After Week Ten

Week Ten was a strong week.  The next event on the calendar will be a dragon boat tournament in San Francisco (mid-September), so training will be uninterrupted for two weeks.  After that, the dragon boat season will be over and it will be triathlon training all day every day.  I am a little concerned that the dragon boat season ends only a mere two months prior to IMAZ, which has limited my triathlon training somewhat.  But I knew this coming in to the training, and my coach doesn't seem to concerned.  I guess that's a good sign.  He did mention that after the dragon boat season, my weekend training sessions will be much, much longer.

But enough about what's coming up ahead.  This week I tried out a new area for cycling: Rancho Palos Verdes.  Lovely rolling hills, seaside cliffs with stunning views, nice breezes and lots of bicycle lanes made for a great Saturday ride.  I've heard many great things about this area and am glad to have finally rode more than just "PV East."  From the start point, we rode counter-clockwise until we hit the southern end of Hawthorne Boulevard (the red line in the middle).  Took Hawthorne up and hooked a left at the northern end to do the western edge of the loop again before heading back to our cars. 

I was very happy with this ride for a multitude of reasons.  A focus on this ride was nutrition.  Following my experience at the Santa Barbara Triathlon, I wanted to work on making sure I had enough nutrition during training (and races, of course).  For this ride, it meant a goal of 100 calories per hour.  I took a PowerBar (240 calories), a Gu (90) and a Kashi bar (150), for total of 480 calories.  A bit more than 100/hour but it felt about right.  Total riding time was a few minutes over 3 hours, but total time was just a hair over 4 hours.  This included one pit stop for water (which was probably unnecessarily long due to a very informative cycling chat with a new riding partner who is very fast and very experienced) as well as a stop to fix a flat tube early in the ride.  Over 3100 feet climbed cumulative in this ride and I still felt relatively fresh at the end.  There's certainly something to this training thing.

Even after taking in 480 calories, I happily scarfed down a big late lunch of Hawaiian food at Back Home in Lahaina.  Strongly recommend the Hawaiian BBQ Chicken there!

Week Ten totals:

Bike: 39.86 miles + 80 min on the trainer
Run: 12.78 miles
Swim: 6044 meters  (3.75 miles)

Total Time: 11:50