Combining Pacing Across Sports

One of the most interesting things about triathlon is the interplay between the sports. Your swim affects your bike and run. Your swim and bike affect your run. Add in the fact that you can do each at different paces and it gets interesting.

Last year in the IM I held off on the bike. I didn't output much power. Then I had a great run. It was a good way to shave 40 minutes off my previous IM pr because I had previously blown up on the run each race. So a steady but slower bike plus a non-exploding run gave me a pr.

But with that easy time shaved off, how do I make up time this year? I won't be able to take it too lightly on the bike... I won't make a pr. But I also can't go too hard... I'll explode like in years past. As I progress towards my ultimate pr the margins of performance get slimmer and slimmer. And what's so interesting is that I'm not talking about muscles... I'm talking about pacing strategy.

The last two days I did two relatively identical bike rides, except for the pace. On the first day I did about 40 miles in 1hr54min. Today I did the same distance in about 2hr... six minutes slower. I popped off the run the first day and had no legs. I popped off the run today and had legs. (There was a Thursday run workout that had an effect on the first ride, but for the sake of argument let's ignore that.)

What I need to do now is slowly close that gap and figure out the critical point at which I lose my legs. Is it 1hr55min? 1hr56min? 1hr57min? And once I figure that out I'll have an idea for a 40 mile race. But what about a 112 mile race? Got to redo the test protocol. Then what about the changes in my fitness throughout the season?

And once I find the "explosion point" I'd then have to figure out whether backing off of it, say, three minutes would actually net me five minutes on the run. If it's a 10k run it probably wouldn't. If it's a marathon, possibly.

There are just too many moving parts! Sure, I'm a geek. I could spreadsheet the heck out of it and get some numerical sense of my critical outputs at various distances. But fitness isn't static. A purely numerical approach is the scientific training way.

As I ride and as I blog workouts I think about the scientific stuff. But I balance it with the naturalistic training method. Going by feel. Sometimes I hide the heart rate monitor and try to ride at mod-hard. I focus on how that feels. What burns. How frequently I wipe sweat. What my breathing is like. And then how the run feels after that effort. Later on I try to correlate it to the scientific numbers by looking at the heart rate and power files. But in races you have to go by feel. You aren't operating at your normal training paces so you have to be able to adjust. You have to know your body.

All of this coming together in a solid race performance is one of the things that motivates me to keep trying. It's fascinating to see how the body reacts to different conditions. It's amazing how a small difference in output on the bike can lead to a massive difference on the run.