DUATHLON

I’m not sure if it’s Lance’s “fault” or not, but lately I’ve been itching to go for a bike ride. I’ve even carried my bike in the back of my car for a week, just in case the opportunity arose. Unfortunately, I carried it around for nothing. Last week I emailed my coach to see what the triathletes were doing during the weekend. He said I could join them today as they previewed the Lifetime Fitness course. For those of you not familiar with tris, next weekend the LTF race will offer the largest purse ($500,000) to the top triathletes in the world. This race also features an “Equalizer” format that allows the women to get a head start. Money is then paid out based on what order people cross the finish line overall, meaning there’s no breakout for men and women.

Anyway, I decided that’d be a great opportunity to scratch my itch and go for a ride and follow it up with a run. Triathletes are “interesting” people and I haven’t quite figured out their training habits. I think they like to go all-out on the bike though. Granted I haven’t been on my bike much, but I still think I’m a decent rider (at least aerobically speaking). Well, within the first half of the ride I got dropped by about 4 riders. I’m not bothered by that but I am curious about 1 guy in particular. He was probably biking 23-25 mph, yet he only runs about 9:00 pace. How can he bike so fast, yet run so slow?

I ended up biking about 15 miles. Afterwards I jogged about 2.5 miles with a couple of gals on the team before running 2.5 miles with the guy I mentioned above. Overall, I ran for a little over 46 minutes and just called it 5 miles.