4 Part Series: The Road to DuaWorlds

Hey Everyone!

Over the last three weeks or so, I have completely dropped the ball on keeping you all up to date on my training and racing. Many apologies! I am currently in a training block in preparation for the Duathlon World Championships on Sept. 25 in Gijon, Spain. As a result, I have lessened my swimming to 2 or 3 times per week and have mainly focused on fine-tuning my run and bike. The biking has consisted of some quality workouts, tempo efforts and various group rides. The running has consisted of numerous BRICKs, tempo runs, and a bunch of road races. During this time, I have kept a log or a journal if you will of my workouts and races. Why I didn't do this on my blog evades me..! In the following entries, please disregard the dates, for they are inaccurate since these sessions may or may not have occurred a few weeks ago. Enjoy!

The Road to DuaWorlds, Part 1

Yesterday I went to do my ride with fellow triathletes, Sean Jefferson and Omar Nour on PCH starting out at the parking lot at Malibu Canyon and PCH. What I thought was plenty of time to arrive (supposed to meet at 3pm, left house at 2:15) clearly wasn't as I spent the next hour in bumper to bumper traffic!

Sean and Omar were traveling back from Oceanside having swum in an open water race and they too were caught in the Saturday afternoon traffic though about a 1/2 mile ahead of me coincidentally enough. The traffic was so bad - multiple car accidents coupled with beautiful beach weather - we decided to pull over and park at the 22000 "block" of PCH, about 1 mile South of La Salsa.

We rode north from there and I was anticipating a moderate 2-hour ride with wattage in the mid-2's and cadence above 90. Oh was I wrong. They wanted to do a pace-line workout that their coach had given them which entailed: 20min warmup - 3 x (20min pace-line @ 300+ watts, 10min recover) - 20min cool down. While they didn't want to ride that hard and we therefore all agreed NOT to ride that hard, we rode that hard, and then some! The warmup turned into 30 minutes, the wind began to howl, and I definitely did not bring enough nutrition for a ride like this! To add insult to injury, we finished our final 20min pace-line heading South, just North of Zuma beach, which meant our cool down was a lot longer than 20min and not flat by any means! At the very least, we had the wind at our backs which was a big plus. To give you an idea of the intensity of this wind, heading North in our pace-line we averaged 18-20mph. Heading South in our pace-line we averaged 29-31mph!!

Needless to say, my legs were shot by the time we got back to the cars, a good 2 1/2 hours and 45 miles later! As a result, I had an early dinner and hit the pillow at 9ish in prep for my 4:30 wake up time to head out to Ventura for the first of 5 road races in what I like to call The Road to Duathlon Worlds.

The 5k race started at 7:15 but I had to register the morning of, which meant I needed to be there by 6am in order to beat the line of other 'registration slackers'. As expected, the race wasn't anything special and the field consisted of a few hundred moms and grandmas. By my speculation, the course was a little long and absolutely terrible footing. The first 2k was two loops around a landfill which was used as the parking lot. I stumbled twice and quasi-rolled ankles twice but to no avail pressed on and hit the tape at 15:27 - 4:57s (by my watch).

I'm feeling pretty good right now, despite yesterday's painful ride. I also ran the race in trainers. For the first time in a while I felt good getting out there and naturally pushing myself to try and keep pace with the bike leader. Quite a nostalgic feeling dating back to my Cate School days.

I will post the other parts of this series over the next couple of days. I don't want to flood the internet with such good stuff..I want to space it out..! Ha!

Thanks for checking in, talk soon!

-HH