Saturday, August 31, 2013

Week of ironman whistler

I have been riding 3-4 times a week for the last several weeks. Most of the rides are cruise rides. Once a week I ride with Nick or Eric for 40-65 miles. After warm-up, we pull for 5 minutes then recover for 5 minutes. Rinse and repeat until home.

Last Tuesday, Nick and I decided to ride out to Ranier and back. After 20 minutes of warm-up, we took turns pulling. As we started on the range roads we quickly spun out because of a nice tail wind. This section of road is 6.5 miles long. If you have a tail wind at the beginning you will get a head wind at the end. I knew there were going to be some challenging sections due to the wind. It was the hardest ride I have ever done, almost 2.5 hours of hard riding.

Drove up to whistler to cheer on a couple of friends racing. The drive up was very scenic. I rode the course on Friday. It is a tough course. The garmin had 7000+ feet elevation gained. Many of the pros had it over 6000. The first 58 miles consists of rolling with a few steep pitches spread out. The next 32 miles are pancake flat with a little wind. The last 22 miles involves some of the hardest climbing of the course. My average speed for the ride dropped from 20.6 through the first 89 miles to 19.1 during the section back to whistler. If the winds and heat are present, the bike will be so much more difficult.

Saturday I ran to the swim start, jumped in for one loop, and ran back. It was a little choppy in the water because it rained that morning on and off, so conditions were not favorable.

The conditions on race day were almost perfect, little to no wind and mild temps.