Sometimes you eat the b’ar…

… and sometimes, well, he eats you.

I had a rough race at Lake Stevens this past Sunday.  My swim was fine but I couldn’t find any kind of rhythm on the bike.  My friends said that my position looked a bit off and I felt like I was fighting the machine most of the way rather than feeling like rider and bike were one.  I was far enough back starting the run that there wasn’t much to look forward to, but I tried to put in a good effort and managed a respectable 1:23 split.

Last night I lowered my saddle 13mm and the bike feels a good bit better now.  I also measured every conceivable dimension of this fit against the corresponding measurements on another bike for which I recently had a professional fit done.  I’m hoping that this position change will fix a lot of my issues on the TT bike.

Thanks to Shawn Burke for taking a few pictures at the race!

   

I decided to sport my summer haircut this time around, after having trouble keeping my cap on at Wildflower and at Treasure Island.  I am happy to stay that the cap stayed put this time!

In spite of my rather disappointing race performance, the race weekend was still a good time.  Andrew Lockton and Justin Park stayed at my house and we got to hang out and eat a LOT.  Justin has this theory about eating a *huge* meal the night before the race.  We each bought an oversized “Muy Grande” burrito and a dinner salad at Acapulco Fresh, then drove straight to Jimmy Johns to also buy sandwiches.  We hit Whole Foods for some side items even though each burrito already came with a bag of chips.  (Chip, bro?)  Then we spread out everything on my table before starting the Eating Fest.

I will award a prize to the first commenter to identify the sexy man on the cover of the running magazine on the sofa.  Bonus points if you *are* the sexy man on the cover of the running magazine on the sofa.

We discovered that Andrew has a previously undiscovered talent for high-volume eating.  He easily packed away all three of his dinners before Justin and I even hit the halfway mark.

The basic idea of this “one massive meal” approach is to get the calories in ~12 hours before the race and to then eat *nothing* the morning of the race.  I wasn’t able to eat nothing in the morning, but at shorter/faster races there is a high probability of GI discomfort if you’re still digesting your pre-race meal.  I know that half-Ironman sounds long, but the races seems to be getting closer and closer to short-course pace.  Justin certainly raced well off of this plan, finishing third overall.

A final positive note about the race – I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who told me that they read this blog!  (It wasn’t all that large of a number, but it was still cool.)  I’m glad to hear that folks are getting a kick out of these blog posts.  It can be challenging to find the time to post regularly, but finding that people really read and enjoy these posts is good motivation to keep posting.  Feel free to leave comments or questions!

On my old Community Server blog I was able to pull traffic reports but I haven’t found a way to do that for my Blogger blog.  Are any of you “lurkers” familiar with such a method?  Does Google expose a traffic report that I just can’t find?  Or do I need to go with some third-party analytics package?  Or would I start getting traffic reports from AdSense if I enabled ads on my blog?  Any help is appreciated!