Uncle Travelling Matt .com — the personal site of Matt Gifford

My training program is starting to resemble the Great Wall of China, in that it’s hard work and involves a lot of bricks! Triathlon bricks however are back-to-back training sessions in two of the three triathlon sports. Usually it means a cycle-to-bike, as your legs feel like “bricks” when you get on my bike, but it also covers the other combinations.

Apart from my Monday rest day, I’m doing a minimum of two sessions per day (2-3 hours in total per day) for the next 5 weeks, including 4 time trial triathlon’s at the beach on the weekends. My little sister has kindly volunteered to mind my gear during the swim and run parts of these. Tomorrow is going to be a hard day, as I have a 2.5 hour cycle session, which is pretty huge probably 65km or more in distance, and my legs are still a little sore from the 20km run on Sunday!

My swimming is improving the slowest, but there is steady improvement. I can now breath on both sides with relative ease, but my stoke count is still very high: 27 per 25m when I checked morning, good is something like 16 or 17. So there’s a lot of room for improvement there! One of the first things I need to work on is, on my breathing stroke my other arm goes back almost immediately (rather than waiting for the one on my breathing side to return first), this is a bad habit that will require some conscious effort to break…

On Sunday we went over to Rotorua’s Blue Lake to watch the race 5 sprint triathlon, part of the New Zealand Triathlon series (I’m doing race 8). This time we got there before the race started, got to see both transitions and an idea of what a good time is for this length event. The guy that won did it in about an hour and splits were about 10min swim (750m), 35min bike (16km) and 20min run (5.5km). The lengths for my race are slightly different, and in fact had changed from previously posted when I looked at the Triathlon New Zealand website this morning.

My race is now a 500m swim, 16km bike and 5km run, which is a fair bit shorter than when I first signed up (750m/20k/10k) in December. While I’m sure the training I’ve done for the extra distance won’t hurt, I’m going to focus a bit more on speed work now and drilling transitions as these are all important for short triathlons.

One of the many reasons to wear glasses while cycling, apart from wind burn, is to stop rouge bees impaling your eye ball!! Yesterday I went out on my first long cycling session, and so far the cycling side of the triathlon training is going well. After having not been on a bike for 15 years, it only took a couple of rides to get my balance back and things are now going rather smoothly. I’m still slightly concerned about being run-over though—the roads in this country are really dodgy!

I read a tip recently that said during the last few hundred metres to put the bike into a higher gear (so the pedals spin easily) so you legs transition back into walking/running mode easier. This really does help, my legs didn’t turn to jelly like they did after the first time on the bike, and I think I would of been good to go for a run straight afterwards, if I’d wanted to. I’m also going do a little research and see if there’s anything I can do to improve my body position on the bike, as I’m sure there’s a few more tricks to learn!

This time out I went prepared with a spare inner tube, portable tyre pump and CO₂ canister, since the furthest point from home yesterday would of been maybe 20km and I didn’t fancy walking that if I got a flat tyre again! Also I think the likely cause of the previous flat tyre might of been low tyre pressure. Bicycle tyres seem to need re-inflating far more often than car tyres—I guess this is obvious to the cyclists out there, but I’m relatively new to this… Fortunately I now also have a floor standing bicycle pump with built-in pressure gauge, so I can check them before I go out, and as an added bonus it also can inflate my Swiss Ball as well

Yesterday the weather was absolutely brilliant over at The Mount, except from the wind which apart from frustrating the athletes lured you into thinking it wasn’t as hot as it was—needless to say I’m somewhat sunburnt today! The race started at 6.30am, so we didn’t get over there in time to see the swim portion, which was a bit disappointing as I was keen to see both transitions. My race is a sprint length one, so transitions are quite important to your time. However, I did learn a few tricks for the bike and run parts, so overall it was a great day.

Btw, for those that don’t know a half-ironman is: 2km swim, 90km bike and 21km run… and no I won’t be doing one of this length just yet! lol.

Well training is going pretty well, the whole swim, cycle, run thing is coming together quite nicely. Until this morning that was, first up it was 45min in the pool working on technique—including the oh so important not using your legs, no seriously, triathlon swimmers don’t swim with their legs. The swim practice went really well, and I’m confident come race day I’ll fly through the swim without any difficultly. And if I say that often enough I’m sure it’ll come true, lol.

So a quick shower and onto the bike, first time out in my new Orca cycling gear too. A few hills and I get to the point roughly furthest from my apartment, and what do I hear?! Well I wasn’t too sure, since it was the first time I’d heard it but unsurprisingly it sounded exactly like a flat tyre!! arrrgggh… yes I probably should of had a tyre repair kit with me but I didn’t. So my good training session and early start at the office this morning went completely out the window!

Putting all that behind me, tomorrow morning I’m heading across to watch the Tauranga Half Ironman. It’ll be good to see how people who know what they’re doing do it, lol. Should be interesting… if I get motived I might blog some photos from it here tomorrow arvo.