I managed to be recovered well enough from last weekend’s race by this past Friday. I kicked off my ten day volume block with a ride out to Fort Collins and Back with Marilyn. It was right at 100 miles in 5 hours with some steady, and even hard, sections along the way (followed by a 4 mile run off the bike). I guess the highlight (read:lowlight) of the ride would be a gift shop store owner (on your right as you hit the T in the road in Masonville coming from the south) refusing to let Marilyn_BUY_some water from the faucet. Please, if you ride out in this area; take your refueling business elsewhere.

Saturday brought warm temperatures and another good day of training. It started at Elks’ pool with Billy and Dennis swimming 4K+ with a main set of 2 x 1000. I was pretty tired from poor sleep, but I warmed into the set nicely. A couple hours after the swim Billy and I headed up to Magnolia Road for a long run. It was getting pretty warm with strong sunshine that feels much different at 8000+ feet that it does for our flatland friends. I wasn’t carrying any water (forgot my fuelbelt) so I tried a different strategy by pounding 50+ ounces of water shortly before starting the run. I felt a bit ill on the way up, but it did seem to do the trick as I avoided any hardcore dehydration. The run felt a bit rough at times, but I still managed to better my time from two weeks ago. Magnolia Road is the only place that I have a lot of data from so its pretty cool to see the progression over the past few years. I’ve come a long way from when I started.

I finished Saturday with a short one hour spin in the flats. Two days down.

Four days of recovery. That is my self-proclaimed standard for post Half Ironman racing. As I sit here on Friday morning (4 days + 1) I certainly hope to see the signs of the recovery today because they have been hiding all week. After racing on Sunday I drove 2 hours to Wichita Falls and then another 11 hours on Monday to get back into Boulder. It was nice to get back so quickly, but I was pretty damn exhausted when it was all said and done.

I actually felt worse on Wednesday than Tuesday with sky-high heart rates on all of my easy sessions and mandatory 3+ hour naps. Thursday saw a bit of improvement, but I was nowhere near where I needed to be. Nevertheless, I have faith in my four day plan and I scheduled my training to reflect this.

In the past years I have had nearly 6-7 months of training (base and otherwise) before I begin my Ironman focus. This year I have about 3-4; with only 1.5 of solid aerobic base. It will be interesting to see how it all comes together in the next couple months as my Ironman push begins today. I will be stringing together around 50+ hours of training over the next 10 days.; two of those days will only have one hour of training so its more along the lines of 48-50 in 8 days. I will have a few days of recovery following this block before I begin a 16 day build period that focuses on dialing into my Ironman pacing while maximizing the progression of all aspects of my fitness.

I’m starting with a 5-6 hour ride today with a short T run to follow. Lets hope the body is nearly back to normal by now.

until later,

jd

I copied and pasted this report from an email I sent out yesterday about the Playtri Triathlon in Dallas. It doesn’t work very well when I do that so I apologize if there are some formatting errors below.

jd
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A little over a week ago I was flipping throughvarious issues of Inside Tri and Velonews (two of my roommates work for them) and I came across an AD forthe PLAYTRI Half Ironman: a Dallas area race directedby one of my friends, Ahmed Zaher. I decided to make a quick change to the schedule and 13.5 hours (in a car) later I was in North Texas.

Race morning did not bring any epic Texas heat, but it did bring some impressive wind. The swim was fairly protected, but the rest of the course would certainly force us to grind a bit. At the swim start I lined up behind Todd Gerlach of Austin, but that’s about all the contact I had with him once the gun went off. Two or three other swimmers tried to make a run for his feet with me, but all of sudden it was as if we conceded and found our own groove. We had an exceptionally large pack that stayed mostly in tact throughout the swim and we all exited just shy of three minutes behind Todd. Ouch. Good swim Todd.

I hit the three loop bike course with hopes of minimizing any lead that Todd would continue to build on the bike. My plan was to keep things somewhat moderate in the first half and then start to lift the pace with the final lap being the hardest effort. After about 8-10 miles of the race I got a split of almost six minutes to Todd. Well, crap. I still decided to stick to my plan since I felt the wind might really favor an attack on the final loop. Attacking on the final loop did catapult me from fourth to second, but coming into T2 I heard my announcing over the intercom that I was six and a half minutes down on the leader. That is a lot to try and make up over a half marathon, but you never know until you try.

After 3 miles of running I got a split of 6:20. No good. After 6+ miles I got a split of 6:10. No good. I might have mellowed out a little bit at this point, but third place was only 90+ seconds back and he was not fading so I lifted the effort on the second loop. After 9+ miles I had taken two minutes out of Todd and that gave me a second wind. I had images of running him down in the final 100 meters so I kept running hard. I pushed all the way to the finish, but I came up two and a half minutes short of the victory.

Nevertheless I was happy to come in second with one of the faster runs on the day; not to mention taking home a paycheck. The inaugural Playtri Festival(www.playtri.com ) was definitely a well-run and successful event. You can be sure I will be heading back there in the years to come.

Thanks go out to my aunt and uncle for all their hospitaity over the weekend and to my sponsors: EAS, Trainingbible.com, Descente, Javelin, and Fuel Belt.

See you in Idaho in June,JD

www.justindaerr.com

Its hard to comprehend the tragedy that took place in Blacksburg this week. No matter how much information they find on the shooter it will never justify or rationalize such actions. My heart goes out to the families of the victims, to the witnesses, and to the students, faculty and community of Blacksburg. Its extraordinarily difficult to empathize with their pain and sadness. Few of us understand the immense injustices in the world. Most of us only understand the petty.

Hang in there Virginia Tech Nation. Here’s to hoping you can all rise above this.

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Training since Monday has included:

Monday:
easy 10 x 200 meter swim; mix of everything. weights followed (and I saw the news on tv at this moment).

Nothing else on the day; Mondays and Fridays are almost always easy in Boulderworld.

Tuesday:
Morning run at the Res with 8 x 90 sec @ vV02 (building to 184 to 185 HR) on 2:30 recovery. Total run around 8+ miles.

Swim shortly after at Elks. 3K aerobic main set on moderate intervals. Little over 4K total. Felt ok. I could not lift the pace at the end, but I did not fade either.

Ride about an hour after swim with Dennis, Gordo, Michael and me. Rode 36, backside of Carter, and home via 75th. My climbing is starting to come around as I climbed the backsde competently this go round. About 70 miles in 3:30

Wednesday:
Morning run, very easy 45 minutes finishing just before the swim began

Swim with some faster work. About 3200 total with 1200-1300 of hard/fast swimming. Felt Ok, but tired at the end.

Afternoon ride with a 15 mile climb up lefthand canyon. Probably the highlight of the day as I kept a high zone 2/zone 3 tempo the whole way. I am not feeling beat up at the higher altitudes so accilmization is coming along nicely. About 2:25 ride time

Finished up and headed over to Sports Garage to pick up the serviced PT. My ergomo is whacked out so I might need to send that back in. Hopefully the issues with my backup PT will be alright.

-jd

Ironman Arizona race day.

I got a late start on the day because I was following the IMAZ swim finish. Once I saw BB’s result (nice improvement) I headed out to do a long ride.

I rolled out via 75th st in the flats and started riding steadily right away. The goal of today’s ride was to log a lot of steady state intensity in the flats. I made one small modification because I wanted to get some climbing during the second half of the ride.

I rolled out to Carter Lake and climbed the frontside, then rode back to Boulder via 83rd, 75th, Lyons, 36. I got back to the house after 3:15 of ride time and quickly checked the race status. Afterwards I headed out and climbed the frontside of Lee Hill, Mile 10 of Lefthand, a little beyond Jamestown, and home via the backside of Olde Stage. That added about two hours of climbing (and descending)

Total ride time was around 5:15 or so with quality throughout the entire session. My acclimation is coming along and it could be readily noticed by my ability to competently climb the steeper grades (as opposed to merely surviving them). I still have a ways to go, but that relates more to my fitness, not my acclimization.

I was supposed to get a short run off the bike in, but I needed to get down to Denver to meet my dad for an early dinner. I got to check out a lot of downtown Denver that I had yet to see before. Pretty cool spot. Lots of bars, restaurants, lofts, etc. That’s the way to do it if you have to be in a big city.

The total volume for the week was around 28 hours; the main highlights including the overall run volume (and quality), Sunday’s ride, and every swim workout of the week.

-jd

Saturday proved to be one of those days that makes you happy to be in Boulder. The weather was absolutely gorgeous when we woke up. It was even more perfect when you consider the weather of the previous few days.

I headed over to Elks for the 8:00 a.m. swim. Gordo put together a fairly moderate, but long set of 5 x 900 meters as swim, band/buoy/band/buoy/paddles, paddles only, swim. All on about 30-45 sec rest.

A couple hours later Gordo, Dennis, Monica, Josh and I headed up to Magnolia Road for a long run.

Magnolia Road.

Mags is pretty famous. I’m not sure who started running there first, but I have no doubt that Lear upped its popularlity substantially and gave it a lot of glamour when he profiled the CU runners running there in his book “Running with Buffaloes.” Whetmore does some of the Sunday long runs for the XC team up there on that long rolling road and everyone wants to do what national champions do.

Magnolia Road begins as a paved road from Boulder Canyon and continues for about 4.5 miles. Then a dirt road begins and continues another 7.5 miles to the Peak-to-Peak Highway. It actually continues another three kilometers on the other side of the highway where it dead ends into some single track. The beginning of the dirt is somewhere in the 8000+ elevation range and you climb all the way to the turnaround which, I would speculate, is around 8800 feet. I need to get the exact number on that because I have been speculating for far too long.

There are two roads in Colorado that serve as my favorite long run locations. One is Magnolia Road in Boulder. The other is Slate River Road in Crested Butte. Slate RR is wonderful because of its solitude and the river that runs along it that you can hear the entire time. Magnolia is wonderful because every single mile has its own character. The road has mile markers so you can really break the entire run into mini sections as they all provide their own challenges.

I normally cook myself a bit when I run Magnolia for the first time each year, but this time I opted to ‘cruise’ it and keep my HR under 160. I ran 60 minutes out (about 156 HR avg and 55 back (about 150 Hr avg) and I did_not_cook myself so I was very pleased with the session. I tacked on another 5 minutes of easy running to bring it to two hours. That also brings a seven day total of about 126 km (about 77 miles) .

After returning from Mags I headed out on an easy two-plus hour spin in the flats around Boulder. Then came home and chowed down on some burritos.

Good day.

Now is probably as good a time as any to sit down and write down some updates. Its about 30 degrees and overcast. Its hard to complain considering they were predicting twenty feet of snow or something ridiculous like that.

The past couple weeks have really flown by with travel, time in Crested Butte, travel, settling into Boulder, and, of course, training.

I finished Lonestar on April 1 and I was on the road by noon on April 2nd. I spent the night in Lubbock and then drove another ten hours on the 3rd to Crested Butte to spend some time with my folks and to drop off some stuff that I won’t be needing in Boulder (read:work clothes).

I stayed in CB through the weekend and got in a moderate amount of training. There is something about 9500 feet that makes simple tasks like running a_touch_ difficult when arriving from sea level (while still recovering from the race). I was crashing pretty hard each night, but my body was starting to come around by week’s end.

On Monday, April 9th, I headed over to Boulder to get settled into my new home. The condo is home to three ex-pats from Austin and about four times as many bikes. They are all great people (bikes are great too) and I think its going to be a perfect fit for the next five to six months. This will be my longest continuous stay-to-date in Boulder and its looks like I found the right people to spend it with.

However, Boulder has not been the kindest upon my arrival. The weather has been quite cold and I did not particularly come prepared as it relates to winter gear. Fortunately my sponsor, Descente, is based in Boulder and they provided me with plenty of gear once I got here to keep me warm in the windy canyons. Frankly, they saved my ass because I haven’t missed a step of training despite to less-than-optimal conditions. Its nice to have sponsors that step it up to make sure their athletes can keep it rolling no matter what.

And their gear is great. Check them out at the link to the right —–>>>>>>

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My buddy Blake Becker, www.blakebecker.com has been keeping an upated training blog on his site and its all been about his preparations for Ironman Arizona this Sunday.

Good Luck B. We’ll be pulling for you out here.

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Blake has been thorough about updating his blog with daily training for IMAZ and I will do the same as I prepare for Ironman CdA this June. Numerous updates per week should be the norm as opposed to one here and there.

Hope you’re warm wherever you are. I need to get the day rolling,

jd