Wednesday 26 June 2013

Welland Half Iron Bike/Run.

Two words for this race:

HOT.
WINDY.

..Definitely had to adapt and re-think my effort level to dial it down a notch because of the hot weather.

I did a 5k warmup at easy pace before the start and was already sweating like a pig before the time trial start of the bike/run! 



Thirsty before the start! Oh no!
Unlike the triathletes, I wasn't going to be cool coming out of the water at the beginning of the bike...
Aero pose! haha!
Bike
90 kms: 35.4 km/hr | 2:32.5 moving time (2:33 official time) 
Average Power / Normalized Power: 190AP/192NP
IF: 0.80
VI: 1.01

Off we go!
 It was windy. Steady headwind wasn't as bad...maybe 20 km/hr but it was the nasty 40-60 km/hr frequent gusts of wind that were a pain.
I paced it very well overall, but got distracted between 20-30kms as my Wahoo iPod bike computer stopped working so I had no metrics on the bike in front of me from then on. Tried fixing it on and off for 10kms, getting out of aero position frequently and slightly soft pedaling before I wrote it off and just went by RPE. (the Timex on my wrist was recording everything anyway..I just couldnt see it in front of my face...). As it turns out, this was probably the section that I should've kept my focus on the most, with constant headwind/crosswind. Lost a lot of time here as power went down by at least 15-20W. Whatever.
Then the cross-winds winds got me bad between 35-55 kms. Suddenly, the disc wheel seemed like a bad idea!


Hammering on the way out in the nasty headwind/crosswind
The way back after 68 km was pretty smooth with a nice tailwind and was able to keep up the power...averaging 40-41 km/hr in the last 20 kms! Eased up a bit in the last 5k to spin up the legs for the run.  Pretty pleased  with the bike today since I was 40th overall (including all triathletes) in the bike portion.


On the way back into T2
Ate regularly and drank well...finished 2 CLIF bars and a gel along with a concentrated bottle of gatorade, 2 salt tablets and 3 bottles of water.

Transition:
A bit too chaotic than I would've preferred. Took me way too long to get my running shoes on. As I was running out of the transition, I remembered that I didnt take my left over water bottle from the bike to hydrate for the 1st km on the run. Thought "Ah well, there's an aid station 1 mile in, it can't be that hot". Little did I know... 



Flying out of transition trying to hold back for the 21 km in an oven.
Run: 
21.1kms: 1:37:02 (4:35 min/km pace)

Decent run for me this year. Nothing spectacular at all in terms of time. So HOT. Where did the wind go? Well, it didnt get any cooler by 12pm when athletes finished their bike and got onto the run course.


However, I've improved a lot from last year when I tended to cramp up in the last 20-30 mins of every race I did...so my goal was just to push as much as I can without seizing up my calves!
The aim before the race was to go 1:30-1:32, but I adjusted it to 1:33-1:35 after I felt the muggy/feels like 40C conditions in the morning. 

Good call! I'd like to think I do better in hot weather than most people, my Indian roots probably have something to do with that!
I was pretty much bang on pace for 1:32-1:33 for the first 15-16 kms, hitting 4:22-4:28 min/km until the last turnaround when a guy walking the aid station at the end decided to swing in my way as I was about to reach for some ice/water...fumbled but OK in a few seconds. But in the chaos, barely took in any water there and ran with a really dry mouth not able to ingest my last gel till right before the next aid station 2.0 km away where I forced it down my throat with 2 splashes of water. Bummer. Too late. Speed dropped to 5:00 min/km and the same slowing down as last year ensued.
In the bike/run...none of the fast people from last year showed up so I knew I was in the lead (I was in no competition with the fast triathletes I saw, though! haha!). Dehydration and fear of cramping made me just lose motivation since I wasnt trying to catch anyone. I mentally switched off and went into cruise mode till the finish until I realized I wont beat my last year's run time and tried to make it up in the last km! Fail. 



Totally dehydrated. Couldn't speed up in the end at all!

Did I mention it was HOT? LOL. 

After comparing the results from last year and the relative performance of other athletes in this year's weather conditions, it is safe to say that everyone slowed down on the run by at least 3-5 mins. Heck, even the uber fast pro triathletes combined, my run was 15th fastest amongst 500+ people. 
Considering that my run time this year was identical to last year which had cool and calm conditions, I'll take it as a good sign!


Total time: 

4:12:30 official time. 1st overall in the bike/run. 

(Hold your horses, there were only 11 people here compared with 500 in the triathlon!! The second person was over 50 minutes behind...thats why I compared my splits with all the triathletes!)

Post-race:

Met up with Garima and Riddhi, who had been patiently waiting in the heat while we raced! She took lots of pics for us, so thanks Riddhi!

What happened to Garima's race, you say? Well, long distance isn't her thing. Too BORING as she put it! So she just went and rode the 90 km bike course and didn't do the race.

Ready to hit the road.
Zoom zoom.
 After 2 bottles of water, 2 hero burgers (best part of the day, seriously!), 2 cokes and 2 chocolate milks, I was still 3 lbs underweight when I got home. Damn. No stiff/sore feeling and NO debilitating calf heart attacks like last year that left me unable to walk for 2 days post-race! Yay!



My shoulders hurt the most! Again! Thanks Tracey!
Had an awesome massage from my favorite torture RMT at Absolute Endurance, grabbed some sweet deals on tri clothes from Champion Systems, got my medal and thanked the Race Director for putting up a great race. Also made special mention of the little volunteer kid at 19km mark who ran after me for a good 100m to get me the sponges I needed. Great enthusiasm!


 
Bike/Run Podium
Keep pedaling.

Tuesday 18 June 2013

Binbrook Duathlon 2013. (It should really be called..."Race to HERO burgers"!)


5k Run / 30 km Bike / 5 km Run


Lets begin by mentioning that last year edition of this race was horrible! Me and Garima got stuck at the entry of the conservation area  and missed our start! We had to keep chasing the real race and I happened to ride the entire bike course with my rear wheel rubbing against the frame and hitting the chainstay…

Things just went downhill from there! Haha…seems funny only a year later!


So this year’s race went as follows:

The race organizers stepped it up and listened to our concerns from last year. The parking was much more efficient and we made it to the start line with plenty of time (even to do a short warm-up!) However, in my opinion, they fixed  one thing and made another worse! The run course last year was roughly 50% gravel but through some overgrown bushes and mud sludge due to rain. This year, they removed that section and conveniently miscalculated the total distance. It ended up being 5.30 km for each leg. Now, it doesn’t affect ranking at all and you nitpickers out there may say I didn’t run the shortest possible route (tangents…) but I beg to differ. I was the 4th place runner and I took the most direct route there was, and nearly everyone post-race agreed with me.

OK, /rant over. Time to carry on…


Parichit’s Race:

5km Run     – 20:54 mins (5.30kms, 3:55 min/km pace)

30 km bike –  51:20 mins (35.1 km/hr official, 36.0 km/hr recorded avg. without 
                                                   mount/dismount walk)

5 km Run    – 21:20 mins (5.30 kms, 4:01 min/km pace)


Decent legs today. First run was solid as I cruised in 4th overall, and so was the bike. Was able to  average 206W for a 35.7 km/hr pace, which was bang on what I wanted.  My biking and transitions (no flying mounts for me!) still suck so I lost my place from 4th to 12thoverall before the second run!

The second run is usually a sufferfest anyway, but for some reason my legs didn’t open up after the first km like they usually do. I blame it on the damn gravel/grass that deadened all peppi-ness in my stride! I still managed to run down 5 people to finish 7th overall.


Garima’s Race:

5km Run     – 25:47 mins (5.30kms, 12.3 km/hr, 4:52 min/km pace)

30 km bike –  53:01 mins (33.0 km/hr official split)

5 km Run    – 25:38 mins (5.30 kms, 12.4 km/hr, 4:50 min/km pace)


As soon as I saw the results, my first thought was: “Holy shit! Did I just bike that fast?” 
Looks like those torture 20X20 sessions Sunny made me do all winter actually helped! Oh and the fact that I actually didn’t try to wear my aero helmet backwards this time! Little things like helmet aerodynamic advantage add up too.

To top it off, I negative split the 2nd run! It was faster than my 1st run. Sunny is so perplexed how I manage to do this every single time! Haha! Take that, skinny legs!

I think I got my helmet on the right way this time...maybe I should check?
 



Post-race:

We chomped down on some HERO burgers and gulped down cartons of chocolate milk. That’s why we love these MSC races! :D Probably ate way more than we burned in 90 mins of exercise, too! Ah well…

Sunny placed 2nd in his AG and Garima came 3rd in F25-29.






This was a good race!



Tuesday 11 June 2013

Hill Repeats...

Damn hill repeats are a killer. That's all I have to say.

8 Repeats of Poplar Plains Rd. 6-7% average grade for ~450m with 10% peaks, followed by cool-down
 I've been doing them nearly every week for the past 5-7 weeks. Possibly getting better, but these hurt bad every time. Learned to respect the grade!


Photo taken from the Binbrook Duathlon post-race event. Powerman Zofingen has a lot of hills...

Thursday 6 June 2013

Ride for Heart 2013



We love this ride. The weather can be miserable or completely perfect, but this day doesn’t disappoint.

Both me and Garima usually use this day as a training ride and jump at the opportunity for riding on the DVP for hours uninterrupted.

Riding on the highway is awesome. I saw so many families out there with their kids, people on unicycles, tri-clubs and cycling clubs, just happy to be out there.

The weather wasn’t perfect. In fact, far from perfect. Literally 2 mins before the start, it poured like mad (monsoon style!) for a total of 10 mins and we got completely drenched. Wet socks and the works.

To top it off, I brought out my usual race day carbon wheels (w/ a new disc cover!)…which unsurprisingly, had ZERO braking power when it gets that wet.

Oh well, so me and Garima basically soft-pedaled and took it easy the first time up all the way to York Mills dodging giant puddles and splashing each other with wheel-spun streaks of water. At least we had tailwind on the way up and headwind on the way back.

25 kms done and this looked like I was just out for a stupid show ride with all this expensive equipment doddling around at 28-30 km/hr!  Then the weather co-operated and the puddles dried up. Me and Garima evaluated what to do at the aid station on the turnaround, and decided that if the weather stayed OK, we’ll continue with the ride and try to go hard, otherwise, I’d stop on the side of the road and we’d easy pedal back to call it a rainy day.

Luck was on our side. The clouds stayed, but the rain held off for the majority of the remaining ride. We took a chance and tried going fast.


Parichit’s Ride

The ride is supposed to be 75 km, with a loop of the climb at the top section (10km each way) thrown in twice. My goal was to do as much riding as I could until they kicked me off course.

The rest of the ride was basically unremarkable. Well, if you can call dodging people biking with headphones, not knowing rules of the road, not yielding to the left (or better, actually moving to the left instead of yielding on the left!), and general madness that you get with recreational commuters just having fun (which is fair). This is Ride for Heart after all, I expected nothing different from any other year. The best part was a guy who didn’t budge after I repeatedly yelled “ON YOUR LEFT” 10 times before I overtook him. I thought he may have been wearing headphones, but no…as I passed by he pointed to the Emergency Lane on the left side of the highway (past the yellow line) and said “Well, you have all the room there!”… I couldn’t believe it…it’s as if they’ve never driven on the road before, to even know that you are not supposed to bike/drive there. I was more scared thinking what that guy would do in a car.

In the end, I managed 150 kms! Woohoo! So I did the top loop of the DVP between Bayview and York Mills 5 times. The only thing that sucks is that at the end of each way, I’d have to take it easy/coast for 2-5 mins at the turnarounds because of the mass of people looping around the highway exit lanes…This is basically 7 mins or 3 kms each loop! (So you can throw 15 kms out of that 150 kms, out the window).

Combined with the easy pedaling due to the rain we had to do for the first 25 kms, I ended up averaging a paltry 31.7 km/hr. But not to despair! On the highway bits, I averaged 34.0 km/hr with ~205W NP (180W AP) for nearly 135 kms at Zone 2 HR. Did ~3500ft of climbing, too! Yay!

My power numbers outdoors still perplex me, though. I’m a stud indoors with the same power meter and outside, the same effort nets me 30W less. That’s +1 mph right there. Gotta figure this one out.



Garima’s Ride

OK, its still Parichit writing this, so I’ll try my best to sound like Garima!

The past 2 weeks have been hectic with Sunny’s parents visiting and all the sightseeing around Toronto (more on that later…).
So I’m not a big fan of riding alone unless it’s a race. And with Sunny gone doing his thing I wasn’t much motivated to race this day anyway. Come Sunday morning and the rain, the little motivation that I developed was gone.
We rode together for the first 20 km and Sunny’s gracious company letting me draft behind him in exchange for regular splashes of puddle water in my face didn’t settle well with me!

After we split ways on the way down, I got into a groove and spun away. The hills weren’t as bad as I remember but the wind was nasty. Then there were guys who drafted behind me and tried chatting me up at the same time. (Hint: …not a great place to make a move, guys! :D)

Once I completed the second loop back uphill and down, I missed the turn for heading back and found myself on an extra loop back up! Ah well, I had some hydration and couple of micro breaks at the rest station, and before I knew it, I was back in downtown having just ridden 100 km!! That’s a far cry from earlier in the morning when 75 km in the rain was just torture to think of!






Post Ride

The post-race party at the Ride for Heart is always great with lots of food, vendors and great atmosphere. Well, the atmosphere was there today, but the weather wasn’t! As soon as me and Garima found each other and went into the food tent for some bagels/bananas, it started pouring like MAD! So bad that the concerts stopped, and retailers packed up!

The thunderstorms continued on and off for about an hour, 10 minutes at a time. Boy, did we get lucky!

Once we were all fed and the sun came out, we pedaled back home and slept off the tiredness!