Big Jo training Nov 22 - Nov 28

SWIM

Squad x 3
Non-squad x 1
Sea swim x 2
~15.5km

This week I did the Kohi Summer Swim Series 2000m race which was fun but not much to report about it unfortunately. It was a bit choppy further out so they had to go to the contingency plan of 500m multilap race. I swallowed a lot of water which didn't taste very nice. I just noticed that my beloved Blue Seventy Helix MuppetSuit is not looking so sprightly anymore so hopefully Son of MuppetSuit will be made before Christmas.
I have been trying to make friends with my pull buoy in an attempt to learn how to swim faster. I absolutely suck with a PB and make little forward progression unless I am wearing paddles.  But I am persevering and while my PB may be looking a little worse for wear hopefully it will turn me into a better swimmer...

Baby shark teeth marks courtesy of G-dog in her chewing puppy dog stage

Looks a bit more normal from this side. Thanks to Haydn for naming it for me. As if anyone else would want it anyway.

 BIKE

Had a few TapTap issues this week after the hub batteries ran out last weekend which resulted in a couple of rides with no power. But after a rejig of the inside of the hub it seems to be all good now no thanks to Cycleops who never replied to my SOS email which I am still very dark about. If Taptap ever needs help again and they don't get back to me I may get nasty with them.  Sadly I didn't get any data for our Tuesday Waitak ride as a result.
Only managed a 3hr ride on Sunday due to a cleat bolt that fell out somewhere around Maraetai so I had to ride with my cleat hanging by a thread, a bit like having a pedal made out of slippery ice - not much fun.

RUN

2 x pool runs (whoopdy fricken doo...)

I went back to the Sports Physician today and after him and another doctor reviewed my MRI they decided I have a stress fracture of my lesser trochanter... I would prefer to call it a stress reaction.
Which ever it is it is still no good for running - my 1 minute intervals in the weekend ended after the 2nd one because it hurt and did not feel like it was doing me any good. So I will continue to pool run and swim and bike my little leggies off and will do another test run in two weeks time... And in the meantime I will drink lots of chocolate milk and try to make my bones strong.

Big Jo training Nov 15 - Nov 21

SWIM

Squad x 3
Non-squad x 2
Sea swim x 2
~ 17km

Whoa look at all that swimming. One of those days was a DOUBLE swim day as well!!! Nothing  much interesting happened in any of those swims, my old favorite goggles tried to die on me but I resurrected them once again so they will live to swim another day. I actually got a bit of chaffing from my togs from swimming so much - oh my!! Didn't do Haydn's Kohi swim as I thought I would be recovering from Karapiro but I will be lining up next week instead.

BIKE

Have been a bit lazy and haven't downloaded all my rides so not sure of my hours and kms for the week, it won't be huge though, plus TapTaps hub batteries died on me so will have to make some up.  Did a long(ish) ride in the weekend up the Waitaks and got dropped by Kezzle-Anne who normally sits behind me and heavy breathes in my ear.  He has been on a Poo Power Program and has improved phenomenally this season - he is a classic example of the Power of Poo.
I suffered quite badly up the Waitaks - its been a while since I've done long hills like that and it showed. I think we should be riding out there every week now that summer is upon us. Although it wasn't looking very tropical up there in the weekend.

The past week has been pretty dark for cyclists in NZ with 5 being killed in the space of 4 days. One person killed 3 cyclists in one go. One of the cyclists was girl who was a similar age to me riding along Tamaki Drive about half an hour after I had ridden over that exact same spot - pretty scary. It has definitely made me think twice about how I am riding and what the cars around me are doing. Sometimes it does feel like the cars are actually trying to hit us though.

A little reminder that it could have been any of us

RUN

0 hours 0 mins
0km

Hip is still poo (not poo as in the Power of Poo, poo as in shit). It is a lot better than it was but even running across the road hurts. My MRI showed some mild bone odema around my lesser trochanter and some odema around the origin of vastus lateralis on the femur (ie. bone stress and a muscle strain). It was reported as all being mild so nothing which can definitively say this is what is causing your pain. And I wonder how many asymptomatic runners would have signs of bone odema on an MRI.... But clinically it presents as a stress fracture/stress reaction so that is how we will have to treat it, I can attempt a 5min run this weekend but based on my run across the lawn yesterday I'm not holding out much hope.
I think the dreaded aqua-jogging awaits...

Big Jo training Nov 1 - Nov 14, Karapiro Half Ironman and a pain in the hip

SWIM

Swimming has been going swimmingly (as usual...) after my shocker in Taiwan.  The new thing is our dear friend Haydn Woolley's new summer swim series which is on a Thursday evening at Kohi beach.  The first race of the series was a bit difficult with a pretty big chop causing them to go to the contigency plan of a 500m loop instead of out and back.  But the next race was much better weather so we were able to swim all the way 1km out and back for a 2km swim.  Its a pretty good way to make sure I get an extra swim in and good to practice open water swimming so I'll be doing as many of the races as I can over summer.

BIKE

While I was in Taiwan someone raped and pillaged my Serrotica road bike and left it crank and BB-less forcing me and RooRoo to become more at one with each other.  The weekend after Taiwan I was back into a 4hr ride with some uptempo work which I actually held pretty good power for and this last week got back into my efforts during the week.  This weekend's long ride was Karapiro Half but more about that in a sec.

RUN

This where the sad part starts.
My first proper run back from Taiwan was on the Wednesday after and I noticed a bit of niggly hip/groin pain. It just niggled away for my next few runs but really came to a head after I did the O'Hagan's 5km run the following week - it was so sore by the end and the next day was way worse.  At this stage I was pretty concerned it was an Injury Which Shall Not Be Named.
So I have since had a bone scan which looked pretty clear to me (ie no ball of fire on my bone like with my tibial stress fracture) however it was reported as having a subtle area of increased uptake around the trochanteric region - ie some bone stress around the outside of my hip bone. But you really needed a magnifying glass to see the increased uptake, so its not completely convincing as a stress fracture but more like a stress reaction which is a precursor to a stress fracture. So I am hoping that 4 weeks off running will fix it but I will be getting an MRI next week which will give us a better idea of what is going on. In any case it is Very Poos.

KARAPIRO HALF IRONMAN

So the whole hip thing came up the week of Karapiro Half and when I got up on Wednesday morning after the O'Hagan's run I realized there was no way I would be running at Karapiro. I was pretty gutted as I was really looking forward to the race.
So I withdrew my entry and offered myself as a swim/biker if anyone needed it and got teamed up with a young Cambridge girl who was keen to run.
Things didn't start out so well even before the race when I filled up my fronty bottle and it immediately started leaking - it seemed my patch up job from Taiwan wasn't so good. But it was leaking slowly so I knew I get some use out of it, plus I had a bottle on my frame so it wasn't too much of a biggie.
The swim went pretty well, we swam on the rowing course which is quite cool.  It was an in the water or dive off the pontoon start - most people chose to start in the water but I really wanted to dive. This didn't go so well for me as I almost landed on tiop of someone and my goggles filled with water. Oh well.
The first 500m was a bit congested but then I was pretty much on my own and came out of the water as 7th female and just ahead of the 2nd individual female (oh my...). I tried a couple of steps jogging but my hip hurt too much so I did the walk of shame all the way up to T1 - and it was a loooooong way... About 300m and I got passed by a tonne of people and as I walked into T1 I heard on the loudspeakers they were playing Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run"- how ironic.
I think my swim must have been around 32mins which is a slight improvement of late but still pretty crap.
So I jumped on my bike and off I went. My bike goal was to catch Nicky who had a much faster swimmer than me and while Nicky would normally be much faster than me she was just on a road bike with no aero bars and hadn't done much training.
I had a few Nicky mirages as I went along but finally saw her up ahead at about the halfway mark. There was a huge long downhill and I hammered it as hard as I could when something came flying off my bars, it took me a few seconds to take stock then I realized it was my TapTap CPU - disaster!!!! I had a moment of indecision - whether I turn around or carry on and go back for it later, then realized I could never leave TapTap on the side of the road so had to turn around and ride back up the hill.  It was pretty gutting seeing all the people I had worked so hard to pass just cruising down while I went the opposite way.  Luckily TapTap was easy to spot but the battery and battery cover had aborted themselves and were nowhere to be seen. I didn't know what was more sad - Nicky and all the people I had passed riding away from me or all the power data I had just lost...
Anyways I carried on riding hard to make up for lost time and ended up catching everyone I wanted to (including Nicky) so all was not completely lost. It a pretty tough course - very hilly and very rough roads so I came in with a time of 2hrs53, I think I would have lost around 3mins with my TapTap drama so we'll round it down to 2hrs 50. In any case I had a fastest bike split of the individual females...
My runner did a fine job and we ended up winning the women's team section.
The rest of the team did well expect Davo who had a mechanical issue (how convenient...) and had to turn around after 10km on the bike.  Nicky had a good ride, Jess swam fast and J-Rad was 10th individual despite running himself dry by eating and drinking all his nutrition in the first 2hrs on the bike...

A few kg's skinnier than when he started...

Its only the second year that the Karapiro Half has been held and its a great event - a few little things here and there which need to be tidied up but definitely has the potential to be one of the big events on the NZ triathlon calendar. Last year I missed out on it because of my tibial stress fracture so I got a bit closer this year but fingers crossed that next year I'll be lining up for the whole thing.

Taiwan 70.3 Race Report

One of the reasons I chose Taiwan to race was because it is a new race I thought it may attract a weaker field which could work in my favour.  Turns out my sneaky plan was foiled as a few decent girls decided to show up (Michelle Wu - Japan 70.3 winner, Belinda Granger, multiple Ironman and 70.3 winner, Maki Nishiuchi - can't remember her results but she's good...) and so on.

They haven't posted any results up yet and my watch battery died so I have no times for anything yet but the general consensus is that it wasn't a very fast course.

SWIM
The swim was a mass beach start, the Pros got a couple of meters head start. Beach starts are not my friend - I should really practice them because I never know whether I should run or dolphin dive (usually ends badly) or what to do. Anyway it wasn't too bad but I was pretty quickly engulfed in the the AG men coming up from behind.
As much as I was a fan of wearing a wetsuit it really was a bit warm and I was cooking by about 10mins. I had a few groups to swim with for most of the way but encountered quite a few annoying breaststokers on the second lap which broke us up a bit.
There was quite a swell the further out we got and I swallowed quite a lot of water.
Not quite sure of my time but think it may have been around 35-36mins which is probably my worst ever. I really don't know what is up with my swimming, I blame Haydn and the Teps for abandoning me, I've been extra sucky since then.

BIKE
Bike started off well until around the 15km when I rode over a huge hole in the road (refer other blog about shocking state of the roads) and heard a bad noise and RooRoo kind of stopped on me. I stopped to investigate assuming it was a puncture but turned out to be my fronty aero bottle which runs pretty snug with the front wheel had dropped down a fraction with the jolt and was now resting on my front wheel. I had some issues with it leading up to IMWI and had patched up a little hole which had been covered with tape, this had pulled the tape off and water was now leaking out. Awesome. I hitched it up so it was clear again and carried on and just used the bottle on my frame. Caught a couple of the girls ahead of me and got passed by a few men but mostly rode on my own.
The wind was pretty bad. Like Kona strength. Seriously.
Mostly side/tail or side/head and very gusty, had a few scary moments and had to pick my times to take my hands off the handlebars.  The second lap was worse with a pretty full on headwind for a decent part of it.
Bike time was around 2hrs43 according to TapTap, will have to check the other girls times to see how it compares but it seems pretty slow to me. I think the guys were riding in the 2.20's so maybe that's not too bad.

RUN
My favourite part. Didn't feel like my favourite running out of transition and up a long hill.  In fact the first 3km were pretty much uphill. After that it was mostly flat with a nice downhill section.
We didn't escape the wind on the run, it was there too making forward progression a bit hard at times. I even lost my hat at one stage.
Took about 5km to start feeling good, then I felt awesome for about 6-7km then I felt average again. It was pretty hot - like high 20's, but I kept cool getting water and sponges from the aid stations so the heat wasn't really an issue.
I have no idea what my run time was - at times it felt like I was going for under 90mins, other times it was more like 120mins. I think the fastest girls time was only 1hr28 and the men were around 1hr23, so I expect I was around 1hr35 but who knows.

So overall ended up in 8th place which is my best placing at an international event, so maybe not too bad for a muppet like me, but will wait to see the times compared with the others before I make any vast, sweeping statements.

Post-race feast - lucky the breakfast buffet was still open when I finished. Nom nom

Followed by dessert

View while I was enjoying my meal

The performance of the day must go to Jamie Whyte for winning the sprint for 2nd from 4 x IMFrance winner Marcel Zamora and also to Kieran Doe for coming 4th.

Next up will be the Karapiro Half Ironman on November 13th.

Taiwan 70.3

Hello and welcome to Kenting, Taiwan!

So after 2 plane trips and a 2hr car trip we arrived at the Yoho Beach Resort at about 2am on Wednesday morning.  The pre-race email said to expect sunny weather 25-30 degrees. Wednesday was overcast, about 22deg and very windy, probably better for racing anyway (maybe not the wind...).

Artwork at the Yoho Beach Resort

Since then I have been for a few rides and runs on the course and swum in the pool at the resort.
Swimming in the pool has been interesting, its pretty big but a funny shape so I reckon I can get ~22m end to end.  One end was on a curved wall which made for some pretty interesting tumble turns but better than nothing I guess.
The roads are pretty bad - a far cry from the smooth roads of Wisconsin and Syracuse but riding the Karapiro Half course recently has prepared me for bad roads.  The bike course is pretty much flat except for a couple of little hills with a few obstacles in the form of road works, dogs and giant geese/ducks (think Jemima Puddleduck on steroids...).

Scenes from the bike course

More bike course

Ducks? Geese? Not too friendly whatever they were. I was worried they would develop a pack mentality on me...

Helpful signs so I knew I was going the right way

Getting my game face on

I see the sea

 

 The run just goes along the main road from the swim to the resort so will be a bit Syracuse-esque but is pretty much flat so should be good.

Local village on my run

We have just found out that the swim will be wetsuit legal YIPPEEEEEE!! The website had always said wetsuit legal but last week they dropped a bomb on me and said the water would be too warm and wetuits would be banned. However some cold currents (or maybe some creative temperature recording...?!) have brought the temperature down to a legal 24.2 to the dismay of the people in the race who can actually swim. Lucky I brought my trusty Blue Seventy MuppetSuit with me!!

Beach where the swim is. Note the grey hump over the hill - just the local Nuclear Power Plant. But its ok I read the sign which tells you what to do if the emergency siren goes off.

 

So RooRoo is all racked and ready to go. Lucky they have the fancy racks that your rear wheel goes into rather than the usual kind which we dislike so much - we would have been seriously flapping around with the wind down at transition when we checked in.

Hello RooRoo

So the race starts tomorrow at 11.30am NZ time for anyone who is interested and should be up on ironman.com.

I have just realized that the buffet breakfast here is open until 1pm and since the race finishes at the resort I should have plenty of time to get in for a post-race breakfast woohoo!!!

Big Jo training Oct 18 - Oct 24

SWIM

A bit slack in the extra swims department this week... But we did do a 2km TT at swimming on Wednesday which just reinforced how crap I am swimming at the moment. I'm too embarrassed to say my time but it was quicker than at Syracuse. Maybe I didn't count right and swam extra... But the most exciting news of the week was my new swim cap purchase (yes I actually paid money for a cap - unheard of!!) but it is so cool that it is worth it. Maybe it will make me swim faster? Or maybe it will make me just want to swim more. In fact I was so excited about wearing for the first time that I even dreamt about it.

Front. Excuse my nose.

Back. Jealous much?!

BIKE

Time: 12hrs50
Distance: 320km

Some good riding this week thanks to some nice weather. Did 4.5km as the longest ride with some uptempo work. My Serottica has an annoying clanking coming from the bottom bracket so have been riding RooRoo a bit more plus with all the races coming up RooRoo and I need to become more of a unit.

RUN

A much better week on the running front - got my calves sorted with a good massage and our dehydration theory work and I was toilet-free for my long run in the weekend.  A lot of people would probably prefer not to hear about my number two's issues but it has really been quite a problem and I know that I'm not the only who has these problems so I'm pretty happy to have to under control now.
My longest run was 2hrs which went well, I'm certainly getting more comfortable with running for longer.  It used to be anything over 90mins was a mission but not 2hrs isn't too much of a big deal.

Chilling out in my new chair with Murfy post-run. And yes I do realize I have a clubfoot and giant thighs. At least we can see how my ankle rolls so easily when this is my comfortable resting position.

At the moment I'm in Taiwan for the 70.3 this weekend so will update in a couple of days on whats been going on here.

Big Jo training Oct 11 - Oct 18

SWIM

Squad x 2
Non-squad x 2

~ 12.6km

Still plugging away at the swimming and am trying to make friends with my pull buoy and band to make me actually use my arms when I swim... One of the biggest problems I have with doing PB and band work (apart from swimming at snails pace), is that I get so cold that I end up freezing for the rest of the day even after spa-time and hot showers. But I found a solution to this the other day - I can swim in the kiddies pool which is only 20m but is heated to about 32degrees mmmmmmmm perfect. Its a lovely temperature for creeping up and down the pool. The length isn't ideal but I was struggling to find any motivation to go to the pool knowing I was going to freeze the whole time. I even tried wearing my Blue Seventy Point MuppetZero but my bare arms started to feel like ice blocks when I pulled them out of the water.  Oh the joys of being a Little Person...

BIKE

Time: 12hrs28
Distance: 319km

Back on the RooRoo this week for my longer rides, it was a happy reunion. My lack of a bigger daily commute is going to bring my weekly totals down a bit I think, but I guess most of that is considered junk miles. I do love adding my weekly mileage up though (well actually letting WKO do it for me...).
Longest ride this week was a bit over 4hrs in some pretty poo weather, but at least its warmed up a bit and get rained on doesn't result in hypothermia.
Biggest news of the week is my super styley BMW kit that my dear friend Neilio hooked up for me. I've never have a complete set of matching kit (arm warmers, knee warmers, vest, etc) so its pretty exciting and it looks AWESOME!!

How cool am I

Neilio is so good to me, he knows that I'm always the last person to get any cool gear because Jo-sized stuff is too hard to deal with so he made sure that I had this gear before anyone else. Thanks Neilio!!

RUN

I haven't been keeping track of time and distance but assume it was around 40-50km. My calves have really been suffering since Syracuse and my masseuse is in Kona so I resigned to wearing compression socks for my long run. This ended in disaster with multiple toilet stops and a rolled ankle and faceplant onto a gravel path (we blame the compression socks for all of this...).  My fall resulted in a few grazes and bruises but I was able to continue for another 90mins so nothing major. As for the toilet issues, a catch up with my friend Mikki who is a nutritionist may have pinned it down to dehydration so heres hoping I can get that under control before I defile every bush in the Eastern Suburbs...