The Training Begins - sort of

It's 280 days until theC'oeur D'Alene Ironman.  Right now I'm thinking I should have picked a location that was easier to spell.  CDA will have to do. 

I haven't started training yet. This is the offseason. But unbelievably it's been almost a month since the USAT Nationals in Burlington. Haven't touched my road bike or tri bike since. The road bike has a flat, actually two flats, and the tri bike is gunked up with gatorade and I need to clean it and fix the bottle bracket, which cost me ten minutes in the Nationals when the bottle came loose. 

So right now I'm just trying not to fall out of shape. And the woman with all the great writing ideas says I should start a diary of the Ironman prep so I can write a book about it.  Just an hour a day she says. An hour! Damn, that won't leave much time for rewriting my novel for the 5th time, which is what I am also doing now. And I'm officially starting that today.  Maybe I should make a diary on that too.

My plan for today was to do a lakefront run and then go to Heather's super spin class - super meaning it's a longer class - ninety minutes. But I slept until 7 am and didn't get to the Y where my run starts until 7:40. 

I ran for 51 minutes - easy tempo run - I figure it was probably about 5.5 miles. Don't know because I left my Garmin GPS in Provincetown, but they found in my room and are sending it to me.  So soon I will have data again. Right now it's okay because I'm not pushing anything and it's nice not have that monitor looking over my shoulder making me run faster. I felt good on the run. The hamstring which had been sore and tight at Cape Cod felt fine.  Sore foot good too.

I keep trying to imagine running a marathon after a 2.5 mile swim and 112 mile on the bike. I've never run a marathon. Craig says it is not necessary. It's a different experinece when you run that segment after everything else. In my ambitous imagination I see myself capable of running an 11 hour 30 minute triathlon. 

When I run go through the numbers:   I did a half marathon swim in 35 minutes - so if I get faster on the swim I should be able to do it 70 minutes. But let's be realistic and call it 75 plus 5 for transition.  So how long will th bike take.  If I can average 18.66 mph I can finish the bike in 6 hours.  Probably totally unrealistic.  I will need to figure out how to fuel myself better but it's possible I could do that. So after another five minute transition I would starting the run at 7 hours 25 minutes.  If I could run the marathon in 4 hours 5 minutes I would finish in 11 hours 30 minutes.  that would be a pace of 9:21 per mile.   Mostly when I do these calculations what I'm thinking is that four hours is goddamn long time to be running. 

It will be interesting to look back at this entry after the race.