Race Report

As before, this race came on the heels of a 15+ hour training week last week. Tuesday I did a very hard zone 3/4 bike trainer ride, followed by a hill run.

Before I would have pushed on through, but now as I am monitoring training effect, training load, perceived effort, and my time to zone 2 in warmups the following day I have become somewhat attuned to how these workouts affect me. The rest of the week's Swim/bike/run workouts were zone 1-2, maintained aerobic fitness.

Despite a rather cold morning of standing outside for several hours as a registration volunteer and not really warming up, still ran well --which of note is something I now consider to be running my own race instead of something artificial like pace or place.

Was able to get into zone 3 relatively quickly, and held it there for the majority of lap one. Gel at mile 3. As I kept it in zone 3 for the first half of the race, I had plenty of gas to run in zone 4-5 for the last lap, setting a PR of 49:55 and taking my age group.

My heartrate monitor gives me a Training effect of 5.0/ 5.0, which falls in the over-reaching not to be done often category. So even though I would like to push on through, I realize that if I want to reap the benefit of that training effect it's zone 1-2 for the next 48 hours at least.

Other notables, Peter came and saw the race, he got a kiss at the half way point (hey, how many seconds did that cost me???). I also saw Lee, and Tray who won in their divisions as well. And it was a real honor for me to have met Bob Blais, father of IronBlazeman Jon Blais, who's story is an inspiration for us all.