Tri-ing to eat tasty food: Swimming against the (tide/wetsuit)?

Chew Lake - BADTri TTT

With a fortnight of solid training almost complete I now have the Harbourside triathlon quickly coming into view. Coming soon after this is Wimbleball 70.3, this is going to be a tough month. Along with Elisa who is doing the sprint two of my friends are doing Bristol Tri, Neil and John, so it will be fun even though it does add a little more pressure to the day to put in a performance. John, who is training for Iroman UK, came third last year, and so I won't get anywhere near him. Neil on the other hand, is a man who likes to stab people with hot forks. He has "not trained", but ran a 1:38 half marathon so he will probably be in good shape. When he did Tenby in 2012 he went under 2:20 for the Bristol tri, so I'm hoping I can get under 2:30 and preferably closer to the 2:20 mark. The key for me will be the run, close to 45 mins and I have a chance. That is if I survive the swim, I suspect Neil may try to drown me. Watch this space....

So as for training, with Wimbleball very much in the back of my mind I tried to get some time on my legs with a couple of long runs. The first was 14 miles in about 2:10. I purposefully aimed to keep really easy, this ended up being about 9:30 miles. I'm not sure what to make of this as I'd expect to be a bit quicker for the same effort level, but equally, my legs seemed to hold up well for the most part and weren't too sore the next day which was the aim. One of the things I want to avoid with the Ironman training is running "junk" miles just for the sake of it, as doing so massively increasing my chances of injury. One thing I did notice was my left leg was working harder on the hill through Ashton Court. This is a bit of a concern as Wimbleball is the complete opposite of flat. I'll keep working on the leg-strength exercises the physio has given me and hope this helps to improve things. The second long run was about 14-15 miles with 45 minutes of running through the grass, trails and forests in Ashton court. I'm going to try and get at least one more of these long trail sessions in before Wimbleball as I think they're really useful for avoiding injury and good race prep for Wimbleball as they're hilly and uneven.

New Bike Nutrition Strategy.

On the bike, BADTri has started to organise a series of bike TT's, the first was 40km, with three loops around Chew lake on the UC251 circuit. The loop is a fairly even 13.4 km, the majority of it is fast and flat but there are a couple of bumps which kill me. The first lap was a 24:08, which I probably pushed a little too hard up the hills on as I got some big spikes in my heart rate, this dropped to 24:33 for the second, and a final 24:47, bringing the total to 1:13:28. A sub 1:15 is pretty reasonable. My bike split for the Harbourside Tri last year was 1:14:32, but I think this is a flatter/faster 40km so I'm hoping to see a bit of an improvement next Sunday. Fortunately I don't think I'll have to start implementing my new Ben's cookies based feeding system just yet.

Dip in Henleaze Lake - a toasty 16 degrees.

One highlight of training was an open water swim in Henleaze lake. The lake is in an old quarry that has been flooded. The water was plenty warm enough with my wetsuit on and I managed something like a 3km swim based on the time I was in the water. Unfortunately, I am coming to the realisation that my wetsuit is a bit shit. I bought an Orca TRN, which has loads of excellent reviews, but it stops me from swimming properly, I feel like I'm fighting the wetsuit more than swimming forward which is not a good sign. As with everything in triathlon, spending a lot of money is the key to fixing your problems. The trouble is I don't know if I can justify spending £2-300 ... and the rest on a new suit.

Defending my picnic from Elisa and passing animals.

One good part of my job is that I sometimes get to go and see new bits of engineering. Occasionally this turns out to be bike related. In the past week I got to look at a new mountain bike produced by Robot bikes. They have 3D printed titanium joints, which are joined with carbon fibre tubes. These were designed by HiEta a company my friend Desi works for. The bike is pretty interesting from an engineering perspective. I'm not 100% convinced of some of the claims they have been making and at £5k a pop is probably a little out of my price range. The idea is that they will make a bespoke geometry bike for you by modifying the joint geometry. The joints, well some of them, have been optimised by a company called Altair to minimise structural weight. There are a few question marks there, given this is my research field, but the pitch was aimed at the general public and not academics. It was an interesting trip, and I got some free 3D printed goodies even if they weren't giving full bikes away. I'm hoping to do some work with Dassi bikes over the next six months who have more of a road/TT aim with their projects.