The Short Course Triathlon Thread

Tomorrow is officially race week for me! Got the final race info through today and were all set to go. Participants off at 5 second intervals, sorted by age group then alphabetically. Which means I get to see a club mate very quickly speed away from me on the first run. Last time we did a race like this I really enjoyed it as there’s always someone to chase down.

I’ve never been very good at riding hard off a hard run so having a NP in the region of 90-95% is probably the A goal.

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That sounds about as restful as my current week, meant to be the 7th week of mid vol specialty (so the first ramping down into race week). Sadly I was off work so it started with a 116km ride with a friend on Tuesday and went steadily less restful from there…

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Which duathlon are you at?

Didn’t see this thread yet :sweat_smile:

I’m signed up for an Olympic Tri in September (actually it was supposed to have been in March, but it was postponed). I’m doing the 70.3 TR plans because I have the Ironman 70.3 Cascais in October, so the Olympic will be my B race.

Worse thing about all of this: these are my first triathlon races :grimacing:

Wish me luck

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It’s the Yorkshire Duathlon. It’s being held at a motor racing circuit so hopefully it’ll be a lot of fun.

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Up until the middle of june I’ll probably stick to my 1x of true intensity each week during the 2nd weekday which is the longer run of my early morning pre dawn runs. Focus now is more tempo to threshold and save the 10k pace repeats until about 4 to 6 weeks out.

Those usually give me a nice boost in fitness but it is short lived if i can’t maintain that level of intensity, and i usually can’t for more than 2 cycles and then the niggles will start. Also since ive been testing lactate I can tell I’ve got a lot of room to improve with fractional utilization. Too much short power stuff the last two years so I’m trying to flatten out my lactate/fatigue curve by focusing most of my intervals to <= lt2 then just before competition do a quick vo2 block.

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Oh boy. I was browsing through spring duathlons in the UK a few months ago, I was so race-hungry I was ready to fly in from Poland (had a free sleepover at a friend’s place available in London). Lo and behold, we were banned from entering :wink: time to race local! The smaller the event, the more likely it is to happen.

Good luck!!

Thanks! I am really ready to get out there and do SOMETHING! It’ll definitely feel quite different from how things have but I enjoyed the last TT style race that I did as theres generally someone to set your sights on and chase down. I will have all the young and fast guys behind me so that might be some motivation as I watch them wizz by.

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I kind of did IMVR14 last weekend, Olympic distance but not really pushing it, just incorporating it into training. Swim
Wouldn’t upload so didn’t get an official result, but 00:28:30, 01:12:44, 00:59:02.

Biked the TOW 3 on Zwift 42.6km on Thursday, swan Friday morning after a warm up 600m and did a 10K brick run later on Friday. Not race pace efforts, but taking it easy gives me a sense of where I’m at.

When I did these in the “Championship” format, last year it was a lot of fun and felt just like racing without the crowds.

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I kind of did an Oly yesterday. Had a lunch run followed by and evening bike (on Zwift so yeah…) then 30min later swim. I did all at a pretty easy pace and in general my on course (no transitions) time would have been 2:14 to cover the distance.

Considering my goal is to be at or near 2:00 at Nationals this year that was a nice confidence boost. Definitely left a lot in the table with all those workouts and now I really want to get in an actual test event. I feel kind of like a caged animal that wants to burst forth and just race somebody. Lol.

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Race day at Yorkshire Duathlon.

Aim for today was just to have a strong event. Do each discipline pretty close to my potential, in the past I’ve been pretty good individually but generally fail to put them together,

Run 1 had a changed course which took us away from the planned out and back down a road and onto a more twisty turny course that ran over grass. The natural enemy of the road racing shoe :smiley: Despite all of this (along with it being slightly long) meant an average pace of 4:13/km. Given I had wanted a time in the 20:xx range that was pretty close!

On to the bike and we had 6 laps around a racing circuit to look forward to. Lots of very open corners that didnt require any braking, and often no need to stop pedaling either. Each lap only being 3.3km and there being 300 people racing meant there was a lot of traffic and even though it was nominally non drafting it was hard to avoid, as long as you werent making it obvious the marshals were pretty lenient. My aim was to have a NP in the range of 95%. Watching the power levels on the watch while riding is rather hard so I settled into a rhythm on each lap, NP in the end was right at FTP. Super happy with that bike ride!

Run 2 was just as difficult as it always is. No grass on this one though so far more happy with a 4:09 average pace to finish it off in unremarkable style.

Run 1: 21:56
Bike: 34:04
Run 2: 10:03
Total: 1:08:51

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Nice times and that’s a pretty solid pace for all 3 legs. If you don’t mind asking how did you do overall and in your AG? I’d have to imagine you were towards the pointy end.

This was a qualification race for the UK Age Group teams so it attracts a really high caliber of athlete. I was my usual standard of right about the top 3rd of finishers at these sorts of event. Overall 94/276 Age Group (M35-39) 7/14.

Top 4 in the age group were well away from the rest of us. 4th was 1:01:56 and 5th was 1:06:27.

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Well done. My legs were hurting as I read the report though. Sprint duathlons are for people in a f___ing hurry.

Funny thing with the density - 300 people over 3.3 km means you’ve got 10.1 m (~33 feet I think) per bike. If they’re all on the course at the same time, that leaves 8 meters of space per athlete (the bike being about 2 m long). I always scoff at people saying it was “impossible not to draft”, but I can’t see how this could not be a draftfest.

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I meant to reply last night but then I sensibly spent my recovery evening at the running track with the club. My legs and I are not entirely friendly this morning. There was definitely a lot of drafting in the sense that if you rode up to someone elses wheel and went past within the rules (passing within 10 seconds of entering another bikes draft), you would then be immediately placed into someone elses draft. But the track was wide enough that it was often easy to find a space where you werent immediately behind someone else. It was really nice to see that there wasnt, as far as I saw, any groups forming. I think that would have been the point that the marshals stepped in and started to DQ people.

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Last week was a pretty good buildup for me, got to 14.5 hours total which was the highest number I’ve seen since I was IM training in 2019. Now I’m on a recovery week with only 10 hours of mostly easy work scheduled and I’m starting to feel that fitness building into my legs. Really excited to see where this training block takes me and so far I’m feeling really really good!

On a side note, apparently according to my Garmin I set a 100yd record in the pool while doing some 100s at 80-85% intensity. (1:19/100yd or 1:26/100m pace). But I’m pretty sure I’ve gone faster before…Still it’s nice to see that my speed is picking up a bit, especially as I’m working on quite a few drills through my subscription to effortlessswimming.com.

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Love Brenton at Effortless Swimming. The way that he explains through others strokes (his video on Lionel Sanders I thought was excellent) really makes me think about how I am moving through the water myself.

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Damn! I don’t remember seeing you havethe m speeds like that since you’re usually denigrating your swim. But that’s still quite solid for an age grouper who still can bike and run at a high level.

Props to you for setting a big goal abd putting in yhe work to get there.

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lol, thanks. The big shame is that I really should be strongest in the water as I’m very tall with natural paddles and flippers. I also went and did some data analysis and realized I did an average of 27min a week swimming in 2019 when I was training for IMFL. I got out of the water in 1:07.

In the past I’ve had little success getting faster in the water but I don’t think I was doing the right thing in the pool. Very few drills and longer intervals. So that’s why I never really bothered swimming as it seemed that 30min per week or 3 hours per week netted me the same times. So I shifted that time to the bike and run. Now switching that up it seems to be paying some dividends and like others have said, in the Oly distance the swim in much more important so I’m really working on that part this year while also trying to be smarter about my training to make use of that time I’m investing into the pool.

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First triathlon on the year! Olympic distance and set a course and all time PR by nearly 2 minutes. Took 2nd overall and the fastest bike of the day. Still dealing with stomach cramping issues I haven’t quite pinned down on the run. Lost maybe a minute due to stopping and needing to push out a burp to get the cramp to go away. Took the swim pretty easy, 2 min slower since the last time I raced here. The water was 63 degrees, and took my sweet old time thru transition. Decided to treat this race as a good practice having not raced in a while.

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