Talk about another great day!\u00a0 No, I didn’t come anywhere close to the podium either with my results, but yesterday was a big day for a lot of reasons.\u00a0 Let’s dig into it:<\/p>\n
– Trying to be frugal, I decided to avoid peak hotel rate season and left NYC at 3:30 a.m. to drive out.\u00a0 Trying to go to sleep at 10 p.m. wound up being impossible, so total sleep equated to 2 hours and change.\u00a0 Not ideal before a race.\u00a0 Oh well.<\/p>\n
– Made it to Montauk just before 6 a.m. and drove straight to T2.\u00a0 This event featured two different locations for transitions, so I left my sneakers and run hat at T2 before driving to T1 which is near the swim start.<\/p>\n
– Got the T1 area set up rather quickly.\u00a0 I’m really proud to have so much experience to be able to set up my area so fast.\u00a0 As a minimalist and with such experience, all I have to do is set up the bike.\u00a0 I no longer use a bucket of water to rinse my feet, I no longer wear socks, and I don’t have to leave any extraneous “what if I need it” stuff.\u00a0 Makes for a much easier and lower stressed pre-race experience.<\/p>\n
– I started my “career” in multisport on Long Island and as such, I had so many friends at this event.\u00a0 Chatting with everyone including my old swim coach was so enjoyable, but it wound up leading to my demise.\u00a0 No one rushed folks out of the transition area, so I leisurely strolled to the swim start and chatted up other folks before someone said, “Hey mister, looks like your swim wave just left.”\u00a0 Rather than freak out which probably should have been the right reaction, I kinda shrugged and waded in before generally getting into a swim direction to meet up with that group.\u00a0 I figure that I was about 2 minutes and change late.\u00a0 Oops!\u00a0 I felt so blas\u00e9 about my lateness probably because I knew this was more of a training race for me than anything else.\u00a0 You can guarantee that next week at the NYC Tri, that won’t be the case!<\/p>\n
– The current was definitely not in our collective favor, and there was some choppiness to it.\u00a0 I didn’t really mind but found that my progress was slooooowwww!\u00a0 A little ways past the halfway point, I found a good rhythm and felt like I was swimming hard and with good technique.\u00a0 As I translate that to the NYC Tri, I’m encouraged since that event also features a point-to-point swim along a fairly narrow corridor.\u00a0 Since I’ve already done this event\u00a0five times, and with the confidence that I got from yesterday’s latter-half portion of the swim, I’m hoping to engage that effort fairly early on next week\u00a0and get a better swim time than in years past.<\/p>\n
– T1 was fast.\u00a0 It has been all season.\u00a0 I was in the top 4%.\u00a0 I wasn’t in turbo mode and had I been, I could have maybe saved 6-8 seconds.\u00a0 Doing so would have put me in the top 2%.\u00a0 No big deal.<\/p>\n
– I had planned all along on hitting the bike course hard.\u00a0 As soon as I got rolling, I had the fire within me and cycled hard.\u00a0 I passed so many frickin people and it felt great!\u00a0 It felt like I could go hard all day!\u00a0 At one point, my friend Bobby passed me but not convincingly, so I decided to ride up and be near enough to use him as a rabbit, but not near enough to benefit from any draft.\u00a0 Some other guy passed me and got right up behind Bobby, a clear violation.\u00a0 It is simply cheating.\u00a0 I wanted to say something, but it wasn’t my wheel he was riding.\u00a0 A few times, Bobby put on the gas and so did the other guy.\u00a0 The two of them battling it out helped me; all I needed to do was stay within 30 or so feet.\u00a0 It was great motivation and while I felt like I was riding hard, I wasn’t hitting a maximum threshold that would have longer term effects, e.g. the rest of the bike course (which was hilly) or the run.\u00a0 Eventually, I scaled back a bit to get some nutrition (gel) and water and when we got to the one climb which was steep but short, two other guys went screaming past me.\u00a0 As expected, they couldn’t sustain the effort and I found great pride in passing them with confidence about halfway up.\u00a0 I had a fast cadence, and just to make a point (not sure to whom really), I clicked to a couple of harder gears, got up out of the saddle, and really cranked up the speed.\u00a0 My legs felt a little twinge, but since the climb was short, I wasn’t worried.\u00a0 Eventually, I finished with the 23rd best bike time out of around 500 people.\u00a0 It was also my personal record for this race and according to my stats, I averaged 23.04 mph!\u00a0 That’s pretty good for me.<\/p>\n
– T2 wasn’t as fast as it could have been.\u00a0 I wanted to make sure that my feet were totally clear of sand from the beach just before T1.<\/p>\n
– Once on the run, I found that my stride length was very short and my rate of breathing very high.\u00a0 I was making decent progress, but I was definitely tired from the bike effort.\u00a0 At the one mile mark, my pace was around 8:30, so I wasn’t thrilled.\u00a0 At the halfway point, the course went uphill and I was worried that it would hurt me but to my great surprise, I powered up and once at the top, I found some good rhythm.\u00a0 The second mile split was just under 8 minutes, and I knew that I’d get the last mile to be much faster.\u00a0 Sure enough, I was around 7:20 in the last mile and it felt like I was gliding.\u00a0 The last portion up the hill to the finish line by the lighthouse was a piece of cake and I felt fantastic.<\/p>\n
– I didn’t finish that high overall but was in the top 25%.\u00a0 If you take away the swim, I was in the top 12%.\u00a0 But, this sport is called Triathlon<\/em> and therefore, one cannot remove the swim component.<\/p>\n So here we are, 6 days away from the most important race of this, my ninth season of multisport.\u00a0 I rested a lot in recent weeks, put in some time\u00a0building\u00a0more core strength, and did very focused types of workouts that were either low intensity long-ish distances, or very short high intensity efforts.\u00a0 I made sure to only do 2 or so workouts per discipline per week and followed a very good diet free of high sugar foods and full of fruits and veggies.\u00a0 Drinking has been to a minimum, water consumption ridiculously high, and sleeping has been plentiful.\u00a0 The neck issue\u00a0is nearly a non-issue and following yesterday’s experience on the bike and run, confidence is sky high.\u00a0 The lack of fatigue in my leg muscles was readily apparent yesterday, so all I\u00a0have to do is maintain this state for another week.\u00a0 I can’t wait til race day!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Talk about another great day!\u00a0 No, I didn’t come anywhere close to the podium either with my results, but yesterday was a big day for a lot of reasons.\u00a0 Let’s dig into it: – Trying to be frugal, I decided to avoid peak hotel rate season and left NYC at 3:30 a.m. to drive out.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-training"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions\/139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}