Christmas Eve Testing

I am quite the scrooge. I told my kids there is no Santa Claus, (the parents of my children’s friends just love me for that one), I don’t buy anybody but my wife and parents presents, and I am annoyed that the pool is closed Christmas Day. So to be true to my scrooge nature I decided to spend Christmas Eve doing some swim and bike testing to see where I am at. My swim speed and bike power have gotten better so I wanted to test exactly how much better.

At Masters I did a 1000 yard time trial in 14:46. That is the fastest I have ever done 1000 yards, but about 10 seconds slower than what I expected. I am lucky to have some great friends who have helped me to get my form better over the last few months. I need to cut another 3 seconds off per hundred before St George. If I can do that I should be able to do the swim in about an hour. I finished my swim with around 3500 yards on the day.

I ate a lot of food and waited about two hours and then I got on my bike. I did a 5 hour bike ride. I warmed up for a half an hour then I started with a 10 minute interval then I did my test interval, 20 minutes all out. I had good power. I was able to increase it throughout the 20 minutes. My first 5 minutes were 369 watts and my last 5 were 399. I averaged 380 watts over the 20 minutes which is my most ever by a few watts. The real good news is even though it was very tough it was not overwhelmingly difficult. My heart rate reached only 173. That is 5 beats lower than my max. This gives me some hope for the future as I think I have room to push myself harder. After my 20 minute test I continued for a total of 2 hours of intervals. Including rest my average power was 310 for 2 hours and my normalized power was 325. Those are good numbers for me considering I started with the hard 20 minute test.

I have major mental problems as this is the stuff I think about all the time. I wish I were more like Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa and thought about how I could make the world a better place. I do think about that stuff as well, but for some reason I am just compelled to think about getting faster, maybe I just need a triathlon intervention.