Category Archives: Cycling

A Tough Day

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Jeff Mather


I have never wanted to quit a race so much in my life, and I wasn’t even a mile into the half-marathon segment of today’s Patriot Half 70.3 triathlon. My swim was really good—my best at this distance that wasn’t aided by a current—and I was really strong on the bike. So what was going on? Why was “DNF” crossing my mind after having what would have been a kick-ass aquabike?

After a few races where I wondered after finishing if I had given enough (including Hopkinton last month), I decided that I needed to work on strength—in particular, my mental strength. I had been finishing a bit too fresh, even though I felt like I just couldn’t go faster, and the gran fondo a month ago showed that I could bike faster. Either I needed more physical strength to get the job done, or (just as likely) I had untapped potential that I could draw upon. Either way, I sensed that I could go faster and needed to work at it; I just needed to be a little more willing to suffer, to be willing to go into the pain cave on the run and know that I would come out of it a couple hours later very satisfied with the result.

When I visualized the race last night and this morning, I could see myself focusing on my technique in the swim, working hard, and finding myself in a group of people with a good pace. After riding the bike and run courses last weekend, I figured I could put in some good effort on the bike and possibly set myself up for a PR. I also visualized myself being more deliberate during the transitions, attempting to speed them up. And that’s pretty much how the first three hours and 41 minutes of the event went today.

I was having more trouble getting excited about the run. I’ve run half-marathons (and longer) before, and I find them difficult but doable. Almost all of my long races have been urban—with lots of landmarks to show progress—but this course was extremely rural, yet it had very little shade. I tried to put that in a little box and just think about digging deep to go hard, but when I started out on the run course, it felt incredibly difficult—mostly mentally. Usually, I don’t have trouble running off the bike, but today felt slow, and I had some trouble believing that I could perform at the level I wanted/hoped. I wasn’t having fun, and two hours of running seemed like a very, very long time. The thoughts of a DNF started early, well before I started walking at the first aid station . . . right at the first mile.

But I knew I wasn’t going to quit. On Thursday, I decided that I would be racing hard in my TeamWILD kit for Mari Ruddy, the founder of TeamWILD and the Tour de Cure “Red Rider” program for people with diabetes. She had been missing since Tuesday, and I didn’t know whether I would be racing in her memory. Fortunately, that was not the case, and she’s recovering now. No matter how bad I felt—and I didn’t feel very bad, just soft—I couldn’t give in. Plus, I would know that I could have finished, that I should have done better. It was never really an option.

So, as I was walking out of the first aid station, I came up with “Plan B.” I would run to each aid station and then walk for two minutes before starting to run again. Coming out of the second aid station, I briefly talked to a guy in my age group who was also walking: “A run/walk is the only way I’m going to get through this half marathon,” I said. “You and me both,” he replied. Shortly afterward a funny thing started happening. I started passing people and making better time than during my previous 70.3. Of course some people passed me on the run—they were running, after all—but I caught most of them when I started running again. I was actually kind of amazed at how effect the technique was. By the time that I got to mile 6, I had a good thing going, and I was pretty confident that I was in a good place for a PR. I decided that I could run through the last three miles, cultivating some of that toughness that I wanted.

When I crossed the finish line in 5:38:42 with a new PR by almost 20 minutes, I felt like I actually had given almost everything I could access today. I wish that I’d had the strength to run the whole thing at a respectable pace, but I’m not sure that I would have been able to do better than today’s 8:56/mile (5:33/km) if I had tried to run the whole thing anyway. Thinking about the run/walk, I see a clear area for improvement, but I definitely see the value in it and will keep it in my arsenal for tough days like today.

I’m doing my next 70.3 (the Timberman 70.3) in August. This race promises to be much tougher because of all the hills. Hopefully I’ll be tougher, too.


Oh, and of course Lisa took some great photos, despite Patriot being a difficult course for spectators with cameras.

Posted in Cycling, Reluctant Triathlete, Running, Swimming | 6 Comments

Gran Fondo

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Jeff Mather

I was hanging out in the middle of the pack about 85 miles into the North Shore Tour de Cure “gran fondo” feeling a bit out of it. I was hanging on to the rider’s wheel ahead of me, but it felt harder than before, and I could hear the world buzzing around me.

Losing my background noise filter frequently is a sign that my blood sugar is going low. I had been hanging out around 200 most of the ride, but I gave myself a minuscule amount of insulin at the previous rest stop since I hit that magic number where, even on a ride, I feel like I need a little something extra to help my body use the food that I’m giving it. Actually being low seemed unlikely, but I’ve seen my blood sugar move a lot in a short amount of time before. If we weren’t going so fast and riding so close together, I would have checked my BGs, but I worried about popping off the back of the pack and being caught in no-man’s-land. Plus, I didn’t really think I was low.

It was also entirely possible that I was at my limit, with or without diabetes. We had already gone 25+ miles farther than my previous longest ride of the year. I’m a firm believer that if you can ride sixty miles, you can ride 100 miles; it’s just a matter of how fast you can go and how you feel at the end of the day. I could go 100 miles for sure, but how was it going to feel? Early on, I realized today was going to be different than my Tour de Cure century last June, which was a leisurely gabfest and sightseeing jaunt with Scully. Unlike that ride, at the eighth mile of this ride there was a two-mile time trial that showed that the people I was riding with weren’t afraid to throw down. In fact, it felt just like triathlon, except faster and without my tri bike. (I kept thinking, “Well, there’s a drafting violation,” before remembering that it was okay today.) About a half-hour later, when heading out of the first rest stop, I managed to get on to the front of the pack and drag everyone five miles to the start of the timed hill climb. Needless to say, it wasn’t my best effort.

That categorized climb was 55 miles earlier. Since then, we had ridden almost another three hours, averaging just under 20 miles per hour (32 km/h). I spent those three-ish hours watching the rider ahead of me—taking care to stay close (but not too close) to his wheel—and checking the road for hazards and turns, which I pointed out like a good pack rider. During those 55 miles I worked on using just the right amount of energy to stay close to the person ahead of me without overdoing it and needing to move out of their slipstream to slow down or (horror!) touch the brakes and then pushing hard to stay on their wheel when I relaxed too much. Power up; power down; power up; power down. And then throw in a hill to cause a ripple through the pack as we all stood up and seared our quads to keep up with the person driving the pace. [1]

I was struggling a bit, but I didn’t want to be that guy. This was a Tour de Cure—which nominally meant that it was a ride to help people with diabetes—but most of the people in the gran fondo were treating it as just another organized ride. Unlike last year’s ride, there were many fewer Red Riders on the long ride, and most of the people we passed didn’t give the typical “Go, Red Rider!” cheer. No one asked anything about diabetes, and when I asked what people’s connections were to diabetes, the answers were vague and almost apologetic. [2] I was torn between wanting people to understand how difficult diabetes can be sometimes and how much people without diabetes take for granted and not wanting to use diabetes as any kind of excuse for anything unless I’m actually in a hypo-induced stupor. I was determined to be the strongest guy with diabetes on the ride and to challenge any lingering misconceptions about our abilities.

So when we rolled into the last rest stop fifteen miles from the finish, I tested my blood sugar, saw that it had dropped more than 80 mg/dL (4.5 mmol/L), ate four glucose tablets and a PB&J sandwich, and mixed some Skratch mix into my water bottle. I wasn’t hypoglycemic, but I had dropped enough (as I had suspected) to feel it and to need to prevent falling at the same rate for much longer. I put another banana into my back pocket to replace the one that I had bobbled and almost caught before losing it at 30 mph earlier in the ride. I took a quick picture with my camera for posterity and then headed out with my adopted group.

A few miles later I was feeling back to my perky self. All of the work I had put in so far was still dragging on me, but I noticed that the miles seemed to tick down a lot faster than just a bit earlier. We also started passing a whole bunch of Red Riders now that all of the routes were sharing the same road near the finish. One of the guys from the small Blue Cross Blue Shield team rolled along side me.

“Hey, Jeff. How would you like to lead us all in when we cross the finish? I mean you’re a Red Rider, and it just seems right.” I was genuinely touched, and the message rippled through our now much smaller group of about a dozen riders.

I knew that if I was going to lead people in I was going to make sure that I did a pull on the front so that it wasn’t just a ceremonial gesture. The last three miles were great! I put my head down and churned out a consistent 20 mph pace, just slightly faster than our 19 mph (31 km/h) pace for the entire ride. My body felt the best that it had all day. When we were stopped at the intersection just before the finish line waiting on the police officer to stop traffic for us, there were compliments and handshakes all around. I like to think it was because I survived their out-for-blood, keep-up-or-ride-by-yourself club ride, instead of just having a really good pull for a guy with diabetes.


1 — I need to more of these hardcore training rides. I think it would make me a much stronger rider. [back . . .]

2 — There was a whole lot of “My mother-in-law/father/aunt had diabetes.” Always in the past tense. Some of the people I talked to were (admittedly) a bit older, but many were my age or younger. Clearly, there’s a need for much better information about diabetes and how to live with it successfully so that there’s less past-tense and more present-tense. And there’s also a tremendous need for research funding and advocacy so that there are more people living without diabetes. And that, dear readers, is why I was at today’s ride. [back . . .]

Posted in Cycling, Diabetes | 3 Comments

Shhh…

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Jeff Mather

I should be writing today’s Diabetes Blog Week post about my ultimate diabetes device, but I really need to go to bed in a few minutes. Tomorrow I’m leaving Milford around 5AM to drive an hour to the start of the North Shore Tour de Cure Gran Fondo. “What’s a gran fondo?” you ask. It’s like a race but not. It’s a mass start event with some timed segments, but it’s not a race, okay?. Okay. I certainly won’t be racing the 100 miles . . . except for the hill climb and the time trial.

But don’t worry. I’ll post about diabetes doodads soon. And the ride of course.

Posted in Cycling, Diabetes Blog Week | 1 Comment

Remembering the Desert

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Jeff Mather


Memories are the focus of today’s Diabetes Blog Week posts.

Until recently, my most memorable day with diabetes would have been the day of my diagnosis 13+ years ago. It was such a life-changing event—cleanly separating my memories into before and after—that it’s going to be hard to ever truly forget much of it. But recently more and more exciting/interesting/unusual things come to mind first when I think about diabetes and my life. On the bizarre side, I called Minimed from a pay-phone in the middle of the outback in Australia when my pump died. Later on that month-long trip, Lisa and I had a fabulous time snorkeling (sans pump), and I barely worried about diabetes at all.

Perhaps my most memorable diabetes event (at least for now) is last year’s JDRF Ride to Cure Diabetes in Death Valley. Diabetes was everywhere on this ride (including some of my favorite people with diabetes) and yet my diabetes was remarkably well behaved. The more time that passes from this event, the more special it becomes. I mean, I rode 105 miles in the desert Death Valley! It was hot and difficult and so meaningful. It’s something I couldn’t have done on my own, and all of the help from the volunteers and donors meant so much to me. That particular ride is not necessarily something I’ll ever do again, but the memory changes how I think about diabetes and what I can do with it.

Posted in Cycling, Diabetes, Diabetes Blog Week | 3 Comments

Swim. Swim. Run.

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Jeff Mather

There’s just no getting around it: Today’s NE Season Opener triathlon was wet. After what felt like the longest time away from triathlon—August’s 70.3 was my most recent—I had been looking forward to this race for quite a while. It didn’t occur to me until yesterday evening, when we were watching the weather forecast on TV, that it was possible that we would get rain during the event. But rain it did. Sprinkles at first and then a full downpour during the bike portion. There were rivers running down the highway, and Lisa said there were several crashes on the big hill leading to the transition area. Fortunately, the rain ended right as I started my bike-run transition, and I finished with a time that was just off my best time from last year: 1:09:47.

I made a couple of good decisions today. First, I decided to bring Tommy V (my road bike) instead of Chrissie (my tri bike). Over open ground, Chrissie is a couple of miles per hour faster, but I’m a lot smoother and much more agile when out for a ride with Tommy. Given that I could barely see through the rain today and that some of the corners were tight, it was the right choice to pick conservatively. And yet I still was passing lots of people. In fact, my bike split felt good and was the strongest part of the event for me. I started to wonder whether I was pushing too hard given how many people I reeled in, but I had more than enough in the tank for the run. My other good decision was bringing a plastic bag to put my running shoes and socks into to keep them (mostly) dry until I needed them.

On the other hand, I should have started farther forward in the swim. Evidently, I got faster over the winter, and I was constantly swimming onto people, slowing my forward progress. I could easily have been about 10% faster if I’d had fewer people elbowing me in the face or slowing down in front of me. On the plus side, I drafted on the swim! That was a first, and it was pretty cool.

My diabetes mojo is a bit rusty. I decided to try something different today, so that I could eat a bit more before the event. I was doing pretty well keeping my BGs down until just before the start when it started to go higher. Unfortunately, I went all the way up to 274 mg/dL (15.2 mmol/L) by the finish. Something to work on for next time.

It’s good to be back!

Posted in Cycling, Diabetes, I am Rembrandt, Photography, Reluctant Triathlete, Running | 1 Comment

Crash and Burn

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Jeff Mather

Like a Sunburn: Two Mondays ago I had this conversation with my general practitioner.

“A few weeks ago I was sick, and then, a week after feeling better, I started having some pain in my leg. It felt as if all of my hairs were going the wrong way. Or as if my thigh had been scrubbed with steel wool. Everything on the left side of my body from my tailbone around my hip to just above my knee feels raw.”

“Kind of like a sunburn?” my doctor asked.

“Exactly, except that when I touch it or apply pressure it feels better. In fact, I feel best when I’m wearing bike shorts or swimming or running . . . or when my clothes can’t even brush against my skin.” By mid-week I was walking around holding my hip, which made the discomfort bearable. I could also be heard exhaling deeply from time to time to take my mind off the pain.

“But just on one side?”

“Yes,” I said. “That lasted all week, so it wasn’t just a run of the mill irritation. Then on Friday I noticed that I had a very swollen lymph node on the same side. At first I could feel it, but now I can actually see it, too.”

My doctor was starting to look like he knew what was wrong with me. What I didn’t say was that, after I found the lymph node, it was too late to get into the doctor’s office on Friday, and I kinda had a little freak out over the weekend. What was wrong with me? I didn’t have most of the symptoms of the few things I could think of. If it was a hernia, would my season be over before it started? What if it was more serious than that?

“And then I noticed a cluster of bumps on my back. They don’t really hurt, but they started around the same time. Now I have a few on the front of my thigh, too.”

“You have shingles. You’re the fifth person in the last week that I’ve seen with it. That’s really unusual.” And then he pointed to the poster from the CDC behind him on the door. It was the poster I had started to look at before he came into the exam room. On it, sad-looking, line-drawn people had shaded swaths on one side of their bodies. Then he gave me a prescription for the drug you get if you have herpes.

I was starting to feel much better a few days after starting to take the valaciclovir. I still feel a little pain just below the skin in my hip, and I’ve read that the neuralgia—which is what this kind of nerve pain is called—can last months. Yet I still feel fortunate that my shingles wasn’t as bad as some of the pictures I’ve seen or stories I’d heard.


BG Crash: Meanwhile, I was still swimming, cycling, and running. Swimming was going well, and I felt like I was getting back to my pre-illness form and speed. Running was . . . amazing! I’m still not super speedy or anything, but I noticed that at some point over the interminable winter my form improved, and as a consequence I seem to be able to run faster with the same amount of effort. Cycling is another story, since I found myself a bit off my form the end of last season. What I needed was time in the saddle. So about a month ago, I switched from mostly running to mostly cycling. I want to say that it’s been slow, but really I’m progressing pretty quickly, getting in a couple of 60-mile rides over the last two weekends. Hopefully, I’ll be speedy on Sunday for the first tri of the season and ready for the 100-mile Tour de Cure gran fondo next weekend.

One thing that has been completely different—and very frustrating!—compared to last year is my diabetes abilities in the afternoon. Almost every workout for a couple of weeks ended with me either 100+ mg/dL (5.5+ mmol/L) lower than where I started. That’s quite a drop, especially given that I had been working hard to keep my BGs in a “better” range. As a result, I was having a bunch of lows (or near misses) while exercising. No amount of pre-emptive eating seemed to fix anything. The worst was a span of three days where I had to stop cycling and running in order to treat hypos. I hate stopping.

It occurred to me that a few things were different. As I already mentioned, my BGs are bit better throughout the day, which (unfortunately) gives me less room for a drop like this. My training volume is also higher now, which means I’m more likely to use blood sugar, since my muscle glycogen might be slightly lower. And—this probably is the key—I had ever-so-slightly more active insulin in my system than last year. I remember being hungry in the afternoon everyday last summer and not eating because it would mess up my afternoon running or riding. Surely, there’s got to be a better way to balance the need to eat and the need to exercise. I should go back to my TeamWILD notes from last year to remember how much to lower a bolus for food depending on how far in advance of riding it is. Stay tuned.


An Actual Crash: Last Sunday, I went out for a little ride. It was a beautiful day; Chrissie (my tri-bike) and I hadn’t been out for a long ride together for a while; and I was feeling pretty energetic. About 20 miles in, I decided to stop at the same park I did the weekend before to take a little “nature break.” The previous time, I accidentally punched myself in the face taking off my arm-warmers. This time I didn’t even make it into the park before starting the mayhem.

Turning the corner from the highway to the park at about 10 MPH, my wheels hit sand, and I slid to a stop on my right side. Two women walking down the street saw the crash and asked if I was okay. As I stood up, nothing felt broken, although I could already feel some pain on my right leg despite the adrenaline. I’m fine. The ladies seemed dubious. So I looked at my bike and saw everything was (thankfully) exactly as it was supposed to be. My insulin pump seemed unharmed. And then I looked at my knee and shin. Blood and scrapes, but nothing that wouldn’t heal or keep me from finishing the next 40 miles. Yes, I’m okay. Thanks. All things considered, I wasn’t badly hurt—just a little road rash—although I was bleeding pretty well.

I headed into the park to do what I’d gone there to do, and then I spent a few minutes cleaning out my wounds. The bleeding from my knee wouldn’t really stop in the 30 seconds that I was willing to give it, so I used my beanie (which I no longer needed on this ride) to blot the blood and headed back out. I think I scared a few people I saw on the remainder of my loop. When I got home, Lisa didn’t believe me that it was a wolverine attack, so I had to fess up that the blood was, in fact, my own and convince her that I was, in fact, okay. After a shower it looked much better. Now, about a week later, the scabs look a bit gruesome, but the injuries they cover feel fine.


It’s been the strangest two months since the New Bedford Half Marathon, and hopefully nothing else happens between now and Sunday.

Posted in Cycling, Diabetes, Life Lessons, Reluctant Triathlete | 4 Comments

Cold

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Jeff Mather

It all started a few days after the half-marathon. I had already decided to take a couple days off running following the race, although I’m not sure I could have actually gone for an easy run on those days without hurting myself. That very cold but fast-ish race really beat me up. On the Monday and Tuesday of the conference I was hobbling around, and sitting still comfortably for long periods of time was a challenge. But by Wednesday I was feeling fine, so I went for a short run around downtown San Jose.

It was colder than I had expected, and I had only packed a couple of short-sleeve running shirts—it’s California, right?—so I was a little chilled for the first ten minutes or so. The same thing happened Saturday morning, when I put in seven flat miles from my hotel to the airport and back along the excellent Guadalupe River Trail. In the days between those runs, I got a case of the sniffles and a sore throat, but it went (mostly) away, even after a nice (but chilly) hike with friends along the coast at Half Moon Bay.

I could hear on the other end of the phone line that Lisa had a bit of a cold, too. I assumed that we both got chilled in New Bedford—me running and her waiting around for me to finish—and then compounded it with a cold outdoor run or bike ride (in Lisa’s case). The day I returned home from California—a week after the race—Lisa was flying to Oregon, and we passed somewhere over the middle of the country. When she returned home the next weekend, her cough had progressed to something more menacing.

While she was gone I did my usual thing. Swim in the mornings three times a week. Run after work a few times. Ride my bike a few times. The weather was gradually warming up, but these workouts were all a bit cool. The bicycling and the swimming felt difficult, which I attributed to not having done much of them recently, but the running was good . . . almost easy. The day before Lisa arrived home I went for a decidedly difficult seven-mile run. It was hard partly because it was chilly and the route I picked had a 2.5-mile hill in the middle of it. But really it was tough because I had given blood the evening before.

Last week the temperatures finally warmed up a bit. I was still coming home from a ride with a runny nose, but at least the temperatures were in the sixties and seventies. Monday and Wednesday I did some incredibly hard (for me) swim sets and was coughing a bit afterward, but I didn’t think anything of it. My swim paces were still off my best times, but I was feeling strong. Wednesday I went for a run.

All last week my BG readings had been terrible. Terrible as in: high all day except immediately after I exercised, during which they dropped 150+ mg/dL (8.5+ mmol/L). In general, I seemed to be insulin resistant. I loaded myself up with insulin and my blood glucose barely moved. 180 (10) was the “new normal” where my body seemed to want to stay. Except that I had finally gotten myself down to 130 (7.2) on Wednesday before my run, which had me feeling incredibly nervous. Because I’m stubborn, I went running anyway, and ended up walking the third of four miles in a bit of a stupor. When I finally started running again, my hypo sweat had me almost shivering. That evening Jess had to talk me down—which I admit was quite easy—when I expressed feeling that I totally sucked at diabetes.

That night and the one before I slept in the guest bedroom because Lisa’s coughing prevented me from sleeping. Even the cat abandoned the poor girl.

Thursday, I finally started to put things together. The ineffective 115-120% basal rates, the slow swimming, the coughing, the sniffles, the copious amounts of Mucinex D that I was taking to loosen up my congested chest, . . . I didn’t suck at swimming or diabetes. I was getting sick. Not (hopefully) the same bronchitis crud that I had last year (and that Lisa seems to have now) but definitely something. I went to bed early.

Friday, I skipped the pool. It was tough for me to do. The coming week is spring break for the town’s kiddos. And as Pool Lady used to say, “No school. No pool.” I didn’t want to take an extra day off swimming before a full week hiatus. But I needed the rest, and I think the chlorine was messing with my already fragile sinuses. Midmorning, I felt like I was in a haze. “I think I’m going to go home early,” I told Lisa, who had been given an antibiotic prescription by her doctor the previous afternoon. By noon I canceled my afternoon meetings and went home to lie on my sofa. I watched a fascinating episode of “Nova” about Australia before falling asleep to wake up more than an hour later with the cat asleep atop me.

Lisa and I had planned to go to New York on Saturday to see “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity,” which are three of my favorite things. But Friday evening, as I was laying around sounding pathetic, Lisa (easily) convinced me that we should go another weekend and concentrate on getting well. Which is what we did.

I concentrated—I really did—but the jury is still out on how well I am. I did the dishes yesterday, and we shopped for groceries today, and that was about it. Well, I did read 150 pages to finish The Romantic Revolution: A History. But mostly I slept and sat around. And coughed. And sniffled. And coughed a bit more.

The good news is that I slept better last night than the previous. My head also isn’t pounding the way it has been the last couple of days, nor is my skin quite so crawly. And while I’m still coughing and sniffling, it’s a little better than before (I think).

The hardest part—perhaps worse than actually feeling like crap—is knowing that my first race is only a month away and that I haven’t been training much recently. But I’m trying not to worry, because usually when I come back from an illness, I end up doing better than before.

Anyway, tomorrow is Patriot’s Day, the best day of the year. I just need to make sure that I dress overly warmly so that I don’t get chilled again.

Posted in Cycling, Diabetes, Running, Swimming | 2 Comments

January 2013 Recap

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Jeff Mather

We can close the books on January:

  • 31 workouts (8 swim, 8 bike, 13 run, 2 Nordic ski)
  • 215.9 total miles
  • 26 hours, 34 minutes
  • 16,700 calories
  • Farthest swim: 1.3 miles
  • Farthest bike: 44 miles
  • Farthest run: 12.6 miles

Plus, one shoulder injury that had me away from the pool for a week. (More about that later.)

Posted in Cycling, General, Historical Record, Reluctant Triathlete, Running, Swimming | 1 Comment

Dirty Pictures

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Jeff Mather

Six months ago, I bought a shiny new bike and posted some sexy pictures of it. I rode it the rest of the season, flew it to Colorado and Wyoming, took it through Death Valley, and loved every minute of our time together.

I haven’t ridden my beautiful bike much since Death Valley, preferring to log the miles after work on my tri bike in the basement instead of on the dark roads. And while I did ride up snowy Mount Greylock a couple years ago, in general I do not like riding on wintry roads. Last weekend the 40ºF (4ºC) temperature was warm enough—despite the fog and drizzle—to tempt me out for a three hour ride. As I was spinning down a road in Holliston I realized just how much I had missed being outside. It has inspired me to get outside as much as I can between now and spring.

But, man, did my bike get dirty.

Posted in Cycling, Photography | 1 Comment

The Announcement

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Jeff Mather

This morning I did an extra-long, pre-holiday endurance swim of 4,000 yards. For the curious, that’s 2.27 miles and just short of an Ironman swim distance. Had I known beforehand, I might have done the extra 250 yards to get me to there. When I was heading back to the locker room, Pool Guy called out, “Great Swim!” It was indeed.

Speaking of Ironman, it’s been years since I rode 112+ miles on my bike, but I rode over 100 miles twice this year (in the Twin Cities and Death Valley) and they felt pretty good. Just like this morning’s swim, they were shorter than the full Ironman distance and they weren’t races, but the distance is in my legs for sure.

One thing I’ve never done is run a marathon. I have run a couple half marathons and 18.6 miles around Hamilton Harbour, but I always balked at running a full marathon. At first my thinking was “26.2 miles is a long way, and I’ve never raced half that.” During my first half-marathon, I distinctly remember thinking midway through that “two hours of pain is more than enough, thankyouverymuch, and I can’t imagine racing hard for a full marathon.” After my first half-ironman, where I raced hard for almost six hours, that complaint doesn’t hold up very well.

26.2 car decalAnnouncement #1 — the small announcement: After years of saying that I didn’t want to run a marathon—all of those protestations were true, by the way; I wasn’t just being coy—I’ve decided that next year I will run my first marathon. For one thing, I’m pretty sure that I’m at the point in my conditioning where I could race one and not just run it. I mean no offense to the people who run marathons with the primary goal of finishing them, but when I toe the line at the start of any race, I’m in it to finish as high in the standings as my body and mind will let me. I wasn’t in the right place mentally to do this in the past, but I am now.

I’m still mentally preparing myself to run uncomfortably fast for an entire half-marathon next March. I’ve been changing how I talk to myself during my tempo runs and mile repeat workouts on the high school track. Gone is the self-doubting question “Will I be able to hold this tempo for 13.1 miles?” In its place during each lap is “Here’s another quarter mile at 7:00/mile pace. I can do ten seconds slower than that for ten more miles.” Even if my brain is not completely sure I can do it now, I know that my body can. I’m going to fake it ’till I make it, and I’m going to keep visualizing success over the next three months until it’s time to do it for real.

Also, there are a couple of marathons that I would like to do someday (“bucket list” stuff, if you will, although I hate the term). One of them is the Boston Marathon, which I’ve watched every year but one since 1998. (Here some photos and reminiscences from 2006, 2007, 2011, and 2012.) The day of the race is my favorite of the year, and each time I watch it I get a little twinge of envy, wishing I were running with that crowd. But usually, it’s just that: a twinge. That all changed one day after work last summer during my long run, which took me along the Boston Marathon route. As I was running past the Natick Common, which is where I almost always watch the race, the church bells started ringing. Instead of drawing everyone outside as the lead runners approached, they were simply announcing the hour, but they might as well have been tolling for me. I’m pretty sure that was the moment when I actually decided to make the jump to a marathon. (The other is Big Sur, which just looks ridiculously beautiful.)

Despite a few people trying to convince me to run Boston next year for charity, I knew that I didn’t want Boston to be my first marathon. I want to enjoy Boston when I do it. Well, as much as you can enjoy a multi-hour throw-down. I also kinda want to see if I can meet the qualifying standard. Plus, I plan on doing more triathlon next year, and I want to focus my training appropriately. So I’ll be running the Bay State Marathon in October—a couple months after the end of triathlon season—in “scenic” Lowell. (Why do I sign up to do long-distance running events in blue-collar, post-industrial cities? Why not?)

Ironman M-Dot logoAnnouncement #2 — The BIG announcement: Now we come back to the beginning of this post. I have improved my swimming. I have a solid base for cycling. I’m moving up in distance to marathons. Moreover, I had a good half-ironman experience; my diabetes is in a pretty good place; and the idea of doing triathlon for 12+ hours doesn’t really bother me.

I’m going to do an Ironman . . . in 2014.

As much as I would love to do a full iron-distance event next year, I’m just going to have to accept the fact that the age on my calf will read “40″ when I finally do my first. I’ve thought long and hard about when to try it. As with the marathon, I want to do well. That’s going to involve some additional endurance and strength work over the next two years. I will be racing next year, and those races will mostly be longer distance events, but I’m saving the big one for a bit longer.

Who knows what will happen after that?

Well . . . I have goals. . . . But that’s all I will say on the subject. Let’s get through one Ironman first.

Posted in Cycling, Reluctant Triathlete, Running, Swimming | 4 Comments

Going Nowhere

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Jeff Mather


It’s here again. Yes, it is the holiday season, but I’m talking about the time of the year when those of us who love cycling (but also have day jobs) put the bike on the trainer and do a lot of our riding indoors. For some of us it represents a fundamental, existential crisis. “I love riding my bike for hours outdoors, but I hate spinning away for hours inside. How do I survive a winter on the trainer . . . or of no riding? *shudder*” Victoria—who has convinced me to do another JDRF ride next year in Nashville—recently posted her lack of love for the trainer, and it occurred to me that I have the solution, since riding inside never seems to bother me.

Nothing is ever going to replace the amazing feeling of the air flowing around you as you push through it under your own power. You’re never going to have that thrilling feel of speed when you’re not moving at all. There’s never going to be same sense of accomplishment from climbing a mountain or going up and down little rollers when you’re staring at a wall or electrical circuit box or television or iPod or whatever might be directly in front of you. When there’s no need to change your pace, of course it’s going to feel monotonous. Two hours of not going anywhere might have same physical effect as riding outside, but it can be rather soul crushing.

Since nothing is going to compare to the real thing, change the kind of riding that you do indoors.

Tell yourself that outdoor riding is for the pure love of the bike, while indoor riding is solely to make yourself a stronger cyclist. On the roads you have fun, inside you ride with a purpose. Outdoor rides might go on for hours, but indoor training should be limited to 30-60 minutes. Indoors you do the hard work to make riding outdoors easier.

If you’ve been riding for a year or two, you should already have a solid endurance base, and you don’t need to do more workouts to target that inside. What you want is to build some strength and speed so that your outdoor rides in the coming year feel easier. Hills will feel shorter and less steep. You’ll comfortably spin along at a faster rate. (Not that speed is necessarily your goal, but it’s nice to have anyway, since you can go farther on your weekend rides in the same amount of time if you have the ability to ride a little faster, and you’ll feel fresher when you’re done.)

Here are a couple of workouts you can do indoors in under an hour and not feel like you never want to see your bike again. These are sessions that I do myself.

Every workout (indoors or outdoors) starts with 10-15 minutes of easy riding. I mean easy. By the end of the warmup, you’re probably going to be a little bored and eager to do something different, and that’s just what we’ll do. On “speed” days, you do a lot of short intervals, while “strength” workouts have fewer intervals, but they last a little longer. After the hard work, it’s time to cool down with another 5-10 minutes of very easy riding. The point is to clear the burn and give your heart a chance to settle down before you hop off the bike and get on with the rest of your day/evening.

Speed: After the warm up, ride very hard for one minute before taking an easy spin for one minute. The hard part should feel ridiculously hard, as hard as you can go while turning the pedals at 80-90 times per minute; you don’t want so much resistance on the pedals that you have trouble turning them. (Imagine sprinting rather than climbing hills.) The recovery part should feel very, very easy . . . even easier than the warmup. You should barely be working at all, since the whole point is to try to get your heart rate back down from the stratosphere. Do 5-10 intervals, and you will have done a good 30-40 minute workout. Start with fewer intervals and eventually work your way up to a full ten.

Strength: While the speed workouts are done at an intensity level that leaves you gasping for breath and bargaining with yourself to be able to finish them, the strength workouts—while still hard—are easy enough that you could imagine carrying on very short conversations. Hold back a little on the first intervals so that you can finish the latter ones at the same pace. After the warm up, ride at about 70% intensity for 2-4 minutes and then ride easy for 3-5 minutes. Do three or four, starting short and then building to longer intervals as the weeks go by.

Hopefully these workouts will get you through the long indoor months during the week and that you can still find a way to get outside on the weekends. Let me know how they go for you!

Now, if only someone could tell me how to make the best use of the treadmill.

Posted in Cycling, Life Lessons, Running | 5 Comments

Triathlon Tools for MATLAB

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Jeff Mather

Recently I got tired of continually writing the same equations at the MATLAB command prompt to convert my swim, bike, and run times into paces in the format we’re used to seeing. Temporarily putting aside my laziness, I wrote a handful of tiny helper functions to do the conversions and display them. Voilà, Triathlon tools for MATLAB (ver 1.0). In the ZIP-file you’ll find a bunch of basic functions:

  • Convert swimming times to 100m or 100 yard paces
  • Convert a running time to pace/mile or km
  • Compute cycling speeds from time and distance
  • Pretty-print the output of these functions
  • Convert running paces to treadmill speeds

Each one comes with help and examples. As you can see below, these pretty much dwarf the actual computation code.

function [m100, s100] = swimPace(distance, varargin)
%swimPace   Convert swimming lengths and times into 100 pace.
%   [M100, S100] = swimPace(DISTANCE, M, S) computes the "100 pace" (time
%   per 100 yards or meters) given a particular DISTANCE and the number of
%   minutes M and seconds S needed to swim it. M100 is the minutes part of
%   the 100 pace, and S100 is the seconds part. DISTANCE should be either
%   in yards or meters, and the pace will be in the same units.
%
%   [M100, S100] = swimPace(DISTANCE, TIMESTR) computes "100 pace" given a
%   DISTANCE and a string representing the time needed to swim it (for
%   example '5:18'). It is more natural to use this syntax to specify times
%   longer than one hour (for example, '1:10:37').
%
%   Examples
%   --------
%   % Example 1 - Pace for a 300 yard swim.
%   [m,s] = swimPace(300, 5, 10);
%   paceString(m, s, '100 yards')
%
%   % Example 2 - Michael Phelps's 400m IM world record time at the
%   % 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China.
%   [m,s] = swimPace(400, '4:03.84');
%   paceString(m, s, '100m')
%
%   See also bikePace, runPace, paceString.

% Copyright 2012 Jeff Mather
% This code is licensed under a Creative Commons "By Attribution" license
% (CC BY).  See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ for more details.

[m,s] = getTimeParts(varargin{:});

totalTime = m + s/60;
unitPace = totalTime / distance;

pace100 = 100 * unitPace;
m100 = floor(pace100);
s100 = (pace100 - m100) * 60;

By the way, here are the answers from MATLAB for the examples shown above.

ans =

1:43/100 yards

ans =

1:01/100m

Happy swim/bike/running!

Posted in Cycling, Fodder for Techno-weenies, MATLAB, Reluctant Triathlete, Running, Swimming | 3 Comments

Done!

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Jeff Mather

Victoria had just finished a very emotional 70 miles through Death Valley. This is one of my favorites pictures from the weekend. Many thanks to Sarah for sending it!

Posted in Cycling, Diabetes, General, I am Rembrandt | 7 Comments

I Rode through the Desert on a Bike with no Name

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Jeff Mather

I’m writing (most of) this dispatch on Sunday while flying home after doing the JDRF Ride to Cure Diabetes through Death Valley. There’s a lot on my mind that I want to get across and a little tiny screen and “keyboard” to use to do it. Bear with me, and hopefully I can fix all of the mistakes in post-production.

  
  


Climbing up Jubilee Pass wasn’t as hard as I had thought it could be. I had switched my Garmin bike computer to a screen that shows all the extra data that I only seem to care about when climbing. Usually I just see speed, distance, elapsed time and heart rate. Am I going fast? How long have I been going fast? Am I working too hard?

Now I was looking at total distance (closing in on 52 miles at the top of the pass), speed (8-10 mph), elapsed time (more than 4 hours), grade (3-8%), temperature (101F), and elevation (approaching 1290 feet). I could sense Greg (a great guy from Seattle) sitting just over my left shoulder as I made circles with my feet clad in my red polka dot socks, the ones I wear with my cycling shoes whenever I go mountain climbing. I may not have been the king of the mountain today, but we were slowly passing dozens of riders who had been quicker than us through the break stops.

I’ve climbed taller mountains with longer and steeper grades than this one, but never have I done a climb as hot . . . or as meaningful!

I did this ride for many reasons. I love cycling in new places, and I especially like a destination with a challenge. Plus, I wanted to see some of my peeps again. Those are the normal reasons. In addition, I wanted to show the kids with diabetes and their parents who were at the ride that it’s possible to have a great life doing the same things as everyone else. Diabetes is an obstacle, a challenge, an impediment, and a pain in the ass. It’s a disease, but I don’t let it stop me from doing crazy things. It has given me a different perspective on life for sure—perhaps it’s even made me a “better” person—but I’m always going to wish I didn’t have it. This ride’s goal was to raise money so that I (and millions of other people) one day might not have diabetes anymore.

The fundraising goals were big, and I’m still amazed that I was able to meet, much less exceed, them. (My mom told me the JDRF website says I had the 8th highest fundraising amount for this ride.) As much as I don’t want to focus on money, it really was the raison d’être for me being in Death Valley. I rode so that researchers can find a cure to my disease, develop a vaccine to prevent other children and adults from developing type-1 diabetes, and devise better therapies in the meantime.

 
 
 


Between looking at the white line marking the edge of the road, the riders we were reeling in, the moonscape scenery all around us, and the numbers on my bike computer, I was thinking about my donors and the other people with diabetes I know—fellow badass bike riders, coworkers, kids, the online community, and random people I’ve met at airports, interstate travel plazas, and everywhere else. I always love riding—and I would have done this ride on my own with lots of logistical support, but it meant so much more to be doing it with all these people for bigger reasons.

Greg and I made it to the top of the pass, took pictures to prove it, and headed 100 yards back down the hill to the rest stop to wait for Ross, an amazing rider and parent of a sweet seven year-old with diabetes. I talked a bit to Maria from the Netherlands whose boyfriend, Matthias, was riding. I talked to Bret, the ISU student whom Victoria and I talked into doing the ride, and to his mother who was also volunteering. They along with everyone else were the best volunteers I’ve ever met. If they were uncomfortable with the 100+ degree temperatures, blazing sun, and unbelievably dry conditions, they certainly never gave any indications.

And it was brutal around 11 AM when we arrived. We rolled out from Furnace Creek at 6:45 when the sun hit the peaks of the mountains to our west. Ross and I had talked about averaging 17-18 mph, although I was expecting/hoping for closer to 15-16. But no! Ross is a machine, and after the first mile-long climb out of town we were rolling along between 18-25 (30-40 km/h). I was okay with this since I was sitting on Ross’s wheel, and it was mostly flat or downhill to Badwater, the lowest point in North America. I thought, “We’ll see what happens after the first bit of adrenaline wears off . . . after we hit the sun . . . after Greg or I start taking a pull at the front.”

We rolled along past Badwater, where I joked, “It’s all uphill from here.” We watched the sunlight work its way down the mountains and race across the basin toward us. At the 23rd mile we were still in shadow but just barely. It’s tradition during JDRF rides to ride the 23rd mile in silence, and I spent those three or four minutes thinking about people the world has lost and continues to lose to this disease. In particular I thought of someone from the diabetes online community who recently died. She was a young woman with a Twitter feed that was full of life, happiness, and hope. Then it was abruptly silent. It’s not right or fair, and it’s a big reason why I was riding.

Almost as if on cue, minutes after we finished this very significant mile, we rode into the sun. Almost instantly the air became warmer. We had been hydrating for days and trying to take on board extra sodium. After the pre-ride briefing on Friday scared the crap out of us (and extra water into us) Victoria and I made a game of getting extra sodium and electrolytes. At lunch she was licking table salt out of her hand, and I was sprinkling it from the shaker into the water bottle I carried everywhere. Our hydration strategy was working so well that we all but raced to Mormon Point, 40 miles into the ride, since Greg, Ross, and I had been saying for 10 miles that we all had to pee in the worst possible way. In our haste, we picked up a bunch of riders, and I was surprised to see that I had pulled a half-dozen fellow riders (including my new friend Rebecca the ornithologist biologist) into the rest stop, where we racked our bikes like we were in T2 of a triathlon!

 
 


The wind picked up around this time, and we were almost glad for the uphill turn toward Jubilee, since it at least got us out of the wind. After about 40 minutes of climbing, we were celebrating and refueling for the trip back. My BGs started the ride at 122, dropped during the first hour to 97, rose to 148 over the second hour, and then hovered in the 120s for a couple hours. At the summit I was so pleased and extra determined to see if I could be “nondiabetic” during the Ride to Cure Diabetes. Ultimately, it didn’t happen, since I rose to 198 about an hour from the end—no doubt largely the result of the extra snacks and the long, fast, and almost effortless descent from the pass. One hour after a small correction bolus of 0.3 units and some hard riding, I rolled into the finish at Furnace Creek with a 97 on my BG meter!

The descent was the first time I lost contact with both Ross and Greg by going off the front. We had an understanding: While they were free to descend like grandpas, I was going to open it up and do what I love to do, after which we would all meet up again at the rest stop a mile after the end of the downhill. It was a great time, albeit a bit rough. My bike was really rattling under me at 35-40 mph, and Ross hit a bump that almost had him crash at 30+. When we watched the video from his handlebar-mounted camera, we were all amazed he didn’t slide down the mountain on his body.

We rode together for another 35 miles, and we all did a lot of pulling. I was doing extra because I sat in a bit on the way out before the climb. The day was getting hotter, and the road seemed to stretch on as far as the eye could see. We made good time over the long, gradual hills (both up and down), but my cohort was starting to hurt. Greg had a twinge in his leg that he felt a couple of times each minute, and Ross started cramping a bit and kept popping off the back. Just after hitting Badwater again on the way back, Greg and I had The Conversation. I was ready to be done and didn’t really want to stop one more time other than to top off my water. Greg said he wanted to slow up and ride in with Ross, since he was feeling a bit baked himself.

 
 
 


To say that I was conflicted would be an understatement. If I were a better man, I would have waited and spent an extra half hour in the sun. But I rolled off to do the last 15 miles solo, passing groups of riders and offering encouragement. Some folks from a large group of Ohio riders held onto my wheel for a minute or so as I passed, cheering on my polka-dot socks. The last stretch was long, hot, and difficult; on more than one occasion I thought, “This must be what the Hawaii Ironman in Kona is like . . . minus the swim beforehand and marathon afterward.” The final, two-mile climb with three miles to go felt especially cruel, being steeper and slower (but mercifully shorter) than the climb up Jubilee fifty miles earlier.

Finishing was fantastic. I was cheered on by the best group of volunteers ever, and I was so happy to be done. Done riding and feeling the ache in my legs and butt. Done wishing for shade and porta-potties on demand. Done eating energy gels and chews on the bike and peanut butter sandwiches and pretzels and pickles at the rest stops. Done drinking lukewarm bottles of Skratch Lab mix and water spiked with Nuun. (In all, I took in over 700 grams of carbs and drank more than ten full bottles of fluid. That’s more than 250 ounces, or 7+ liters.) Done with all that but definitely feeling guilty that I hadn’t stuck with Ross and Greg for the last 15 miles. I felt doubly worse when I heard them announced moments before I returned to the finish; I had waited a while for them to come in, but I needed to get my phone so that I could tell Lisa and the world that I did not die in the desert. They were so happy to be done, though, that I don’t think they even cared that I was 15 seconds late meeting them at the finish.

We hung out for a while before going our separate ways, cleaning up, and returning to wait for Victoria (from Alabama) and Renea and Elizabeth (from Seattle) to finish. We had seen them 30 miles out, and we knew it was going to be a long day for them. We chit-chatted about the ride and everything else until we saw our friends coming in, and we hollered and cheered and clapped for them heartily. Victoria, who had been having a really rough weekend, almost didn’t come out for the ride, and she broke into tears at the end. We all hugged a lot and congratulated each other and continued to give encouragement even after the ride was over.

This weekend was a fantastic and emotional experience, which we decided was a bit like diabetes camp for adults . . . well, at least for those of us with diabetes. Afterward, I still have diabetes and the blood sugars to prove it. I celebrated with a little too much ice cream and not quite enough insulin (for fear of going low) in the hours after the ride, and my blood glucose readings went from being nice and flat to looking like the high peaks that border Death Valley.

With every mile we rode and every dollar our generous donors gave, we’re helping JDRF make this disease one of the ghost towns that we passed along the route. Thank you all so much again—12,135+ times—for your emotional and financial support. (If you want to help make diabetes a thing of the past, it’s never too late to give.)

Posted in Cycling, Diabetes, I am Rembrandt, Travel, USA, Western Adventure | 12 Comments

How the Race Was Run… and Planned… and Practiced…

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Jeff Mather

I’ve been working on this post in one form or another for almost two months. That’s how long it’s been since I did the Rev3 Maine triathlon, my first 70.3. In an earlier post I wrote about the event itself: how it went, what I felt, how I pushed myself, and my happiness with the result. This one is about the journey and the practical parts of the tri.

Literally minutes before leaving for the airport to go to Barcelona with Lisa last March, I signed up for an 18-week training plan with TeamWILD. Previously I had been my own coach, mixing swim and bike training sessions around a standard 5K, 10K, or half-marathon training plan. The running plan was sensible, but everything else was quite ad hoc. I was eager to try something a little more holistic and which would provide a bit more structure in my bike and swim workouts. I also knew that I was going to need to have my nutrition and diabetes management dialed in as I upped the distance, otherwise four months of training would be wasted and leaving me wondering “what if?” The TeamWILD plan looked like it would give me what I needed.

I’m so pleased with how everything turned out. I trained hard, worked on developing a race plan, experimented with different nutrition and insulin dosages, and ultimately executed my plan almost exactly as I had hoped. I also learned some important lessons from experience (i.e., mistakes) during races last year and earlier in the season. These are the kind of things that you don’t expect to happen but still have to prepare for. Sometimes I was better at working around the problems, but I always tried to incorporate what went well and what didn’t into my next race plan.

On the big rides I did during the summer, I had been lowering my basal insulin rate by 30% about a half-hour before heading out, eating right before starting, and giving a tiny bolus of insulin along with it. This seemed to work. I didn’t manage to follow this plan for the Olympic-distance NYC Triathlon, and the experience left me with high blood sugar, dehydration, and a tough run at the end. In Maine, I was actively patient on race morning, watching my CGM and waiting to eat, bolus, and give Lisa my pump until the very last moment before my swim wave went out. (My backup pump was waiting for me with my bike in transition. I used it during the rest of the triathlon.)

The swim was tough; it’s definitely my weakest discipline of the three. There was a lot of churning water and bumping swimmers. Someone next to me almost knocked off my goggles with his elbow. The waves didn’t really bother me, but not being able to see very well because of the small swells had me anxious. Halfway through the swim I had that recurring, whiny thought: “I don’t really like swimming.” But then I reminded myself that I was only twenty minutes into the race, it was a bit early for those “Are we there yet?” thoughts, and it would be a long day if I kept up that line of thinking. So I thought about my form and buckled down.

A bit more than 45 minutes after dashing into the water, I was high-stepping my way out, unzipping my wetsuit and running up the main street of Old Orchard Beach into transition. I tested my blood sugar before hopping on the bike, and it had actually fallen a little bit. I wasn’t low, but I was heading in the direction where I knew that I needed to start eating right away.

The bike portion was pretty good. My training consisted of longer, low-intensity rides eventually up to 56 miles, which is the distance of the bike leg of a half-ironman triathlon, along with shorter high-intensity interval and tempo sessions. I had gotten pretty used to what it felt like to ride at my target heart rate during training, so it was easy to get into groove. In fact, it felt a bit too comfortable, and I go back and forth in my mind about whether I should have been a little more aggressive. During the race, though, I was worried about saving enough for the run, so I held back. It was probably the right decision, but it was hard to do.

I tested my BG on the bike, which is something that I had been practicing on my afternoon and weekend rides. What I didn’t take into account, though, was that my jersey would be a bit wet when I went to test. Water is the enemy of BG testing. It makes it hard to get a nice droplet of blood, and it fouls the test strips. I was only able to get one good test in, but it told me that my nutrition plan of eating about 25 grams of carbs every half hour in the form of energy gels and blocks was working well. 2:57 after heading out on the bike, I was back.

The run was the toughest part of the day for me. After almost four hours of swimming and cycling, I was starting to get tired. But it was at this point that I started to think about whether I was in a place to achieve my stretch goal!

My primary and easiest goal was to finish. Next, I hoped to have a good diabetes day and have a smart race where I executed the plan that I laid out in the previous couple of weeks. Then there were the time goals that I hoped to meet. Conservatively, I was estimating 6.5 to 7 hours to complete the 70.3, but I knew that if everything went right, I might be able to go under six hours. Having had an okay swim and a solid bike performance and seeing good blood sugar numbers, I was in the place to start pushing myself for that sub-6:00 finish.

All things considered, the run was quite difficult. By itself, running a half marathon isn’t too hard, but after swimming and biking, it took on a life of its own. Having the time goal really helped. It kept me motivated and prevented me from walking a few times where it would have been easier to relax for a bit. I ran hard but not fast (for me) as I plodded through the 13.1 miles.

But in the end I finished with a combined time of 5:58:36!

Training for the Rev3 Half was incredibly rewarding. Even though it took up a lot of time, I feel much stronger physically and mentally, and my diabetes skills are much better, too. I am definitely going to do more 70.3 races in the coming years.

Posted in Cycling, Diabetes, Reluctant Triathlete, Running, Swimming | 2 Comments