IMLP 2014 Training Update-Week 20-Lake Placid Mini-Training Camp Week

The Week

The week started off on a high note with some really good workouts early on. The effects of my prior recovery week have started show up. I banged out a nice 32 mile ride on Monday night in less than two hours,averaging about 17.7 MPH while still staying in a zone 2 heart rate. Tuesday continued with a good swim and decent run despite it being a pretty hot afternoon.

I decided to attend a yoga class with my on Wednesday night to give myself a little break before the upcoming training blitz in Lake Placid this weekend. Yoga classes were also free this week and I thought spending some time with my wife would be a good thing before I take off to the Adirondacks for the weekend. The yoga class wasn’t the greatest and when you don’t do it on a regular basis it isn’t the easiest to wing it. I also had packing for my trip and needing to cut the grass before I left on my mind too.

My HRV is starting to take a bit of a nose dive in the last couple weeks. This is also including a rest week. Hopefully that will rebound after the next week when taper starts.

Off to Lake Placid

I managed to knock out a quick swim at lunch on Thursday. I had been hoping for the latest release of on of my favorite podcasts, Zen and the Art of Triathlon, on Thursday but was disappointed when it didn’t show up in my Podcast app. The podcast host, Brett Blankner, is very entertaining and it usually plays for about 3 hours. I thought this would be great to listen to on the drive. I decided to tweet Brett to see when he was expecting it to go out. He replied back for me that he would send me a link to the podcast, which he graciously did. Thanks Brett, you rock man!

I quickly threw all my stuff in the car and made my way to Lake Placid after work. I stopped off at Cali Burrito for burrito to take along for dinner. The ride went pretty well except for some stop-and-go traffic on I-287, but that didn’t last too long. I stopped at a rest stop on I-87 to eat my burrito, take a bio break and re-fuel. I listened to the ZenTri podcast most of the way up which really helped time go by. I got the first taste of the new paving on Rt 73 coming into Lake Placid. I was a bit diI arrived at the apartment a few minutes past eleven, unpacked, had a beer and went to sleep.

Friday

I woke up around 8-8:30 Friday morning and headed into town for some breakfast at the Breakfast Club next to Starbucks. It was pretty packed so I sat at the bar. I splurged a bit by having French Toast and home fries. Pretty yummy though. I needed to kill some time (since you have to wait an hour after you eat before swimming…right? ) so I headed to EMS and did a little shopping. I was very ready to get out of town at this point since it was starting to crowd up a bit. I managed to get a good parking spot by Mirror Lake beach area right in front of Lake Placid Pub & Brewery.

Swim

Pre Swim-Mirror Lake, Lake Placid, NY

I had purchased a SaferSwimmer float a while back for swimming in lakes that have boats and when I don’t want to leave my keys and things laying on the shoreline, but I hadn’t gotten to use it yet. Lake Placid is pretty safe to leave things on shore, but I wanted try this thing out. Two ladies swimming were asking me about it and thought it would cause too much drag. They had started swimming before I did and I ended up passing them with my orange buoy hanging off my ass. Guess not? Really I forgot it was even there once I was swimming and it is nice if you just want to take a break and hang out for a few mins.

Mirror Lake, Lake Placid, NY

I had also started up a workout on my iPhone in the Runkeeper app just as a comparison to my Garmin. It came in handy since I forgot to take my watch off of Pool Swim mode, which does not use the GPS. So after swimming for 20 minutes my watch said I only swam about 50 meters! I also could not get it to locate the GPS satellites while floating in the lake.

I did a full 1.2 mile loop with my floaty and then ditched it on shore for my 2nd loop. I took my waterproof camera this time, stashing it in my wetsuit. I swam out another 12 minutes or so, took some pictures and then swam back for another ~3/4 mile. The water was perfect wetsuit temperature and it was a beautiful day too.

After my swim, I headed back into town again for some lunch at the Good Bite Kitchen. The Good Bite Kitchen is a tiny little place in town that has really good and healthy vegetarian food. The perfect place to replenish during a heavy training weekend. As always it was delicious.

I headed back to the house and chatted for while with Dan & Wendy who own the apartment I stay at. I then hopped on my bike and headed out River Road for short loop. My short loop is the basic IMLP bike loop minus the out-and-backs and cutting off town with River Road. It ends up being just shy of 40 miles which took my about 2.5 hours last year.

NY73 Fresh Pow-Pow Paving

The start of the ride was amazing with the new paving. Granted it is still a pretty tough climb, but you can now just focus on spinning and not dodging all the cracks and potholes in the road. The new paving ends at the hikers parking lots before the Cascade Lakes. There is a small stretch of new paving on the right side part way down the Keene descent, but it only lasts less than mile ending at Owls Head Road. They really need to finish this down the hill because it gets really bad around the Rustic Furniture shop. It does look like they are still working and they have a few cutouts where they taper the macadam off.

The map below indicates the newly paved areas in green as of the time I left on Sunday(June 29th). Hopefully that smaller section to the right gets much bigger before July 27th! I also hooked up my GoPro under the aerobars on my bike and recorded most of the IMLP bike course. Once I figure out the processing workflow for those videos I will probably post a couple short clips on the new paving and the descent into Keene on here. My ultimate plan is to create a TrainerRoad video workout for the entire ride for the winter time.

So, the smooth paving was short lived. As I made my way around the last bumpy turn before Keene, began hearing a rubbing noise coming from my back wheel. I pulled over to the side and spun my wheel didn’t see anything. I continued on and the sound continued. Then as I hit the last cut out for the new paving in the old road my back tire flatted. I pulled over into the large ditch gulley. There was no shade to be found and the sun was beating on me. Also there was a constant stream of large trucks and horse trailers that had obviously let out from the horse show that was going on this weekend.

I changed the tube in around 15 minutes or so and continued on down into Keene. The remainder of the ride was quite nice since it was getting later in the day. Once you make the turn towards Jay, it seems like you can just relax a bit and enjoy the wide, flat road with minimal traffic. I felt really good on this ride and the climb from Jay to Wilmington seemed so much easier than I remembered it to be. I ended completing the ride in almost 10 minutes less than I had the year before without even trying!

I got cleaned up after the ride and headed over to one of my favorite places to eat, The Cowboy. They have one of the best veggie burgers, but I ended up going with the Thai Green Curry dish tonight. It was really tasty. In keeping with the Thai theme here I also started out with the Spicy Thai Noodle salad which was also very good. It reminded me of the classic Thai papaya salad with noodles. I washed all that down with a Lagunitas IPA. I ran over to the Hannaford grocery store after dinner to pick up some items. I had forgotten my VitaMix at home so I no longer had my smoothie as a breakfast option.

Ski Jumps at Dusk-Lake Placid, NY

Saturday

NY73 Fresh Pow-Pow Paving

Saturday the big plan was to do one full, 56 mile IMLP bike loop, then do a shorter second loop without the Ausable Forks out-and-back. This should amount to somewhere around 100 miles for a pretty full day. I got on the road somewhere around 10:30 AM. As I approached the Cascade cross-country ski lodge, I started hearing a rubbing noise again in the back wheel. It was very  similar to the sound I heard the day before when I got the flat. I inspected the tire, but no flat. Hmmm? After further inspection I realized my tire had started bulging in one spot and rubbing against the frame right behind the brake mount. Ugh! I managed to pull the tire back in the lockouts enough that I was able to ride the 2.5 miles back to the house. Glad that happened before I started down the Keene descent!

I had a new tire that I considered changing this tire with that morning since it had over 2000 miles on it, but skipped it due to time. Guess that didn’t pay?! I changed the tire and began gradually taking it up and down with air pressure to avoid a pinch flat. On my last pump up to 100psi I heard the dreaded leaking of air. Ugh!! Now I only have only tube left with the 80mm stem on it for my deep profile race wheel. I am surely not going down into Keene with no spare tubes. I do not get any cell coverage down there, so if I get stuck I am hitching a ride with someone to get back. I finished replacing the tube and this time it seemed to be ok.

I got changed and drove over to Placid Planet Bike Shop on the other side of town. They had plenty of tubes with 80mm valve stems, but they were $16 a piece! I usually pay around $8-10 for the Continentals. Oh well, guess I am forking it over. Now that it was after lunch time, I had a decent lunch of some lentil vegetable soup before heading out for my second attempt to ride.

Ausable River Gorge

I started out riding down into Wilmington and riding back up to Lake Placid just to make sure everything was cool. I did the Three Bears Climbs and navigated through town. The road coming up past Lisa G’s and the lumber place is really buggered up, so watch out for that. I kept riding past River Rd and the ski jumps to Cascade Lakes still everything was ok. I stopped for minute because after this point I was fully committed to the Keene Valley with no communications. I pushed on.

Ausable River Gorge

The rest of the ride went very smooth. It was now around 5-6pm so there was minimal traffic and it was a really enjoyable ride. I skipped Ausable Forks again, but I did do the short Haseltown road out-and-back. I approached River Road, where I could have turned in to the house, but decided to go forward and do the Three Bears one more time. Once I reached the top of Papa Bear, I turned around for the easy cruise back to River Road. I ended up with around 81 miles which is ok, but not the 100 I had planned. I was fortunate to get that in with all the issues. Hopefully they will take care of all the mechanical issues for IMLP!

I stopped on the way to town to snap a few shots of the mountains and ski jumps from the golf course.

Adirondacks

Sweet Rewards 46’er Pale Ale-Lake Placid Pub & Brewery

I decided to head to Lake Placid Pub & Brewery for dinner, since my wife never likes to eat there. I had a nice view from my table of the beautiful sunset that night out the window. The food was pretty good. I had a nice vegetarian style french-style onion soup that had a mushroom stock for appy, and a flatbread pizza. I also had a couple 46’er Pale Ales which are my favorite and are typically hard to find in the store. To top things off, I had two mousse shooters for dessert! One was a peanut butter mousse and the other traditional chocolate. Yummy!!

Mousse Shots!! -Lake Placid Pub & Brewery

After dinner I grabbed my camera and shot a couple pictures of Mirror Lake as the final bits of sunlight disappeared. Got a few keepers. Beautiful night!

Mirror Lake

Sunday

I decided to sleep in until 8:30 again on Sunday morning. I sleep so well in the ‘Daks and the bed at the apartment is soo comfortable! I enjoyed a carb-heavy breakfast of Oatmeal and whole wheat bread with some Coconut Peanut Butter(Yum!), before gearing up for my long run. I started out around 10:30am with a 3 mile warm-up making a right out of the driveway on River Rd. I left the Fuelbelt at the house and would grab it on the way back. I turned around mile 1.5 which was almost to the end where it intersects with Rt. 86. There were a bunch of skate-skiiers out on their roller-skis as well as other runners. I need to get a pair of those roller skate-ski’s! There was a couple ladies with a big cooler of water offering to everyone that past which was nice. Not sure if they were with a specific group or not.

It was getting pretty hot quickly, but I was feeling good. I was keeping to a 9:30 pace most of the time. I stopped back at the house to grab my fuelbelt and ended up shooting the breeze with the homeowner for a bit. I eventually continued on. The only rough part was the climb by the steel bridge on RT 73, which lowered my pace a bit. I was starting to get a little worried about time now. I wanted to leave no later than 2PM and it is now around 11:30pm and I was only an hour into my run. Two more hours would put me at 1:30pm! Why did I not figure this out before? I would still need to shower, eat something and packup and I don’t think I could do that in a half hour.

Now I was kind of stressing about time. I decided to run up into town and turned around right before the road drops down before Lisa G’s. I figured I could fill in any extra time I had with back-and-forth on River Rd. There was a horse show going on at the Horse Grounds so that was something to watch as I ran by. I ended up doing an extra repeat on the ski jump hill on my way back. There was another runner walking up it when I did that and I thought it would motivate him a bit, and it did. When I turned around and past him he was like “you’re doing repeats??!!” I laughed and said “only one!” Well, I think extra repeat did me in. Somewhere between there and the house I started feeling like crap. My legs got all crampy and stiff on me. I was drinking Skratch Labs hydration the whole time too. This made my decision to quit early an easy one. I ended up running past the house and doing another mile out and back. Those two miles were really slow 10+ /mi pace. I ended up with around 13.5 miles in around 2:14, which was about 45 minutes less than planned. I didn’t feel too bad about it either because I felt like I was listening to body on this.

I got back to the house, showered up, and packed up. I was on the road by a few minutes after 2pm. The ride home went pretty smoothly too. Denise ended up meeting my in Clinton, NJ for some dinner at Pru Thai. Nice end to the weekend!

Training is nice and gradually making its way. Should peak at around 120 TSS which is a bit higher than last season. Taper will bring the pink line down and the yellow line up.

I ended up with a around 16 hours of training for the week. Not the 20 hour blitz I was hoping to do, but it was still a decent week. It is always nice to be in Lake Placid! Hopefully I have exercised all of the mechanical issues out of my equipment for the year too. I feel very confident with my performance on the bike and I am sure I will see some improvement there on raceday. Hopefully I can still execute a 9:30 pace for the marathon portion.

Thanks for reading!