December: Crawling Across The Line

December has been an interesting one for me, as reflected in the lack of posting going on here. It seems a lot of things have caught up to me and I haven't really taken the time to adjust my expectations as required. It has still largely been a lot of fun as the rest of 2010 has been. However a couple of 'races' have slapped me fairly sternly in the face. A reality check I suppose on how much you can cram into one life.

Early December saw me grace the start line for my first long course triathlon since Sri Chinmoy and Penrith 1994. Strangely enough it seems I missed the changing of the name for this distance to half ironman only to find I am in the last race under this title as they are reverting to 70.3. Which makes a lot of sense given we use metric measurement in Australia.

None the less the last half ironman for Australia turned into a 1/3 ironman due to the flooding of the lakes in Penrith, with the swim cancelled and the bike leg adjusted to avoid the need for carrying flippers on the ride. Having seen the lake I was pleased not to be entering, not mearly due to my natural sinking ability but more in watching the floating Islands now gracing the views from Parliament House.

Starting in one of the last 'dry waves' I set out intending to sit up frontish without being silly. A constant reminder floating in my mind that I had in fact only covered the 90km distance of the ride once in training since the Perth to Sydney ride of 2006. The plan of sitting on 4min k's panned out perfectly with a run to feel process bringing me in on 16mins 11secs.

Having racked the bike the night before it seems I managed to check everything but the distance of the computer sensor to the magnet. No info available so the ride to feel process remained the order of the day. I was hopeful of lapping around 30mins a lap for the 17.#km circuit and felt comfortable in this as the ride began, the first 3 laps feeling great. Out the back end of the course however the wind was starting to knock me around a bit and the 4th lap felt much tighter. Going into the final lap of the cycle it was evident that my lack of time to train (or time I made to train) on the bike was starting to affect my fluidity and the wind was bloody hurting.

Post race timing shows the ride to feel is still fairly accurate with splits of 30:45, 1:00:09, 1:30:22, 2:00:45 and the blow out lap for 2:35:21. Not brilliant average speed but happy to have found the pace early and settled in.

As with the final lap of the ride the run falls into the basket of all over red rover. Cramps from the 1st km restricted me to a gentle shuffle and walking the aid stations to regain control of spasming quads. Quite aptly put by former student Alex S with the comment "come on old man" as he ran by during one of the more spectacular sessions of quad rapture. In the end a 1:58:58 for a total time of 4:50:30 gave me a rude upper cut to reality in terms of the difference between rocking up to an Olympic Distance event half hearted and the longer races. None the less happy to have found myself back in the scene.

The rest of December was dominated by a ridiculous work finish, trying not to get an N-Award for new parenting and Christmas stuff. Must say if I could be Santa for a day then this would be way too much fun. Particularly if it was say for Genevieve's first Christmas. The end result being however that I actually missed a lot more training that I had been maintaining up to this point. Including the vast majority of the BMMC Saturday 6ft Sessions.

Having not learnt a thing from what is now something like 28 years of experience of under training (1982 to 2010 I think = 28) into events lead me to the false expectation that a cruisey 36km around the Royal National Park might be a good way to finish the year.

Not being able to claim the biggest hit the wall experience of my life, for all present will know that a lap of Bell around 2000 as the first ride back in a year will always hold a special place in my head space. The Awesome Audley certainly lays claim to the blow up of the past 5 years. I believe the official sequence with around 8km to go was, Call Kel "I'm out pick me up please", sit down, bag off, sook like a baby on the side of the road until 12 mins latter a runner comes by and suggests it is not that far and it is ok to join him if I can get over myself.

Thankfully I managed to finish off because a DNF in training is never going to be allowed to be forgotten in BMMC sessions. All though a 5hr:10ish min lap may well be mentioned a few times as well. All I can say is it is now 3 days latter and I now have an understanding of why I felt so crap. Given that writing this is most likely the longest period of time I have spent off the duny since getting home from the run.

Now for the more tasteful (oh to be able to eat without fear) as promised a song for Genevieve from today's post: