SWIM
Swimming has been going swimmingly (as usual...) after my shocker in Taiwan. The new thing is our dear friend Haydn Woolley's new
summer swim series which is on a Thursday evening at Kohi beach. The first race of the series was a bit difficult with a pretty big chop causing them to go to the contigency plan of a 500m loop instead of out and back. But the next race was much better weather so we were able to swim all the way 1km out and back for a 2km swim. Its a pretty good way to make sure I get an extra swim in and good to practice open water swimming so I'll be doing as many of the races as I can over summer.
BIKE
While I was in Taiwan someone raped and pillaged my Serrotica road bike and left it crank and BB-less forcing me and RooRoo to become more at one with each other. The weekend after Taiwan I was back into a 4hr ride with some uptempo work which I actually held pretty good power for and this last week got back into my efforts during the week. This weekend's long ride was Karapiro Half but more about that in a sec.
RUN
This where the sad part starts.
My first proper run back from Taiwan was on the Wednesday after and I noticed a bit of niggly hip/groin pain. It just niggled away for my next few runs but really came to a head after I did the O'Hagan's 5km run the following week - it was so sore by the end and the next day was way worse. At this stage I was pretty concerned it was an
Injury Which Shall Not Be Named.
So I have since had a bone scan which looked pretty clear to me (ie no ball of fire on my bone like with my tibial stress fracture) however it was reported as having a subtle area of increased uptake around the trochanteric region - ie some bone stress around the outside of my hip bone. But you really needed a magnifying glass to see the increased uptake, so its not completely convincing as a stress fracture but more like a stress reaction which is a precursor to a stress fracture. So I am hoping that 4 weeks off running will fix it but I will be getting an MRI next week which will give us a better idea of what is going on. In any case it is Very Poos.
KARAPIRO HALF IRONMAN
So the whole hip thing came up the week of
Karapiro Half and when I got up on Wednesday morning after the O'Hagan's run I realized there was no way I would be running at Karapiro. I was pretty gutted as I was really looking forward to the race.
So I withdrew my entry and offered myself as a swim/biker if anyone needed it and got teamed up with a young Cambridge girl who was keen to run.
Things didn't start out so well even before the race when I filled up my fronty bottle and it immediately started leaking - it seemed my patch up job from Taiwan wasn't so good. But it was leaking slowly so I knew I get some use out of it, plus I had a bottle on my frame so it wasn't too much of a biggie.
The swim went pretty well, we swam on the rowing course which is quite cool. It was an in the water or dive off the pontoon start - most people chose to start in the water but I really wanted to dive. This didn't go so well for me as I almost landed on tiop of someone and my goggles filled with water. Oh well.
The first 500m was a bit congested but then I was pretty much on my own and came out of the water as 7th female and just ahead of the 2nd individual female (oh my...). I tried a couple of steps jogging but my hip hurt too much so I did the walk of shame all the way up to T1 - and it was a loooooong way... About 300m and I got passed by a tonne of people and as I walked into T1 I heard on the loudspeakers they were playing Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run"- how ironic.
I think my swim must have been around 32mins which is a slight improvement of late but still pretty crap.
So I jumped on my bike and off I went. My bike goal was to catch Nicky who had a much faster swimmer than me and while Nicky would normally be much faster than me she was just on a road bike with no aero bars and hadn't done much training.
I had a few Nicky mirages as I went along but finally saw her up ahead at about the halfway mark. There was a huge long downhill and I hammered it as hard as I could when something came flying off my bars, it took me a few seconds to take stock then I realized it was my TapTap CPU - disaster!!!! I had a moment of indecision - whether I turn around or carry on and go back for it later, then realized I could never leave TapTap on the side of the road so had to turn around and ride back up the hill. It was pretty gutting seeing all the people I had worked so hard to pass just cruising down while I went the opposite way. Luckily TapTap was easy to spot but the battery and battery cover had aborted themselves and were nowhere to be seen. I didn't know what was more sad - Nicky and all the people I had passed riding away from me or all the power data I had just lost...
Anyways I carried on riding hard to make up for lost time and ended up catching everyone I wanted to (including Nicky) so all was not completely lost. It a pretty tough course - very hilly and very rough roads so I came in with a time of 2hrs53, I think I would have lost around 3mins with my TapTap drama so we'll round it down to 2hrs 50. In any case I had a fastest bike split of the individual females...
My runner did a fine job and we ended up winning the women's team section.
The rest of the team did well expect Davo who had a mechanical issue (how convenient...) and had to turn around after 10km on the bike. Nicky had a good ride, Jess swam fast and J-Rad was 10th individual despite running himself dry by eating and drinking all his nutrition in the first 2hrs on the bike...
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| A few kg's skinnier than when he started... |
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Its only the second year that the Karapiro Half has been held and its a great event - a few little things here and there which need to be tidied up but definitely has the potential to be one of the big events on the NZ triathlon calendar. Last year I missed out on it because of my tibial stress fracture so I got a bit closer this year but fingers crossed that next year I'll be lining up for the whole thing.
