Dec 23

Dec 23, 2003
The Inaugural JustGreg winter olympic distance triathlon results are in and hey – I won!

This post really belongs in the Ironman Idaho 2004 section, but I don’t have a button up yet for that so I’m sticking it here – mostly because I need to have some record of my times for planning purposes. In fact, that’s mostly the reason for this entire web site – a reason for me to record what I’m doing so that I can look back and see what I did. I can no longer rely on my memory alone because it tends to exaggerate successes and diminish failures. Keeping a journal is the only way to keep it real.

After Ironman Canada this summer, Helen and I both signed up for a half Ironman in California in early April. To keep my interest in training up, I slotted in my own little self-timed olympic distance triathlon half way between the summer and the half ironman in April – which worked out today, two days before Christmas. That gave me a reason to do some speed training in the early winter months leading up to the self timed event in December.

Coach Steve once informed me that using a olympic distance multiplication factor of 4.6 is a good predictor of potential Ironman time. My goal was to complete the 1500 meter swim, 40 km bike and 10 km run in less than 2 hours, 15 minutes which, when multiplied by 4.6 would predict an Ironman time of 10 hours, 30 minutes which **could** be good enough to get me a Kona slot!

So here’s how it went:

Swim: 25:40 in a 25 meter pool with wetsuit. I was pretty happy with that – holding 50 seconds per hundred meters for the whole 1500 – my swim coach Greg would be pleased.

Bike: 216 watts for an hour with my Elite on a wind trainer using my SRM power meter. I have a calculator that takes weight, altitude, temperature, position, tires, and body measurements and calculates speed based on Watts input. It calculated a 40km distance time of 1:02:40. Really not sure how accurate that would be. One thing that was kind of curious is that you can’t really stop peddling when using a watts meter because it goes to ZERO. In the real world, you can take short rest stops and still glide, add distance and maintain some average speed. Don’t really know how a continuous 216 watt effort for an hour would translate to the real world?

Run: 45:30 outside at 0 C with warm and kind of heavy clothes – distance measured with the GPS.

Total time worked out to around 2:14-ish and adding in 4 minutes for transitions, would be around 2:18. Using the 4.6 ratio, it would convert to an Ironman time of 10:34, which might be just out of my qualifying range. I figure for my age group, I would need somewhere between a 10:15 and 10:30 (on a lucky day) to make it to Kona. I’m probably about 5 to 10 minutes short currently. But then again, it is the middle of winter here, so I’m pretty pleased with my result.

But this race kind of sucked. No tee-shirts, and no aid stations.

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