Bike-run

I had a time constraint which meant I had to scale down the workout slightly (no 60-60!), but I had a very pleasing bike-run session in the middle of the day.

I did 45 minutes on the bike trainer, nothing intense. (Average HR 129, max HR 146.) Mostly just spinning--but I did some single-foot pedaling drills and also five minutes of riding what I might call comfortably hard.

Then I went more or less straight out for a run. Nothing intense, slowish to begin and then speeding up a bit as I went on: 3.4 miles, 9:22 average pace, 7:13 max (it's noticeable to me that my, say, finish-line type pace i.e. bit of speed at end has gotten at least thirty seconds faster than it was at the beginning of August when I was first looking at pace--probably more due to weather improvement than to running improvement, but still...).

It's been occurring to me recently that I should remember how in January and February I could only swim for about half an hour and though it seemed a lot of trouble to go and get changed etc. just for that little a time, it was necessary. If I can't fit in long bike sessions, it's still worth fitting in short ones--even thirty minutes, if it's part of a workout with something else, but certainly a forty-five-minute session though rather small is better than nothing.

We got training schedules this week via the CU triathlon club--indeed (strange!) the volume of training I'm doing pretty much already suits me for the most advanced plan, which seems crazy to me! Crazy but true. I'm kind of already set in my ways on the swim and run portions, swimming in particular just kind of has to be what it is; but the bike part is a useful set of guidelines, something for me to try and hew to, plus knowing I've got that indoor tri in mid-December is a bit of a goad.

This is a month of base, with the bike on three days (Wed.-Fri.-Sun.), with 60 and 30 minutes each consistently on Wednesday and Friday and then a long one building up on Sunday, starting at 120 minutes, working up through 135 to 150 to 180 and back down to 90 for a recovery week following. I don't think I'm prepared for my long ones to be quite that long yet--more for psychological than physiological reasons!--but the mid-week structure seems to me sensible, and those days fall out rather as I'm imagining anyway. Try and do 45-60 minutes after yoga on Wednesday if I don't have work obligations, try and do half an hour on Friday morning following CU swim. (If, that is, I ever end up going to the Friday workout! The need for sleep rather means I am going to be skipping it quite often, so I must think about how to handle the bike-related implications.)

One more thing: a product review! Becca was inquiring as to the nature of the device that gives me pace information, and though I e-mailed her separately I thought others might be mildly interested.

It's a Polar Foot Pod plus RS-200 wrist monitor, and I really love it.

I am of course really too lazy to write a proper product review, but here are my minor thoughts.

A lot of triathletes prefer to use a Garmin, and certainly that is an intriguing device--probably better for extensive multi-sport use. For running, on the other hand, this one seems much the best.

(Coach Mindy swears by it--that's why I have one! She is a big Polar fan--when she was still in the fashion industry, she designed the first sports bra with an integrated HR monitor strip...)

It uses inertial technology rather than GPS, so that pace data is--well, not instantaneous, but very responsive to change, within a few seconds at least. (In Central Park there are apparently lots of places where the GPS signal fades & the Garmin becomes less useful.)

(You can use it for cycling and swimming also, BTW; and I believe there is actually a bike thing you can get to integrate pace data, not sure about this.)

It's particularly good for holding yourself to a slowish training pace. I also find it psychologically indispensable for runs in strange places--if you're doing an out-and-back of some sort, you can actually (if you are a person with a sense of direction, you probably have clearer guesses about these things, but I am wholly oblivious) know how far you've come and also how long it will realistically take you to get back, which makes it much easier to concentrate on the actual run and can save you a lot of worry of the "Hmmm, I feel I have never seen this before in my life, have I come too far?"-type second-guessing that racks the sense-of-directionless person with anxiety...

I did feel at first that the data was a bit less full than I was expecting (obviously it will not give you what the Garmin does, elevation, which again some people might find important for tracking HR); but this is partly because I have it set on a one-mile auto-lap function. If I used a shorter auto-lap or else just used the lap button myself, I certainly could be getting much more detailed HR and speed data, so this is more of a user shortcoming than a device failure.

The one thing that seems to me incredibly annoying is the technology for transmitting data to the computer. I believe a different model has infrared, and that would seem to me better--this is marketed partly on the appeal of wireless technology, but it's a SonicLink thing that requires a microphone and seems singularly prone to failure--I often have to try four or five times before the data is transmitted properly, though in every respect of storage etc. the device really seems to me excellent.

In sum: strongly recommended.