Did my second brick today, and it was hard. I rode the longer way home, which is 14.5 miles and hilly instead of 12 miles and flat. It took 55:29, which I consider good time. Then I had a 1:52 T2. I guess that’s slow, but at the race I won’t have to maneuver my bike around inside our apartment. We’ll see how it goes. Finally I ran 3.6 miles in 33:10 which is faster than I thought I’d go. The first 5 minutes my legs definitely felt “off” and then the next 5 minutes they just felt tired. They never felt great, but towards the end I easily could’ve kept going some more so that’s a good sign.
I also timed how long it took to put on my shoes once on the bike while circling around in the parking lot. It took 1:12, during which I travelled .14 miles. If I already had my shoes it would take less than 30 seconds to travel that distance. It would take about 10 seconds to put my shoes on off the bike, and I would lose at least 10 seconds because I can’t run in those shoes. That leaves a 22 second time difference. In the race I should be able to go faster while putting on my shoes because the course will be straight, unlike the loop in our parking lot. I also really don’t like walking in my bike shoes, so I’ll put the shoes on, on the bike. At the other end of the trip, it took about 25 seconds to take my shoes off while on the bike. I don’t think it’ll cause me to go much slower since I’ll be starting to slow down anyway.
Overall, tonight’s exercise felt pretty good. I think it was probably more work overall than the tri will be. I didn’t swim 440 yards but I did bike an extra 2.5 miles, climbed some decent hills, and ran an extra .6 miles. I also carried around my work clothes on my bike rack. None of that is coming to the tri. It’s comforting that I was able to just do it, and hopefully knowing this will let me push a little bit harder at the triathlon itself. Just 10 days left…