Archive for the ‘Sport’ Category

This is a 30-minute upper body workout for endurance athletes. It is perfect for triathletes, runners and cyclists. Even though our legs are doing most of the work, having upper body strength is important for maintaining good form and running economy. In this class, we’ll go through some strengthening and flexibility exercises for our arms, shoulders and upper body.

In this video, I will review the Huub safety tow float. It follows on from my video last week about how to inflate the thing.

The third workout in my strength and conditioning series is all about balance. Balance is super important in triathlon. If you think about a race, you spend none of it with both feet on the ground. You’re in the swim, pushing down with each leg in turn on the bike, or running, which by definition means having one foot off the ground at all times.

As such, having good balance means you can maintain good technique and therefore avoid injury, and also significantly contributes you your economy: the less energy you can waste swaying side-to-side, the more energy you will have to drive yourself forward.

As you may know, Garmin have had a massive outage. It went down Wednesday night/Thursday morning and started coming back online on Monday, so 4-5 days. It took out their website, call centres, Garmin Connection, production line in Taiwan and even services like flyGarmin and Garmin Pilot.

Garmin’s software is awful at the best of times. Syncs constantly fail with the Garmin Connect mobile app, there are a bunch of bugs in their website that have lastest years (I still can’t see my swim from Wetherby Triathlon) and a lot of stuff crashes and does not work as it should. Hopefully, this will be a kick up their ass to make things better.

As a result, this has put a lot of strain on the things that rely on Garmin.

I managed to record my World Triathlon Leeds virtual event and earn my certificate. I was less lucky with Ironman VR16. Unusually, Ironman was on the ball and extended the deadline but technical problems at Garmin’s end with synced rides going missing and activities not reporting correctly meant I gave up after an hour of messing around. Thanks for that, Garmin. Still, even if I do not have the badge, I know I was a VR16 finisher in my heart.

The cycle was particularly challenging. I did 120 km, but a third of the way through a bolt fell out of my cleat (see above) and I had to do the last 3.5 hours with one foot clipped in and the other riding the flat side of the pedal. Thankfully, there were no major climbs or descents.

A few weeks ago I reviewed the Garmin HRM-Dual and said that it was okay. Since then, I’ve been seeing dropouts in the Bluetooth connection that don’t seem to occur on my other devices, including my Polar H10. Here’s an updated review:

Following on from my core workout last week, the second in my series of strength and conditioning workouts for endurance athletes focusses on legs.

Try to keep your knee behind your toes when doing lunges. I couldn’t find the part of the video to add a note to it.

In this video, I will compare the Honeywell HT900E to the Pro Breeze 20″ to see which one is best for indoor cycling.

I hsven’t been doing any fast running recently. The endless base miles for GVRAT have been slow plods and Ironman VR14 was an easy run, too.

However, I decided to do VR15 as a brick. Not the full 40 km bike and 13 km run, as I had already done 100 km on the bike the day before. But, as a warm-up, I did a 20 km blast up to Horsforth and back on the bike before setting off on the run.

The first two kilometres were a little sluggish but the rest were down around 4:40 per kilometre, finishing on a 4:05. Total time for the 10km was 47:12, which is one of the fastest 10ks I have ever run. So, pretty pleased with that. Although, there is an important caveat that I took a break at the turnaround point, so it’s technically a Ross Barkley time.

I was originally planning to do the 13 km as one fast block, but after stopping my watch and restarting it for the 3km, I realised I burnt my legs trying to get a good 10k time. So, I finished off the final 3km in a still-not-shabby 5:00 per kilometre.

It’s not quite a glove and it’s not quite a mitten: the Sealskinz split finger glove, also known as the lobster claw, is my go-to glove when the weather gets really cold. But it also broke really easily. Here is the video review:

How do we avoid drowning in our own sweat when indoor cycling? If you use a turbo trainer, you will probably be familiar with it being one of the sweatiest things you can do. In this video, I’ll give you five ideas for making it manageable.