Posts Tagged ‘triathlon’

Day 5 of the 7in7 challenge starts to push the game a little further. The first four days added up to 13 hours of training, which is a lot, but not unheard of on an Ironman triathlete training schedule. But from here on out things get tougher as I crossed the 16-hour mark. Some aches and pains, soreness and chafing but so far it is pretty manageable.

Today’s plan was swim, run, bike. My swim felt good but there was some messing about dodging other swimmers so ended up slower than yesterday. Despite feeling sluggish at the start of the run, I got stronger throughout and felt amazing for the final few kilometres, possibly because I Was coming back down hill. Finally, the bike course took in the Beach Island Loop of Watopia. Thank you to Graeme, Naomi and Leigh for keeping me company.

Swim: The Edge, 38:23
Run: Woodhouse Moor loop, 51:23
Bike: Watopia, 1:19:36

Today I passed through the halfway point in the 7in7 challenge. And we passed the £600 mark in fundraising for Unseen!

The cold water in the lake seems to have dried my hands out and I’ve been madly moisturising all day. And I forgot to foam roll last night so I felt pretty stiff this morning. Luckily, after an uneventful swim, Laura Henson was able to fit me in for a sports massage. I broke out the overshoes for the bike ride today but the rain mostly stayed away. Finished up with a trail run around Meanwood Valley with Sarah. It’s all downhill from here!

Swim: The Edge, 37:03
Bike: Otley loop, 1:42:18
Run: Meanwood Valley, 1:01:28

Day three was a reverse day: run, bike, swim. Morning run with my dad through the bluebells in Temple Newsam before heading down to Wakefield to cycle with Bogdan. Lovely to have some company for both parts! In the evening, I headed down to the Blue Lagoon for my first lake swim of the year. The water temperature had fallen to 13.1 degrees and it felt freezing! My core was okay but my poor hands and feet.

More importantly, we passed the £500 mark raised for Unseen today. Thank you for all of your generous donations!

Run: Temple Newsam, 56:56
Bike: Wakefield, 1:39:52
Swim: Blue Lagoon, 49:39

Day two complete. My swim stroke is feeling much stronger today. I swam an extra 50 minutes as by the time I checked my watch to see how many lengths remained, I was already past my target. The 1,500 itself was 3 minutes faster than yesterday. The bike was slower due to the route being hillier, and my cleat came loose. Heavy rain and stomach cramps on the run, but it was lovely to be running with the club. Thank you Clare for leading.

Swim: The Edge, 38:17
Bike: Chevin Eccup loop, 1:40:55
Run: Kirkstall, 1:02:59

Day one in the bank. The pool was busy this morning and it felt like hard work, possibly because I was thinking there was still all of it to do! Luckily, the sun was shining for the rest of the day and I got my summer jersey out for the first time, albeit with a base layer underneath. The run was shorts and t-shirt weather, too. A little soreness in my left glute but no concerns at the moment (of course, it is only day one!).

Swim: The Edge, 40:01
Bike: Castleford out-and-back, 1:35:23
Run: Aire & Calder Navigation, 53:23

Starting tomorrow, I am attempting to complete 7 self-supported standard distance triathlons in 7 days. It is in support of Unseen, the anti-slavery and human trafficking charity (registered charity number 1127620). They run safe houses for both women and men, the Modern Slavery Helpline, and training on modern slavery awareness.

That’s a 1,500-metre swim, 40-kilometre bike ride and 10 kilometres run each day. I hope my body holds up! The pools have only been open for two weeks here in England so it has been a short ramp. And I seem to have picked a week filled with rain. But I have it a lot better than the estimated 40 million victims of modern slavery worldwide, including thousands of victims here in the UK.

If you want to get involved you can come swim, bike and run with me. You can also get involved via the JustGiving fundraising page. I will be posting updates here and on my Instagram.

James Lawrence, better known as The Iron Cowboy, is the triathlete that completed 50 Ironmans in 50 days (the 50-50-50) and is now on a new challenge: #Conquer100. Which, as you might guess, is an attempt to do 100 Ironmans in 100 days. All of this is amazing and in this post, I want to focus on just one area of that amazing which is how much he needs to eat.

I don’t actually know what he is eating other than a few social media pictures but just calculating the numbers makes suggests that his is truly a test of GI tract endurance. Here is why.

Calories burnt

Lawrence is posting his Garmin workouts as he goes and he is burning around 5,900 to 6,800 kcals per triathlon, which is taking him somewhere between 16-18 hours. Then there is the 6-8 hours he is not racing, most of which is sleep, so we can assume another 600 kcals of basal metabolic activity on top of that. Therefore, he is probably burning through around 7,000 kcals per day.

Which means he needs to eat 7,000 kcals a day. And because he is mostly racing when he is not sleeping, most of that needs to be done while he is doing the triathlon.

Could he run a calorie deficit?

One option would be to eat less than he is burning. Except this is not an option in Lawrence’s case. Because he is doing it for 100 days.

Even a modest deficit of 500 kcals per day (modest when you are burning 7,000) would cause him to lose 0.5 kg per week. But he is doing it for 14 weeks, so that is 7kg he would lose. He probably only has around 7kg of body fat on him at most and we need some body fat to live. Men can get down to around 2-5% and still be okay, but when you only have 10% body fat, you cannot lose 10% body fat and except to survive. Of course, he could also lose muscle but that is a pretty bad idea when you are trying to do an Ironman every day.

In any case, he isn’t going for this strategy as he has been posting his weight in his daily updates and gained a little bit of weight over the last week.

Okay, so gels then?

One of the big challenges is that he needs to eat a lot of this while doing the triathlon.

Typically, we would minimise eating while exercising because the body needs to shift blood flow and energy to the muscles and so if we try and force it to digest food at the same time we end up with stomach cramps. To offset this risk we would typically use gels: they are made up of glucose and fructose that the body does not need to break down because it is usable energy.

In comparison, we would avoid eating protein because proteins are long chains of amino acids and so the digestive systems need to break these down into individual amino acids before it can use them.

But in Lawrence’s case, gels are not an option. First, his body physically could not process them fast enough. The perfect ratio is a 2:1 mix of glucose to fructose that allows us to take up 90 grams per hour (360 kcals). To get through 7,000 kcals per day, he would need to take a gel every 20 minutes for 20 hours per day. He is not awake that long.

Also, who could stomach 60 gels per day? And no, he can’t mix it up with anything else because nothing else has the magic 2:1 ratio of glucose and fructose. Start eating sugar out of a bag, for example, and it is not as effective because its a 1:1 ratio and the body needs to cleve the table sugar in two to get each part.

The only way to get the energy content in then is to rely on protein and fat to avoid the 90 grams per hour barrier.

Second, a pure sugar diet would not work because he needs to rebuild the damage in his muscles constantly. Typically, we would go out and do a hard race and worry about eating protein after as our muscles recovered. If this process took a few days, it no big deal because our races are widely spaced. But if you are doing nothing but sleeping and racing for 100 days, you don’t have this luxury. The body can only handle 20 grams of protein at a time and functions best when it gets these protein shots 5-6 times per day.

The iron stomach

In summary, he needs to eat around 400 kcals per hour, every hour, from a mixture of protein, fat and carbohydrates, and leave himself enough energy to digest all of this while swimming, cycling and running.

While 400 kcals is not a heavy meal, it is clearly a meal, compared to an energy gel (typically around 100 kcals) or energy bar (maybe as high as 200 kcals if you get a big one) and then he has to race on that basically all of the time.

I’m now an IRONMAN Certified Coach. I am already a certified coach with British Triathlon, but it is reassuring to know that my coaching skills also extend to looking after long format athletes and that I am not just winging it based on my personal experience completing full distance and 70.3 races.

I might write up a proper review of the IRONMAN U programme later but in the final assessment, your skills get put to the test when you have to design a detailed training plan for a fictional athlete looking to complete their first full distance event. It was tougher than expected but the work apparently paid off as I achieved 98%.

It’s been a challenging year for all of us. Thanks to a receding coronavirus, there has been a triathlon season, however. Albeit a short one. I signed up; for five races: Evolve quarter, sprint, Derby, Windermere and Goole. Goole was cancelled and I picked up a cold just before Evolve sprint so I wasn’t allowed to race. It lastest past Derby triathlon, meaning I only got to race two of the five races.

Still, two is better than none, and at least Windermere is one of the pretty ones. We made a long weekend of it, renting a converted barn in Crosthwaite and used the time to take in some of the lakes, including Venla beating us all up Gummer’s How.

The swim

I had a pretty terrible swim: it took nearly 50 minutes. I am a slow swimmer anyway, but I am usually under 40 minutes for 1,500 metres. I think a couple of factors contributed. I took it easy and decided to treat myself to breaststroke. That way I could look around at the beautiful scenary, especially looking up at the north end of the lake. It was also a slow start as you cross the timing mat, then run down into the water. But it’s pretty stoney and shallow, so it doesn’t lend itself to running and diving.

The course was also a little confusing. There were supposed to be eight buoys on the water, and the standard distance went around six of them. But, on the day, there were actually ten of them, of which we had to go around eight. This led to some confusion in the swim pack ahead of me on the way out, and me getting confused on the way back as extra buoys kept appearing.

I was second to last out of the water, although this isn’t really an accurate measure because it was a staggered start due to COVID and I was in the second-to-last wave, 25 minutes after the race started.

The bike

The bike course was a story of two halves. One of the issues with the Lake District is that there is a lot of cars and the first half of the bike course meant we were travelling down main roads with cars whizzing by, or on smaller roads, cars would get stuck behind slower cyclists (especially on hills) and I would get stuck behind the car.

The second half was on smaller roads and this was much nicer. It was reasonably flat for the Lake District: 450 metres of climbing over 37.5 km and only one steep climb that topped out at 13%.

The run

The run took place in the grounds of YMCA Lakeside. It was all trail, and some bits involved scrabbling down a few rocks. As I climbed down one of the little walls, the rock beneith my foot gave way and started rolling down the hill. I had to jump off it Super Mario style.

Given the sun was up and beating away by this point, I was pleased to be running through the trees most of the time, though. I had a small issue 2 kilometres from the finish when my running shoes ripped but luckily they stayed on for the remainder of the run!

I am very glad it was dry as it would be a challenging run course in the wet. Some parts were muddy and I slipped a couple of times. But I was wearing my road shoes.

The result

My official time was:

3:20:32

But the splits were initially bit of a mystery. Officially, my swim time was 12:30:45, my bike was 1:26:50, my run was 1:01:08 and my transition times were instant. On my watch, I clocked 49:20, 3:15, 1:26:52, 3:59 and 57:07.

But they later updated the results to be 49:19, 3:15, 1:26:50, 4:03, 57:05, which matches up with my watch.

The pictures are available for free, although heavily watermarked and to find them you have to manually search through the nearly 12,000 photos they have uploaded. As there were three distances going on at the same time, there was no indication where I might be in the pictures. I found my bike and run ones, and I don’t think there is a finish line one. Still, free, so no complaints.

Conclusion

Organising a COVID-secure event is a huge challenge and it’s not like triathlon events are a profitable industry in normal times (unless you’re Ironman, and even they are in financial trouble). So, a big thank you to Epic Events for getting it organised.

Some triathlons are fast, flat and great for PBs. Others are more about having a great experience in a beautiful location. This race is the latter.

Last weekend, my dad, mum and sister all completed their first open water triathlon at the Evolve sprint race.

My dad had previously completed Goole triathlon but this was his first one in open water. My mum and sister were brand new to triathlon. All had been planning to complete at World Triathlon Leeds until is was cancelled due to COVID, so this made a great alternative.

Unfortunately, I came down with a cold on the day of the race, or we would all have been racing. I’m gutted but that’s life. Great work everyone! And thanks to Bev, Morg and the whole team at Blue Lagoon for putting on these races under such difficult conditions.