The Friday Review!!! February 25th, 2011

Happy Friday Everyone!!!

Results from Rev3 Costa Rica

Here is where you can get all of the results from the Rev3 Costa Rica Race!

Leonardo Chacon (Men's) coming in a time of 1:53:25
Kelly Williamson (Women's) coming in at a time of 2:10:35

Some of my favorites I follow
Matt Reed - 8th (Pro) finished in 2:02.23, I don't know what his average run pace is, but he was 12/13 in the men's field with a run pace of 6:08/mi.  Also there were only 3 men in the pro field that exceeded a  6:00/mi pace.
Kate Major - 2nd (Pro) finished in 2:12.42.  Looks like it was a case of Kelly being better on the swim and the run just enough to out race Kate with her small advantage on the bike. 

I hope to see both of my favorites in the other Rev3 Events this year.  It was kind of interesting to see the pro field in the Olympic distance race this year, but I am attributing that to the fact this was more of a warm up race for the season. 

The next Rev3 Series race is in Knoxville on May 15th, 2011 (Olympic and Half Iron distance).  I completed the inaugural race last year at it was awesome!  It is also a great alternative to the Ironman 5150/70.3 events!  I know some of you are anti-Ironman sanctioned events, while others are just looking for a great alternative race series and this is a bandwagon you should definitely be on (Shameless free plug :).

Let's see... what else happened this week?  Oh yes, the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand!  There is a podcast that some of you might listen to, IM Talk, and if you don't you should definitely check them out.  They are also on Facebook if you want to friend them as well.  They talk about everything, and you get a greater world picture on triathlon since it is coming from a non-US perspective.  Bevin and John, the podcasts' creators are doing well although they have sustained property damage to their homes.  Here is a link if you would like to donate to the people of Christchurch for this disaster (Multiple sites listed here).


Lastly, before I go on about myself for a few minutes, I thought one of the bigger news events this week was Macca announcing to leave Ironman for awhile to focus on the 2012 London Olympics and the Australian Olympic Team. Good for him.  He knows what he wants, and he is gonna leave IM to go and to it.  Congratulations.  I only did a quick skim over a few articles, and I don't remember whether or not he said he would be open to coming back after the Olympics.  I will still enjoy his racing, whatever format he is racing in.

Ok.  So this week I missed a couple workouts because of my Final Exam, but other than that I did OK.  I finally got my road bike fitted on Tuesday, and the most drastic change was that he moved my seat height up about 2.5 inches, he moved my seat forward about a centimeter, and he flipped my headset upside down to give me a more aggressive profile.  He also suggested I get a new set of drop bars (smaller) that will fit the new group set I purchased last week.  I am still waiting for that to come in as of today, however Monday was a Federal Holiday so no post running on Monday.  Bill at All3Sports was very helpful, although they were a bit short handed, they had a lot of employees down at the Rev3 Costa Rica race (they are a major sponsor for the event).  Other than that I have class tomorrow morning for 4 hours, then the Southeast Multisport Expo (that runs from 1:30-7:30p for all of you who live in the Atlanta area).  After that I have a couples shower to go to with my roommate, the couple are really good friends of ours, and the groom to be is one of my fraternity brothers.  Outside of studying, I once again will take full advantage of this beautiful early spring weekend to swim, bike, and run closer to my goals this year.  I think I have about 23 days till the Publix Half Marathon, and I have about 78 days till the Peachtree International Triathlon. 

Have a great weekend!

The Friday Review... February 18th, 2011

Happy Friday Everyone!

I hope all of you have had a great week this week.  I know for a lot of you the weather has been really nice and I have also seen the number of people out and about biking/running quadruple I think.  People had a rough case of cabin fever and needed to get the hell out of the house!  Got a few news items I saw this week, which I thought were important, so I will pass those along first and then get on with what the hell was going on with me :)

First off I wanted to put in my two cents about Lance Armstrong's second retirement (dubbed "Retirement 2.0.").  I think this is a great thing for Lance, and hopefully he will be more decisive than Brett Farve is/was in leaving his sport.  Oh I am sorry, I meant coming back.  Oh hell, I don't know what Brett is doing... I think that he just flips a coin about two weeks before the season starts ;)  Regardless of his innocence/guilt regarding the doping allegations, I think him coming back just stirred the pot again.  There will always be people who put him on that.  After looking at the year after year training regimen that he went through, I would hate to think that some, if not all of his major wins were due to performance enhancing drugs.  Also there were so many proactive things he did for pushing forward testing to fight the doping scandals. 

I feel that his comeback from retirement and wanting to bridge that with the Livestrong organization did not pan out like some people felt it was going to, or at least where I thought it was going to go.  I am sure there were some events where proceeds and donations made there way into the Livestrong program, however, from a PR and outsider's standpoint I felt that Livestrong would be labeled on everything he touched.   I heard all this hype about how a lot of his comeback was going to help promote Livestrong, and then when I watched him throughout the year I did not see much of Livestrong shown, other than his Livestrong bike he rode during his races.  I did not think that he was gonna be able to pull off another Tour de France win, however, in the same note, he loves his sport so much that I can see how hard it is for him to get away.  Kudos to you Lance, I hope that you enjoy your retirement!  Also come back and do a tri or two for fun ;)

As for me, the front end of the week went really well for me training wise, and then the wheels fell off at the end of the week.  I will get to that in another post, probably tomorrow (Monday, as it is Sunday and I am still working on the Friday Review).  School seems to be much harder and taxing (no accounting pun intended) and when I got to Thursday I started wearing down.  An average day for me without training is 6:30a - 11:00p, and that schedule includes working and studying.  Add in training and I am going 5:00a - midnight.  My Fridays I have made to have an easier schedule or have that my day off so that I can sleep in a bit, and not take a worn down body into the weekend where I need to ramp up my training due to more free time.  I will make the adjustments.  Oh and nap time is definitely coming back!  I like to take naps, but I am the kind of guy who, if he has the option to, will try to push through and just make it to the end of the night.  Naps are going to have to come back into the equation if I am to make it through August. 

I am gonna cut this one short as I once again ran this post too far past Friday ;P  I got some other stuff that I wanna talk about tomorrow anyways.  I hope that all of you had a great training weekend, and enjoyed the weather (for those of you who had great early spring weather this weekend).  I am out!