Hey! Hope you guys had a good weekend. I certainly enjoyed ours.
The Tour’s been pretty good so far, no? My daughter Emma and I watched all three stages over the weekend, and I gotta say that I loved it. Usually, the first week of the Tour is kind of a snoozy affair, but thanks to all the crashes, this year even the first stage was exciting. And I thought yesterday’s sprint stage was just awesome. Just watching the teams navigate those tiny French roads at breakneck speeds to try to set up their sprinters is unbelievable. I suppose that if you don’t yourself ride, you might not appreciate the beauty and power of it, but I personally find it awe-inspiring.
Haven’t seen today’s stage yet. I know that Cadel Evans won it in a photo finish over Alberto Contador, but I’ll have to find time to play it back on the Versus website before I actually get a chance to see it happen.
Speaking of bike-riding, my own riding went about as well as can be expected over the weekend. You may remember that I’d planned to do a long brick with intervals on Saturday, but then I decided that I’d rather ride actual hills than pretend to ride hills via interval work. Anyway, I rode reasonably well for about 25-miles, until I ran over a broken bottle and slashed my rear tire… at which point, I discovered that the little nub for my C02 cartridges was missing. So I ended up having to call Sally to come get me before I could get home and go for my run. Not the end of the world, but also not the most efficient way to run a brick, either. By the time we got home, it was hot, and I did not feel like running. I did eventually slog my way through 2.5 of my intended 3-mile run, but it wasn’t my finest hour, I can promise you. Still, it was decent training, and running when your tired is a necessary evil of triathlon. Not my favorite necessary evil, to be sure, but an absolute requirement of the sport nonetheless.
Sunday was more of the same. I’d planned to run somewhere around 6.5-miles and ended up going around 5.5—again, running tired. What else is there to say about it? It sucked, but that was kind of the point. I wanted to train as hard as I could without actually risking an injury or putting myself in the position of needing to take more than a single day off to recover. I did that.
Monday turned out to be that day off. I’d sort of expected that it might be, and by Sunday night, I was sure. If nothing else, I really wanted to sleep in at least once over the weekend. We did eventually go to the beach, and I put in maybe 300-yards of rough water swimming, but that only took a few minutes and barely counts as exercise. It was good to get warmed up and to remember what it feels like to have to spot buoys, but beyond that, it was, well, just a day at the beach with my family.
Meanwhile, my nutrition experiment went pretty well. I made all manner of in-race nutrition packets, recovery drinks, and healthy-smoothies over the weekend, and I think that they helped. I mean, my legs are tired today, but I’m not sore. I take that to mean, in part, that I’m recovering a little better than normal, probably thanks to simple proteins ingested immediately after my workout. That’s good.
I also learned a few things about sugars. For example, the good thing about the racing gels that I made is that since they’re basically just crushed dates and agave nectar, they contain fructose (fruit sugar) instead of corn syrup or refined sugar, and fructose burns a little slower than do pure glucose or maldextrose. In practice, that meant that my homemade racing gels provided a better, more stable energy platform than actual Gu-brand gels do. Which is to say that when you take a Gu, it’s like ingesting rocket fuel. You burn really bright for about 15 minutes, and after that you start to taper off, until you crash at around the 45-minute mark. At which point, you better take another gu. With the fructose gel, I never got that “rocket fuel” sensation that you get from a Gu, but I also never had that “let down” feeling, either. It was just a steady a stream of continuous energy that kept me working right at the threshold that I wanted to maintain. The fructose is also a lot easier on the stomach and doesn’t seem to require quite as much water as the gu’s do for digestion. In any event, I was pleased with the way I performed while using the new gels, and I plan to use them soon in a race. We’ll see how that goes.
Last thing of note for the weekend is that I did, in fact, manage to get out to see Transformers this weekend, and boy… what a dumbass movie that was. Actually, I have a feeling that the movie itself wasn’t dumb so much as the editing was. Which is to say that it looked to me like Michael Bay and company probably shot about 4-hours worth of movie and then had to cut it down to a bare minimum in order to hit a reasonable running-time. I mean, don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed the new Transformers movie—a lot. It was way entertaining. But the third act was a mess, and there were truck-sized holes in the plot. And I think those could have been fixed—easily—with the addition of maybe a half-dozen scenes. But there was just no time. They just tried to do too much, and as it was, there wasn’t enough screen-time left over to get it all in.
So that’s pretty much it. We grilled Saturday and Monday, went and saw the fireworks on Sunday night (after the movie), and had some friends over for dinner last night. A good time was had by all.
It was a good weekend and a full one, and I’m happy. Tired but happy.
How was yours?
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