Pic Spocket

I just completed a pretty epic weekend of training and racing. Saturday, I headed to Kensington Park in Michigan for a long brick workout in the hills: 117 km bike with hill repeats on hilly and rolling terrain immediately followed by a 30 min run. At the end of the bike segment, I actually ran into a group of LPC athletes, which was pretty nice. The workout was tough and I was dead once I got back home shortly after noon.

Sunday morning brought something new for me: a stand-alone open water swim race called “Swim to the moon” organized by Epic Races. This is a 5000 m one-way swim through 5 connecting lakes in the Pinckney Recreation Area once again in Michigan. I entered the ‘wetsuit division’ for the race. Turns out that the race was mostly attended by swimmers (duh!) and not so many triahletes it seemed. We were only ~23 swimmers in the wetsuit division.

For the race, I put my Garmin 310XT GPS watch under my swim cap to record my race. I thought I had a great idea by turning off the “swim mode - which does smoothing” so that the watch could notify me at each kilometer during the swim (vibration), but it turned out to be a bad idea. In the normal mode, the watch ended up overestimating the distance travelled by ~20%, so when the 4km warning arrived, I thought I was on fire with a killer time and I increased the pace further. After a while, I knew somethign was wrong because 10 minutes later, I still was not seeing a hint of a beach or a finish line. Bummer! Here is a satellite view of my swim through the 5 lakes. Pretty cool huh?

You can actually see on the satellite view where the watch was warning me of the completed kilometers. As you can see, I still had ways to go when the 4 km warning came about. Because of false on-the-fly data, it seemed like the swim was never ending. Final distance reported by the Garmin unit: ~6km. I usually get better correlation when I swim with the watch under my swim cap.

I really had a blast during this event. They had aid stations with drinks and gels at various docks and boats.

My final time for the 5000 m swim with wetsuit: 1:21:58. Still far from real good swimmers that finished the race in 1h06 (without wetsuits!!!!), but I am very happy with my performance. This equates to a 31′ time on a Half Ironman swim, and a 1h02 for the full Ironman swim. Considering that was my first swim to life above 3000 m, that’s quite good.

With this time, I get 4/27 in the wetsuit division, 3rd overall male and a nice award: a “swim to the moon - Award” beach towel.

I did better than I was expecting, and this gives me a huge confidence boost for my upcoming triathlon swims, including next year’s Ironman (3.8 km) : now I know I can do the distance!!

>> RESULTS: Overall

Here is the link to the interactive Garmin site.

But the weekend of training was not done.. I had to log in a long run of 1h40 later in the day. I have done it during dinner time, running through Malden Park and at the Detroit River for a good 20 km. The legs were completely DEAD after that. Today Monday is a rest day, and I feel pretty sore from the last week. Back to training tomorrow!

Wednesday evening, it was the third and last installment of the T-REX triathlon serie in Brighton Michigan. I have done all races in 2009 and 2010 so far, and manage to improve my time at each iteration.

This was the second triathlon for baby Cadence Turner.

I won’t go too much in the details. It went very good, starting with a nice swim in the speedsuit. I was only slower than my last swim there by a few seconds.

On the bike, I still have a hard time believing it, but I battled the whole time against a 55 yrs old woman. The little thing was passing on every hill climb of the course, and I would passer her on the downhill and the flats. We kept doing that till the end of the course. I was so intrigued, I looked her up online when I returned home. It turns out she’s an ageless legend, Laura Sophiea,  multiple ironman age group world champion in KONA (World Championships) where she competed like a dozen times. No wonder I had a hard time! Here she is in the picture below, right in front of me.

I still posted the fastest bike split of the race, and also tied the bike course record for 2010 with a 29:32 time for the 19.2 km course with rolling hills.

I came out 3rd out of T2, and ran my fastest triathlon run split to life with a 4:06/km pace, but that was not enough to keep my position. Several fast runners wednesday evening and I ended up finishing 7th with a time of 1:05:08, a new PB on this course by about ~45 seconds. I did 3rd in my age group, getting some more goodies.

Craig also raced. He went back to his signature move, as shown below. After the finish line, we were posing with our “T-REX serie’s finisher beer mug”.

A funny thing: the event photographers had banners around the race site, including this one on the stage where Canadian Ted Lamont was playing. I was on the picture from a previous race this year.

I am very happy wit my progression. I raced 6 times on this course in 2009 and 2010 and managed to improve my time at each opportunity. Here are the time comparisons:

* Wetsuit Swim
** Speed Suit Swim

As usual, more pictures in the album below!

T-REX TRI 2010

Last Sunday, I raced the Tecumseh Triathlon (previously ‘Windsor Triathlon’). This race is one of the only races in Ontario offering prize money for the Elite division, so it attracts some very fast people. However, they make the Elite race start earlier and keep the results separate from the “Age Group” division. With the Elite guys out of the way, I was hoping to place really good (top 3?) in the non-elite race.

Thanks to my lovely wife for supporting me 100%, I have awesome pictures of the race to share once again She was cheering for me on the side lines.

Last year’s race was done in torrid conditions. Extremely hot and very humid. This year was similar in trend, but not as bad. I had quite a good race. I had a decent swim, but the last 200m were weird due to the shallow water. It was hard to figure out whether you should swim, jump or try running in it.

I had an awesome bike split: simply the fastest bike split of the non-Elite athletes for the day. The winner of the Elite race was a monster on the bike though, doing 7 minutes better than me on the bike alone. He’s one of the top triathlon time-trialist in Canada. That’s crazy fast!

I did OK in the run, but I got passed by a couple of “Masters” (over 40 years old) in the second half. I did not know at the time, but seems like there was prize money ($300) for the fastest Master of the day, so these guys were gunning for it. I wish I had a stronger fighting will so that I could respond more agressively when being taken over near the end of the race. I tend to give in rather than digging even deeper.

Total time (800m swim / 30km bike / 6km run) =  1:30:10, some 12.5 minutes faster than last year!! However, I did not place as high as I’d hope with a 5th position overall in the non-Elite race. This was very tight though with the winner only 73 seconds ahead of me! I am still quite happy with my race and my improvements.

>> RESULTS

Below: Charlotte Loaring, m y coach’s sister running the finish chute for her overall win in the non-Elite division. Then, posing with awards with her and Sean Ryan, the overall winner for the non-Elite division on the men’s side.

Craig also raced, cutting a good 10 minutes from last year’s time. Good job! Craig literally left sweat and blood on the field. Look at his pedal below, showing the blood from a cut on his foot from the swim that went through his bike shoes - that happens when you walk the lake bottom rather than swimming ;).

Baby Turner witnessed her first triathlon race. Craig actually replaced his signature move (push-ups) by a pit-stop to kiss Cadence during the run, under the amused eye of another athlete…

After the race, me and Corinne joined the Loaring pool & bbq party, where some of the LPC and Elite athletes met after the race.

Tecumseh Triathlon 2010

Sometimes, networking technologies are reaching into unexpected places. This is especially true with the explosion of the internet. I remember reading over 10 years ago about MIT students that connected on of the campus’ vending machine to their local area network so that they could verify online the availability and temperature of their favorite pop drink from their desk before heading down to avoid going all the way there to find that their drink was sold out. Makes you wonder what will be connected (or rather ‘what won’t be connected to the internet’) in 20 or 30 years.

In the mean time, I got one of these unexpected ‘connected’ device for my birthday last June from Corinne, and thought I would write a few words about it. I am referring to the Withings Wi-Fi connected scale. (Of course, I did make that suggestion… after reading Ray Maker’s review of it.) One might think: ‘Who want to have their bathroom scale connected to the internet?’ Well… I guess neardy-weirdos-living-by-numbers like me hehe! Seriously, it’s actually an effortless and useful tool to monitor your body composition over time.

Here is the scale in all its glory. It’s actually pretty neat looking: low profile, blue-tinted glass top and digital screen.

The scale functions are pretty advanced by themselves. The scale not only measures your weight, but also your body composition (% of body fat). It also computes and displays your BMI (Body Mass Index), but I do not agree much with these. According to the tables, I would show as borderline ‘overweight’ when in fact I am decently lean.

I also own one of these advanced body-fat-measuring scale made by Tanita, and find the information quite useful to monitor your weight and composition. Weight alone is not a good indicator to see progression when dieting or training. Body composition is quite important. For instance, people training and dieting may feel like they reached a ‘plateau’ when the scale does not show weight loss anymore, while in fact muscle mass can be increasing while fat loss is still underway. While the absolute fat percentage measured (evaluating the electric impedance of your body and comparing it to some tables) is not extremely accurate, it is good to monitor changes over time. The numbers below include me holding the heavy camera…

If you have been following this blog for a while and seen the ‘weight loss’ serie, you have seen that I used to record and chart the progression of my weight loss. While it was not terribly time-consuming to do, I still had to commit to the task and update the graph daily and manually. Since my original goal has been reached and free time is quite limited with the current volume of triathlon training, I simply stopped recording this data even if I weight myself daily.

Where this scales separates itself from the competition, is by its internet connectivity. After a small and very simple initial setup operation involving your home computer and a USB cable, the scale connects to your home wireless network. My scale is actually on a different floor of the house than the home office where the wireless modem is located. Then, after each weight-in, the scale connects to the internet and sends your measurements to your account on the Withings web site. Then, charts are automatically created and updated without any user intervention. Measurements can be edited, added or deleted manually from their online user interface.

note: The peak in weight is real.. it’s what I get after a week of vacation without training while eating junk (pizza, ice cream, etc)… Back to diet and training now!

The thing is actually pretty smart too: based on user profile (created online) and the last weight-in of each user, it will automatically assign the measurement to the correct person. In other words, there is no button to push or anything to select a user before weighting yourself… Simply stand on the scale, and it automatically detects if it’s me or Corinne. In the case where several users are in the same weight range in the house, then it would offer a choice on the screen and you would have to shift your weight on the left or right to specify who you are.

Another cool feature is that your account can be setup to automatically update other online fitness and health tracking websites that you may be using. For example, I am using ‘Training Peaks‘ (TP) to log all my workouts and communicate with my coach. My Withings account is setup to automatically update my Training Peaks account every time I step on the scale. Here is the graph in the dashboard view of TP. I never asked him, but I guess my coach has access to that information as well. I just hope he does not get an email notice every time I step on the scale hehe!

Withings also offers all kinds of optional online sharing tools (stand-alone web page, widgets, Facebook updates, etc). Here is my up-to-date online chart.

After several weeks of use, I have to say that I really like it! It’s effortless and quite reliable. Neat gadget! Larger pictures are available here.

Just back from a long weekend completely off the grid - no internet, no emails, no computers and no phone - at the beach in Ipperwash in the Grand Bend area with Corinne and Newton. We refer to these as ‘Newton’s vacation’ since we bring him along for the ride. We stay in a very simple motel in the area over there, that accepts dogs.

It was quite relaxing especially since training is still VERY light in my case. I am still nursing a pain issue in my right knee that occured after my last race. Every morning, we take breakfast as ‘take-out’ and head out to the beach in Ipperwash. Hard to get a better parking spot…

Quite nice actually to have all your stuff so close hehe

The first 2 days, there was a lot of waves, but that did not keep Newton from having the time of his life down there. He just loves water, and fetching the ball. Put these 2 things toguether, and he’s having a blast!

We also went for a stroll in downtown Grand Bend to have a bite on the Saturday afternoon, but finding a parking spot over there is kind of a nightmare. After that, we headed to the ‘dog beach’ at the ‘Pinery Provincial Park’ for some more beach time. I actually did a 30 minute training swim covering roughly 1500 m parallel to the beach (no pics).

The weather was not as nice on Sunday, but we still enjoyed the beach before driving back to Windsor. Back to work tomorrow morning!

Here is the link to the photo album. Take time to browse it, there are a few really good ones of Newton.

Ipperwash Beach 2010