finally time for the 2008 version of the MN TriClub’s fabulously famous clinic; “Your First Tri”. This clinic is led by fellow TriClub member Duey Carlson, and is an annual favorite. Duey is an experienced age-group triathlete who has completed many tri’s from “mini’s” to Ironman. Although the clinic is held in a lecture format (so no need for workout clothes), the setting is highly informal and greatly benefits from lots and lots of your questions! Duey will bring along all of his tri gear, so when he is explaining something he can show it to you as well. You’ll get to see and touch everything and ask all the questions you want (remember: there are no dumb questions in triathlon – we all had to start somewhere and we all had the same questions in our minds that you have now!). This is one-stop shopping for all of your “First Tri” information. You’ll always remember the experience of your first tri, so be sure and attend this clinic to make that experience the best that it can be. And even if you’ve done triathlons before you might want to attend; I always pick up a new bit of information every time I attend. All are welcome; you do NOT have to be a MN TriClub member to attend.

Here’s just a few of the topics that Duey will cover:

Picking a race

What gear you’ll need

What to do the night before

What to do on race morning

The swim start and the swim itself

T1 (swim to bike transition)

The bike portion

T2 (bike to run transition)

The run portion

Post race

How do I know I’m ready?

Tapering

So, what are the specifics related to the clinic?

WHEN: Saturday, April 26th from 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm

WHERE: Midtown YWCA - Click Here for map & directions

WHO: Anyone who wants to prepare for their first triathlon (MN TriClub membership is not required)

RSVP: pjohnson [AT] YWCA-Minneapolis [dot] org

COST: Zero, Zip, Nada, Free!!!

IMPORTANT: When you get to the Y, there will be a table set up just inside the front doors where you will need to sign in and get a name tag. Due to the times we live in, you’ll also need to show a photo ID at sign in as the Y needs to have an accurate record of who is in the building. After signing in, you’ll be directed to the clinic room. Light refreshments will be provided by the TriClub.

Swimming and a 10 Count

2008-04-06T19:01:40Z

I’ve been swimming more then usual over the last eight weeks in order to prepare for the 1500m swim leg in the Lifetime Olympic distance triathlon in July. The problem — as always — seems to boil down to some kind of swim endurance and/or comfort level that I need to develop. I wanted to pass along some things I’ve been told which appear to be helping and which may help others.

First, swim endurance has been an personal issue for some time. I can easily swim short distances with comfort and efficiency, but as I attempt extend the distance of any given swim effort I experience a kind of gradually rising panic. I had been attempting to extend distance in swim efforts by doing sets of pyramids. Pyramids are a cyclic interval type exercise; in my case I was swimming 50m, 100m, 150m, 200m, 150m, 100m, 50m for 800m total per effort. A set would typically consist of two or three of these yielding 1600 or 2400 meters of total swimming. While pyramids seemed to be going ok, I really hated them. I swam them with difficultly and was constantly tempted to shorten sets or length. Mentally, it wasn’t resulting in much progress.

Fortunately, an alternate path was suggested to me and it has produced some tangible results. The suggestion was to swim a measured distance with planned breaks, then over time squeezing the length of the breaks down to make the distance more contiguous. In my case I was swimming 1500m as 30×50m with 30 second breaks between efforts. Each 50 is a comfortable distance, and the 30 second breaks allowed me to defer the lap counting to my watch. The watch keeps me honest, and the 50m laps have gotten easier. Executing this plan has provided some structure to the time I’ve been swimming which makes it easier to continue to work on.

Second, I have recently participated in a swim clinic sponsored by the Twin Cities Multisports Club. (TCMC) TCMC is a sister club to the Minnesota Tri Club (MNTC) which I have been part of for a couple of years now. In the clinic we were videotaped swimming from the side and from the front. I saw two obvious things in the one viewing of my swimming at the end of the clinic. First, my legs are still generally to deep. Second, I only get fully on my side when recovering my left arm. I have been focusing on these two things in recent pool efforts and something interesting happened.

I have mentioned before that I know that I was able to execute a 12 count for 25m before, but I had not been able to produce one recently. Most of the winter I was in the 14-15 range with occasional 13 counts, but on Thursday I produced two 10 counts. When the first one happened, I was so shocked that I had to stop at the wall. I was sure that I had miscounted, but then it happened again and was reinforced by some 11 counts as well. I should mention that I do not believe these stroke counts are maintainable over the course of a race, but it’s encouraging to know that it is indeed possible. Additionally, it opens the door to some nice potential swim golf scores.

Upgrade pain

2008-03-30T18:53:27Z

If you attempted to read anything here in the last sixteen or so hours and had the connection attempt refused it was caused by my upgrade attempt performed yesterday evening. Almost everything is back to normal at this point. Turns out there was a configuration issue for all the virtual domains, so all the user facing things would not work. Let me know if you find something wierd, and I’ll see what I can figure out.

A little of the detail. We are now running:

MySQL 5.0.x
PHP 5.1.x
Apache 2.0.59
Wordpress 2.5

Another new thing is my attempted use of the wp-openid plugin which.. um.. doesn’t work yet.. At least not fully.. If you have an openid that you want to use, register the old way and associated your identity URL with the created user. I believe that the issue is associated with the new wordpress password encoding technique. It is unclear to me at this point, but that is my suspicion.

OpenID is a GoodThing in my opinion, so give it a try. At present, comments are still under the same requires first approval policy we have had since the comment spammers started abusing us.

What the Star Tribune could learn from the NY Times

2008-03-29T23:50:40Z

Late last year Nick Carr wrote a piece titled The business case for TimesSelect which discusses the recent change for the archives of the New York Times away from a subscription model toward an advertising model. Carr’s point is that the Times didn’t necessarily error when they made the choice of a subscription based web presence over a more open business model. His point and the resulting comments are interesting, however it made me think of how much I hate the business model of the Star Tribune here in the Twin Cities.

The policy of the Times subscription model was to make the archives available for a fee. After an article has aged some amount, it was archived behind the subscription policy. In the case of the Star Tribune, once an article ages past some point it is removed permanently from the site never to be seen again. Considering the concept of the long tail it seems this policy is the worst of both worlds; not only is the information not available to generate subscription revenue but it also is removed from the long tail benefit of potential advertising revenue. The Tribune, a publication struggling for revenue, seems to have done themselves a disservice.

As a side effect, I can no longer link to Star Tribune articles from this blog. Any link to a Star Tribune article is a broken link waiting to happen; their policy breaks MY site as well. From a traffic standpoint, this blog doesn’t make a substantive difference to their bottom line; however, the concept of the long tail suggests that a significant number of small blogs linking to a variety of articles over time would provide a non-trivial advertising income. As Carr likes to point out, the Star Tribune could share crop the profits from the work of others for the trivial cost of storage.

Putting aside the question of the public benefit associated with archives being available in some form, the business plan they have chosen to implement make me wonder if they have anything to say which is worth keeping around at all.