Still enjoying riding my bike on the indoor trainer and using the Zwift app to bike in a virtual world with other riders. I completed stage 3 of the “Tour de Zwift” challenge today (9 scheduled rides in January covering all their different settings).
I missed Greg today, but our schedules didn’t work to do this one together so he’ll be completing it tomorrow night. While I definitely have more fun with him in the room, there were still virtual riders there typing exclamatory things about the hills, adding a feeling of camaraderie even though I was alone in the gym.
The best and worst thing about Zwift rides is that I don’t know what to expect for elevation. My trainer duplicates hills by making it harder to petal, and Zwift slows down your miles per hour based on what your wattage (pedaling effort) would get you on the percent grade hill you’re on in their virtual world.
That means you could be putting in a solid effort and going over 20 mph:
Or you could be putting in a solid effort and going 6 mph:
Today’s ride finished with the most ridiculous hill I have ever climbed in reality or virtual reality. The overall ride had 1,168 feet of virtual elevation gain, and if you can see from the above screenshot, with only 1.8 miles left I’d done about half the elevation gain.
The last few miles of the ride were intense effort for 3-6 mile per hour returns. I had gotten to about 3.2 miles left thinking there was a chance I’d finish in under an hour, and then it ended up taking me 1 hour and 21 minutes to finish because I was biking slower than I run due to the giant hill.
Mentally, this was really tough, and I struggled to maintain my above 100 watt average which is usually my goal for rides (unless I rode the day before).
But like any challenge, maybe especially the ones you don’t see coming, I felt all that much more accomplished when I finished it.
And VERY ready for lunch.
I’ve been using our InstantPot to make batches of grains to keep in the fridge and then using the “beans, greens and grain bowl with dressing” formula to make easy lunches. (And the grains, berries, spices and a hint of molasses formula for breakfast).
Today’s lunch is teff (which is a tiny, sticky grain that I am a bit neutral on because it clumps) with black beans, chopped kale, green onions and the “best cheeze dip I ever ate” recipe from the No Meat Athlete book (not online but here are five simple sauces and a primer on using them to make fast and healthy meals).
It’s filling, flavorful and full of good stuff that will hopefully make my legs feel better because wow is it going to take more than a tumeric ginger shot to get ready for my interval run tomorrow!
It all happened kind of fast. Greg was telling me about this online challenge to complete 9 rides in January on Zwift, an online cycling platform that connects to your indoor trainer and allows you to ride in a virtual world with other real people who are in their basements or living rooms on their indoor trainers. It’s a pretty neat concept, and when doing races or events you can see your placement change when you pass people, feel the resistance on your wheel when you hit a hill (depending on your indoor trainer set-up) and explore virtual landscapes.
So Greg decided to do the Tour de Zwift this January as a way to kickstart the year with some indoor cycling… and then he casually offered to get me an indoor trainer to hook my road bike into if I wanted to join him. We’d originally only purchased one trainer, which meant switching bikes and never riding together. I’d never even considered getting two.
But it was kind of a stroke of genius because now we can ride together, which makes it much more fun. Now we can get our workouts done more efficiently by completing them simultaneously instead of staggering them on the weekends and taking up the entire morning.
The kids are old enough so we can ride while they’re home and awake and puttering around the house doing their own things (including popping in to check out our progress and watch us bike through a futuristic NYC).
With two indoor bikes we could even decide to do an easy ride while watching our favorite television show together instead of sitting on the couch. (Who knows if that will ever happen, but we could.)
We’re in the honeymoon phase now, but I’ve absolutely loved the two rides we’ve done together so far this January.
Zwift can connect to other online platforms and automatically upload your rides, so I don’t have to manually enter my biking mileage into Garmin or Strava in order to track it for my goal of 500 miles in 2019. A goal that I’m awkwardly ahead on thanks to this “Tour de Zwift” challenge – I’ve already biked 55 miles and it’s only January 5th!
I’m excited to have indoor cycling at my disposal right at home all winter so that come snow, sleet, hail and school cancellations I can still get either a treadmill or a cycling workout in without having to face the icy roads or find a babysitter.
I was up in Maine for my nieces’ dance recital and decided to do Sebago Lake Tri the next morning before we headed home!
Sebago Lake Tri race review first, then my story at the end.
2018 Sebago Lake Tri Recap
The Sebago Lake Tri by TRI ME was held at St. Joseph’s college for the first time this year. It used to be at Point Sebago.
Location: Easy parking at the college, plus plenty of bathrooms indoors. Note that Standish is further from Portland than advertised on the race site; it takes about 40 minutes to get there from downtown Portland, not 20.
Race size: This is a small race. It’s great because event parking wasn’t an issue and I never waited in line for the bathroom, but there may be fewer people behind you than you’d like. 😉 Only 126 people finished the Individual Sprint Tri, and 65 finished the Individual Olympic Tri.
Swim Course: A bit rocky entering the water, and a long horizontal course. Water was average lake temperature for Maine in June, about 63 degrees. Wetsuits required. No bathrooms down by the swim course, and a decently long uphill path to get to the transition area. They did have a place for shoes for athletes when they got out of the water to run up to transition. Lake is relatively calm in the morning for triathlons and no aquatic plant issues. I recommend tinted goggles because the sun will be in your eyes for the return to shore and it makes it hard to spot the buoys. The Olympic buoys were a different shape than the sprint buoys, but they were all the same color yellow. It likely was fine for them because they had to pass the sprint buoys and then go around the outer Olympic buoys. The finishing buoys were orange.
Bike Course: Hilly with some long, slow hills, and one incredibly bumpy road and a covered bridge with wooden planks that were parallel to bike tires and the gaps between boards were a potential hazard. Previewing the bike course is a good idea. My Garmin registered 709 feet of elevation gain for the 14 mile ride, with quite a bit in the end for a slightly anti-climactic finish. Course was closed in some areas but not others. Good number of flaggers.
Thankfully they swept Middle Jam road before the tri. This is what it looked like when I previewed the course.
Run Course: Trail running through the woods on campus; one red loop and one blue loop for sprint, two red loops and one blue for olympic. I was in the back and didn’t find the course too crowded, but the trail is occasionally narrow and you need to pay close attention to the arrows and flaggers to do the correct route. Finishes with some uphills that were more efficient to walk than run because they were so steep. Loops through campus in a way that makes it easy for spectators to see you multiple times on the run if they’re good at figuring out the map.
Post Race: BBQ and beer for athletes (tickets were in bib packets). Extra BBQ tickets for family could be purchased in advance, beer was a one-ticket thing and you couldn’t purchase beer for non-athletes. 2018 website still advertised a playground and mini-water park for after the event family fun, but that was at the Point Sebago location. There were no family activities at St. Joseph’s college. No veg options at BBQ so I gave my ticket away and ate a banana and some potato chips with my beer. Beer was cold and from Sebago Brewing, so it was pretty delicious. Bring your finisher pint glass and they’ll put the beer in that instead of plastic!
Giveway: Technical race shirt at bib packet pick-up, includes women’s sizes. Finishers receive a Sebago Lake Tri pint glass, and reusable water bottles sponsored by Mike Caiazzo of Portside Real Estate Group. Mike is most well known for being my brother-in-law, but he’s also a professional triathlete who led a preview of the Olympic Bike Course, and he was on site at Bib packet pick-up at Sebago Brewing and at the race. Good person to ask about nutrition on the ride or where to buy your next house in Maine.
Results & Photos: There will be a free race photo available online sometime after the race through Flashframe. Results were chip timed and broken down. You could sign up to get text messages with your race results, and they came through almost immediately after the race. Age category awards were given to the top three in every category broken down in five-year increments, and also for Athena and Clydesdale and top overall finishers.
My Race
It was a beautiful day for a tri!
I still had trouble and panicked in the water during the open water swim. It was frustrating because I’ve put in so many hours working on my swim stroke in the Equinox pool, even investing in a swim coach, but my reptilian brain freaks out in the water and won’t let me use it.
I have no regrets about learning to swim and the effort I’ve put in at the gym. That’s a life skill that is never wasted. Swimming for fitness is a beautiful low-impact workout that I will continue to love long after I do my last open water swim. (Which might have been yesterday, but never say never.)
But one truism that triathletes often repeat is that pool swimming does not prepare you for open water swimming. That’s accurate. Open water is very different from a pool where your lane is protected by lines of buoys keeping other swimmers from swimming over you, where there’s clear visibility and a blue line to follow on the bottom of the pool, and where you can stand up and rest any time.
I’d definitely put in more time out in the open water working on staying calm and sighting before I do another triathlon.
Despite a tough swim, I was not one of the people towed to shore on the back of the kayak. (And good for them for knowing they needed to stop.)
Which meant I got my reward; I could get on my bike. I’m so incredibly happy when I get to the bike portion of the Tri. The run portion is all right, but I’ll be honest, running feels better when you haven’t flailed around in the water and then biked for almost an hour first.
So, where to from here?
I might look for a cycling event sometime. I wonder how much I would enjoy training for a 50-mile ride somewhere. I know nothing about cycling events, and maybe it’s time to look for a beginner friendly ride that doesn’t involve crossing state lines and biking for days.
I’m also planning to run another half marathon in the fall. I’ve lined up babysitting for my training runs this summer, I’ve got a training plan. I’ll be turning 35 in September, and I ran my first half marathon the day before I turned 30. It seems appropriate that I run one the month I turn 35, too. I thought when I signed up to run that first half that it’d be a one-time accomplishment. What better way to celebrate the fact that it was just the beginning than to run another one at this next milestone birthday? And 35 is at least half a milestone, just like 13.1 is half a marathon.
And will I ever Tri again? Not without doing some open water swim clinics, first. But that won’t be in my near future. I’ve got biking and running to do, first!
I got some new triathlon gear! I pre-ordered this limited edition No Meat Athlete tri outfit months ago and it just arrived.
When I ordered it back in May I was struggling with plantar fasciitis and my decision to drop out of Tri For a Cure based on my doctor’s recommendation.
That might seem like the worst time to order new triathlon gear, but it was actually the best. Hitting “submit” on that order form was a promise to myself that this wasn’t the end. There would be other races.
I knew it would arrive in September around the time of my birthday, and it seemed like the perfect gift to myself. (It was.)
I have my sights set on the Sebago Lake Triathlon in June 2018. I’ll finally get to test out my improved swim skills!
I even have my outfit all picked out.
Think these guys will come watch me race?
Happy New Year to everyone who celebrates! We spent our day off from school in the best place possible: outside. Will suggested we take this photo of all three of us using my camera timer. I’m glad we did 🙂
We’re making the most of the last full week of summer before school starts!
The boys are in sailing camp every day this week from 1-4 pm.
They’re sailing tiny little sailboats around the dock area and loving every second.
There’s not really enough time for me to go back home in between, so Monday I had lunch and watched the eclipse in Portland with Greg, Tuesday I went Freeport outlet shopping with my mom, and Wednesday I went for a gorgeous bike ride.
Two islands, 22 miles, and one shower at the yacht club when I got back. (Thanks guys, hope those aren’t members only. At least we’re patronizing sailing camp?)
Check out the views!
Makes me think about where I could bike at home in Massachusetts if I drove a short distance first.
