2009 Ford Ironman Coeur d'Alene Race Report - Prologue

I'm going to break the report up into multiple posts because while I've not written anything yet, I assume I'll have a lot to write and if it turns out I don't, at least I get to pad my total number of blog entries. (He who dies with the most blog posts wins)

We last left our hero lamenting about the ever changing weather reports last Thursday. Friday, I went for an early morning ride as I didn't do anything on Thursday. Later that morning, we headed back down to the expo on a quest for a rain jacket for my sister who found something that probably wouldn't have sufficed had she wound up wearing it anyway - and she might have, but given her attire as she came across the finish line, it didn't matter. I digress.

We made some small errands before returning to #235 to rest and start preparing our bike and run transition bags. The mandatory athlete meeting started at 7:30 so we headed out for our obligatory pre-race burrito dinner around 6 thinking it would be plenty of time however, the restaurant we found was packed and so we settled for Qdoba and headed straight for the meeting. It turns out the meeting wasn't at the same location as the expo, but rather about a half mile past on the other side of the host hotel, the Coeur d'Alene resort (where for a cool $350/night, you too, could have the privelige of sleeping mere yards from all the action).

We arrived at the banquet tent at 7:15 to find that not only was the athlete dinner completely over (which was fine, we didn't plan on eating there anyway), but they'd already started the meeting and were essentially done with the explanation of the bike segment. After finding a seat mid-tent, I asked the guy next to me when they started and he replied they'd started early, around 7. Needless to say I was little peeved because as anyone who does triathlons knows, the odds of getting a penalty on anything other than the bike or bike related infractions are pretty damn small. I didn't get any penalties, but what's the point of having a schedule and passing it out to all the athletes if you don't follow it?

After the meeting, we returned back to #235 and finished packing our transition bags. I wound up getting to bed a little later than I would have liked, but I don't think it caused too much of a problem.

Saturday morning, we awoke and and eventually made it down to the expo to drop off our bikes and transition bags. After doing so we left to return to #235 to relax for the rest of the day. A mid-afternoon movie with the family that had arrived around noon helped us stay off our feet. We had dinner after a late afternoon nap and went to bed early to get ready for race day.

Everybody's Working on the Weekend

Living in Colorado has its advantages.  If you're an athlete, the training at altitude allows you to excel at sea level.  If you're an outdoorsy type person, guaranteed there's something here for you.

However, if you're a cyclist or triathlete (or duathlete) when it snows and you have a ride to do it usually means you're relegated to the trainer.  Just like when training outside, training inside can be great or can really suck.

I've found that as long as I have a good^* movie on TV, then the workout is great.  If there's nothing on, and you can't find a movie to watch, then time can pass excruciatingly slow.  Thankfully, today was not one of those days.  My 2:30 on the trainer went relatively quickly and I even had a break 2 hours in to help clean up the pee our new puppy decided to leave on our new carpet.  (how nice)

The one drawback to the trainer, at least mine anyway, is that I can never make it simulate the resistance of the road, or even the CompuTrainer I use in the lab.  Thus, it's either too lose and my wheel skips, or it's snug and I can't get too far out of my granny gear or it's like climbing up Magnolia.  If there's a happy medium, I haven't found it yet.  And why someone hasn't designed a trainer that doesn't result in you actually destroying your rear tire over time is beyond me.  It doesn't seem like it'd be hard.  Have some type of drum on which you can mount a rear cassette and have that drum connected (either via a chain or a belt) to a resistance unit.  This way, the resistance is constant and one can shift normally.  The rear stay on the bike would simply mount to the drum like it would to a normal rear tire: rear derailleur around the cassette and the dropouts on to some small studs.  A normal quick release skewer could be used to keep the bike from disengaging.

If anyone out there hasn't patented this yet, do it and build it.  I'll gladly be a guinea pig.

^*here, the definition of good will certainly vary greatly amongst everyone I know.