Signed up for Portland Tri today, and a good bike workout

Signed up for Portland Triathlon today! That's my primary race to break 2:08 in the Olympic distance tri. My plan is to bust my butt in training, and then take advantage of training at 4500 ft elevation and racing at 37ft elevation. Plus, it's a family trip....so Tera and Paul get to see the family in The Dalles and Portland.

I'm really excited about this triathlon, but the bike course might be tough because I'm not so great on hills, the course has a 400ft elevation gain in 1.5 miles, and you have to do three loops, so you gotta go up that hill three times! Oh well, there is a perfect hill right by my house for race specific training...the hill is 450ft gain in one mile, so it is very similar to the race hill.

The swim is in the Wilammette River, and the run is a loop around downtown and goes up and over a couple of the bridges, which is elevation gain but nothing serious.

As always, the race fee gets some add-ons; in this case, I added $5 for Oregon Trout organization that works for clean rivers for good fishing (I love fly-fishing, too!) and I paid $2.25 to offset the carbon created for driving there....two bucks is easy enough, even though I don't completely buy into the global warming but I think we need to do something about pollution simply because we are to be good stewards of what God has given us.

Tonight's bike workout went well. Thursday is muscular endurance day. It's a bit early to be doing muscular endurance, but the overall plan is set that I have to be doing it now to reach one set of 65 minutes at the gearing/cadence/heart rate I need to go 24mph for an hour.

Tonight's set is a continuation of the 4x17mins w/ 2 min rest in gear 8 (second hardest). The racing goal, what I'm working up to, is 65 minutes at gear 8 w/ cadence of 88 and heart rate of 152. Tonight's stats: all sets in gear 8, first set cad82/hr152, second set cad 81/hr 154, third set cad 77/hr 154, fourth set cad 77/hr 148. I bonked a bit the last two sets, but I have two more of this workout sets before I move to 3 sets of 23 minutes.

I make significant progress each week, so I know my plan is working. Last week, I did the same cadences and heart rates but in the next easier gear, so I know I improved this week...and motivation was only average. The weight lifting I'm doing with my legs (leg curls, leg extenstion, leg press) is paying off, and this will make it easier to get to the gym in the morning!