Big Jo training Dec 13 - Dec 19

SWIM

Squad x 3
Sea swim x 1
~9km

Nothing wildly exciting to report on this week.  I did a 1500m TT at Parnell Baths in my wetsuit and came out with an ok time with my one-pace. I was at Cook's Beach for the weekend so did a sea swim there which was a bit choppy but nice. And the only time in the weekend that it wasn't raining - how ironic. Full points to Lesbo for letting me waking her up so she could do my wetsuit up for me after a big night out at Jac's wedding. Poor Lesley's little hands hadn't woken up properly so it was quite an effort for her but I fed her with chocolates so hopefully it was marginally worthwhile.

BIKE

Time:
Distance:

Good week on the bike this week. Got my A into G and did some short intervals and got some power PB's woo hoo! And then didn't need to do any efforts on Thursday as holding Uncle Roy's wheel in the gale force winds was hard enough.
My weekend in the Coromandel was a training weekend disguised as a wedding weekend (cunning I know...), sadly the weather was absolutely poo for riding (and for a wedding) but I came prepared and luckily it wasn't cold which is fatal for me combined with the wet. So I did semi-decent ride on Saturday and then good ride on Sunday from Hahei to Kopu on the way home. I was a bit concerned about the road being a bit busy and people not seeing me but am happy to report that the drivers were super courteous and no-one abused me or tried to kill me. It rained the whole way but I was actually pretty happy in my riding apart from the winding downhills with my failing brakes where I was struggling to find my happy place. I got a bit cold once I was soaked through on the downhills but I knew I was almost there by that stage. Some kind man stopped at the top of the hill and asked if I wanted a ride because the weather was so yuck. Bless him. I guess people find it difficult to understand that we do these things for fun, but we do.

RUN

Not quite sure what to do with the running. I did 2x15mins and 1x20mins mostly on grass and while I wouldn't call it painful it certainly wasn't the same as the other side so I'm feeling at a bit of a loss. I know my tibia look a few weeks of running to feel right, but I'd had 4 months off running for that so that was understandable whereas this one I have only had 5 weeks off running. I don't feel like I've aggravated it at all but I don't want to be jumping the gun on it and making it worse down the track.
I think I have decided to have another week off and then give it another go. Tauranga is looking very shaky at this stage... BAH!

How to keep me entertained during boring wedding speeches while waiting for food...

The lovely couple Jac and Tony and the Brownie Cake nom nom nom

Big Jo training Dec 6 - Dec 12

SWIM

Squad x 3
Sea swim x 1
~12km

Did 3 good squad sessions at Parnell Baths this week. Unfortunately me and my old Orca wetsuit did not really become friends this week as it gave me a wicked rash at the back of my neck. Hopefully my special new Blue Seventy Helix Muppet Suit will be made soon so I can wear my original Muppet Helix in the pool. I was in Taupo for the Half Ironman in the weekend and had good intentions of going for a swim while the others were out on the bike but the weather was a bit yuck and it just looked so cold and uninviting... I figured my time was better spent doing a longer ride. Did my Thursday Haydn sea swim in my usual slow time. The tide was a bit low and there were some pretty nasty oyster rocks which were hard to see so I had some pretty bad ouchies on my feet after that.

BIKE

Time: 9hrs 43
Distance: 229km

I have fallen into the trap of thinking I have raced because I was spectating a race in the weekend and therefore thinking I am in recovery mode the following week. Very Bad. I have also lost about 2hrs per week of commuting which I need to make up somewhere else. My long ride was lost this weekend with the half but I did get a decent ride around French Pass in Cambridge on Sunday and while I was in Taupo I did a ride over the new bypass which goes around the back of Taupo.

A new route in Taupo. How exciting

My RooRoo's lever issue is being resolved (after a few days of me realizing it wasn't going to reattach itself...) but until then my Serottica and I are getting reacquainted.

RUN

The big news for the week is I went for run!! Woo hoo!! On the grass I did 4x1min, 1x2mins, 1x3mins all with 30sec of walking in between. There was the odd whisper of pain but nothing at the end or any aching afterwards, so perhaps more psychosomatic... So I will continue to do interval jogs on the grass for the next week just to make sure all is a-ok. I am also going to need to look at my running style (I'm not called Slappy-J for nothing) and need to try and tone down how much lift I get to reduce the amount of load on my poor little bones.

TAUPO HALF IRONMAN

I was supporting the usual Bowden and Lawson suspects for this as well as Jess's brother Sam who was doing his first half in preparation for IMNZ.  J-Rad had a good swim coming out in the Terenzo group with Davo 2mins down and Jess beating her husband out.  Jess had some bad luck with a puncture in T1 which took a long time to fix, which was crap because she would have been close to the top 3 (and $$...) without it.  J-Rad had the ride of his life (until he popped with 30km to go) and Davo blew his foofoo valve trying to catch him. Across the board run times were a bit slower than usual but Jess took the fastest run split of the team and Sam tootled along to get the job done.

Captain Poobum. Could be mistaken for a pout but he's telling me that he's popped

J-rad happy in his running...

Nick with his game face on

Big Jo training Nov 29 - Dec 5

SWIM

Squad x 3
Sea swim x 3
~ 15km

A bit more quality time with my PB and band this week. Although I did learn (after getting yelled out by the whole lane) that I can swim with a band and no PB when I am in my wetsuit.  We have started to do a few squads at the Parnell Baths with Haydn which is always good value. Definitely feel more wasted after a Haydn swim than any other swim.
The Tauranga Tinman Triathlon was on in the weekend and since I was going to be there as a supporter I figured I would offer myself as a swimmer. So I swam a whole 750m (note to self: being a team swimmer is NOT cost effective for $/minute spent racing...), almost missed the start getting carried away watching the individual race, dodged a few jellyfish, came 3rd out of the water (!) and our team was 1st overall. Woohoo.

BIKE

Time: 11hrs51
Distance: 303km

Had a nice 4.5hr ride with my friend Two Piece in the weekend, we had a big 4.5hr chat :) We must do that more often.
Very sad moment after that ride while RooRoo was in the car traveling to Tauranga - somehow my front derailleur lever snapped... I can still use it but its very hard to get into the big ring. Luckily Tauranga is nice and flat so I was still able to go for a bit of a ride on Sunday but its no good for any decent riding. After a few days of hoping it would magically heal itself I have realized that this isn't going to happen and need to get my A into G and organize a new one. Of course they are not very cheap so it is really is quite a sad moment. At least I will then have a spare rear derailleur lever...

Boo hoo

RUN

2 x pool-runs...

Nothing new to report here. I didn't attempt a trot this week, although I had to run around transition to get to my swim start and it didn't hurt so thats a good sign.  So I will try another one minute run next weekend. Fingers crossed.
I have been making a concerted effort to up my calcium intake thanks to my friend and helpful nutritionist Mikki so hopefully my bones are getting nice and strong. My iron stores have dropped yet again (surprise, surprise...) so I am getting the hang of coordinating the calcium and iron since they are not friends, so hopefully its working and I will be super strong boned and full of iron by the time I am back into it.

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.