OktoberFast Wrap Up

I realized last night (as I was destroying a plate of Tandoori chicken, ironically) that October is going to be a very light training month. I have to Taper for the OC Tri which is the 10th, then I promised my body and my wife to go light on the training this month to rest and finish a living room remodel. So my goal is to be at or below the weight I am on race day despite the decreased training load.

The above is the comment I left on September 30th in response to Big Clyde's post about the OktoberFast challenge.  Basically, my month was supposed to go down like this:

• Taper for the OC Olympic Triathlon
• Finish remodeling the living room
• Maintain (or lose) weight in light of a decreased training load.

How did the month end up?  Here it is in review:

The Taper - I ended up doing OK with my taper - twice (well, maybe one and a half times).  Regular readers will recall that I was all ready to go for the OC Tri, but managed to put the wrong cleats on my cycling shoes.  I didn't discover this little folly until about 40 minutes before the race start, so I had to drop out after the swim.  Obviously I was pissed, so the second I got home I searched for another race and found the Big Rock Olympic Triathlon the following weekend.  Though the second time around wasn't a full taper, I definitely took it easier than normal.  In hindsight, I think everything worked out for the best - I ended up doing OK at Big Rock.

The Remodel - Yeah....this one's not done.  I've been working on it, but I'm not finished.  I used to love doing this stuff, I'm not sure what happened.  I still have to install some light fixtures, paint and seal the floors.  This WILL be done by Thanksgiving; mid December at the latest.

The Weight - My weight is down by a pound or so, but it wasn't that much of a "challenge" due to the fact that my training volume didn't decrease too much.

Here is my training volume for the month:

Bike:	20h 16m 24s  - 362.79 Mi
Run:	11h 42m 55s  - 86.93 Mi
Swim:	9h 12m 08s  - 15880 Yd
Strength:	40m

It's a little over 41 hours.  My run volume is slightly up from September, but the bike is down by about 90 miles.  The decrease in the bike is mostly due to 2 or 3 days of crappy weather we had.  I'm not sure if this is a bad thing, but I really couldn't be bothered to ride in the rain pretending I'm racing in one of the Spring Classics.  Also it's nice to see I made it to the gym - once.

The cherry on the proverbial sundae was winning my age group at the Huntington Beach Distance Derby.  This certainly wasn't in my plan.  In fact I wasn't even registered for this race on September 30th.  But it was nice to win a piece of hardware for the first time. 

So it seems that though nothing really went as planned, I had a pretty good month.  Well, except for the living room.  I'm catching some heat for that and I probably deserve it.

Anyway, a big thank you is in order to Clyde for masterminding the challenge.  I also look forward to reading about how everyone else did with their challenges.

Wow, A Win?!?

I ran a local 5 mile race this morning called the Huntington Beach Distance Derby.  The race starts and finishes at the pier with a out-and-back route along the strand.  It's a pretty low key affair and since it only cost $25,  I figured it was a way to get out the door early plus get an official time for my trouble.

Even though it's low key, the city does a great job putting it on - there was enough of a vendor expo at the start/finish line to have something to do while waiting around, it's professionally timed and there are plenty of volunteers with a great aid station.

I didn't even plan on writing about it.  What was there going to be to write about?  I was going to get up, drive downtown, line up at the start, start running when the horn went off and stop 5 miles later.

But then a funny thing happened.  I won my AG and came in 16th overall.

To be fair, the deck was stacked in my favor similar to how Boise State's fooball schedule is stacked for them.  That is to say that in my case, there were not too many lithe, natural born speed demons there today.  You know who I'm talking about - runners who can effortlessly hold a sub 6 minute pace mile after mile.  And what's funny, last year it wasn't like this.  There must be something else going on this weekend.

Still, a win is a win, right? 

What happened was that I got off to a good start, and within the first mile the race was split into 4 groups - the guy who won was out front, another 20 or so runners who were holding a pretty quick pace came next, then me and 2 or 3 others and then everyone else.  And from there, I managed to get away from of the runners I was with and passed a few from the pack ahead as they dropped off.

So that's how it ended up.  I crossed the line in 37:22 with an average pace of 7:28.  I was actually hoping to best a 36:21 time I'd done on my own, but today my splits ranged from 7:20 to 7:35 per mile.

Of this first victory, I must ask one thing my friends...HOW?

I was planning on going straight home after the race, but I knew I had done OK based on the amount of people I counted ahead of me at the turn around.  So I stuck around.  I knew I had a top 20, but I had no idea there was no one in my AG ahead of me.  I was definitely surprised when they posted the results.  I now know the taste of victory - it's just like the strawberry smoothie I had my face jammed in when I looked at the leader board.

The interesting thing about the results are that a guy who beat me by about a minute to get 13th place only got 5th in his AG, which was 50-54.  Those guys where on fire today.