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All posts for the month October, 2018

Initial Training Thoughts

Posted by hammonjj on October 19, 2018
Posted in: Uncategorized.

I’ve started a new journey, triathlon, and now that I have almost two weeks worth of training, I have some thoughts on how this journey is going to go.

Overall, my training has been super light and my numbers reflect this. I have only done 5 runs, 2 bikes and 5 strength sessions in the last 10 days. My goal for this is to start slow, very slow. When I was initially training for XTERRA Lory last year, in an effort to get fast quickly, I ramped my volume up too fast and ended up having some issues. Specifically, I had issue in my knees and joints from ramping both volume and intensity on the run too quickly. I’m not making that mistakes this time and, so far, it’s going better.

However, I am running into some issues in my shoulder and shoulder blades when running. I get really bad cramps in my upper shoulders and pain in my shoulder blades that has been lasting multiple days. After some initial research, it seems to be something called “Scapular Wing”, which is basically a muscle weakness in the shoulder blade itself and can be easily corrected with a combination of stretching and strength training. I am going to be keeping n eye out on it and possibly see a physical therapist about it though. If it’s not basically gone in two weeks, I’ll go see someone about it.

Beyond that, I have hardly touched my bike, but am slowly ramping volume there as well. I suspect I’ll be back up to 5-7 hours of riding a week in the coming month and will be mostly focused on sweet spot efforts to gain fitness back quickly. I will be waiting to get back into the pool until after the first of the year as I took to swimming really fast last year and ended up swimming consistent 1:22 per 100 in the pool and would likely have been a little faster in open water with a wetsuit. By age group standards, that basically front pack, so I don’t see a need to do much swimming at this time.

Lastly, I have an initial race calendar put together than comprises 1 sprint triathlon and 5 XTERRA races, but I will wait to announce that until I have solid 2019 dates for those races. I made assumptions on their dates based on previous years, which is general safe, but occasionally races will change weekends or be cancelled all together.  

Until next time!

New Focus: Triathlon

Posted by hammonjj on October 8, 2018
Posted in: Planning, Racing, Training. Tagged: , .

Over the years I’ve raced and ridden just about everything that a bike racer could do. From road to cyclocross, all the way to cross country mountain biking and it has been a blast. However, since becoming a father, I miss a lot of workouts and racing opportunities due to the one dimensional training patterns of cycling. I’ve tried several unconventional scheduling patterns, but there are always tradeoffs and I’m no longer will to make those kinds of sacrifices anymore. Due to the complicated nature of schedule training and bike racing with family/work life, I feel it’s time to make a change, so that I can actually reach my athletic potential.

With that in mind, I plan to make the switch for the 2019 season to triathlon, specifically XTERRA triathlons. Why XTERRA? Two reasons:

  1. Some of the most fun I have had training and racing has been on a mountain bike. There’s something so freeing about getting out on the trails and blasting through nature that can’t be replicated anywhere else. Honestly, it becomes an almost spiritual experience.
  2. I don’t actually own a triathlon bike! An old teammate has graciously lent me and old Felt B16, so I will be taking advantage of it as long as I can, but I will have to return it at the end of next season. I also currently don’t have plans to fund the purchase of a tri bike, although I’ll certainly try.

I thought about doing strictly endurance mountain bike racing, but decided against it. At this point, super longer races aren’t something I’m interested in, although, as I get older, it’s becoming more appealing. I much prefer shorter, intense racing, which XTERRA should bring in spades.

On the logistics side, I will do my best to bring back at least monthly updates to my training as well as race reports after each race (schedule TBD). Hopefully they’ll be full of breakthroughs and successes!

Until next time, when I’ll hopefully have a race schedule to report on, maybe some initial swim/run impressions and a new blog title to commemorate my new sporting direction!