Wow, I can’t believe that I’ll be hopefully well on my second loop of the run in exactly two weeks (9/12/2010 16:14). My wife and I were talking about how it seems like I was just getting out of the hospital this past January after dealing with a ruptured appendix and a slight competition. I haven't gone back to look at my training log in detail, but I think I averaged between 50 and 60 hours per month of training. I will try to get some firm numbers after Ironman.

Am I excited about Ironman yet? Excited enough to check out the extended 2 week forecast guesstimate on accuweather.com to see a  high of 70 with periods of rain. As long as the wind is nil, I’d be fine racing in that. Also, the bib numbers were posted on Friday. If you’re interested in following my progress, keep an eye out for bib number 532.

All my gear is pretty much good to go, after getting one last race day test at Pigman. I finally got around to purchasing a new front wheel, based on demoing several wheels with Rocket Bikes this season. After going back and forth between the Jet 6, 9 and H3, I ended up going with a HED Jet 6 Flamme Rouge. Yeah, I paid a premium for the Flamme Rouge upgrade, but my long term plan is to get a road bike next season and use this for the front on both bikes. I’d like to get a matching rear wheel with power tap, but we’ll see.

I have a set or race tires I’ve been using for my races this year, which I will use for Ironman. And just for good measure, I also have a pair of latex tubes as well. The combination of the tires I will be using and the latex tubes is to help decrease rolling resistance. Although given how crappy the roads are on the IMWI bike course, I don’t know how much of a help it will be. Why not brand new tires for Ironman? Simple, brand new tires are too hard to put on. In the event of a flat, I can’t spend 10 minutes trying to stretch a brand new tire back onto the rim.

I also managed to put a new chain on my bike, and a new cassette. The cassette was easy, as I’ve been pulling the cassette off to get my wheel cover on. However, this was the first time I’d replaced a chain. Turns out, it wasn’t that hard. Using my newly purchased Park chain tool, I broke the old chain off, and then put the new chain on following the included instructions for determining chain length. For the SRAM chain I chose, to determine the length, you put the chain over the largest cog in the back and the biggest chain ring up front without feeding it thru the rear derailleur, and then add one link plus the power connect link. Three weeks later, no problems and everything is running fine. I do want to point out that I made a switch from my usual 12-25 to a 12-27 cassette, specifically for Ironman. I wanted to make sure I had a a little extra low end for some of the hills in order to keep my legs as fresh as possible for the run. As part of my road bike build this winter, I will most likely purchase a new compact crank with shorter crank arms for the tri bike, and then repurpose my current standard crank for the road bike. I would run an 11-23 on both bikes as well. 

Spectator Instructions

Want to come cheer me on. Want to come laugh at me break on the run? Use the following guide to help navigate around the Ironman course. Here is a link to a map I made on Bing.

Pre-Race and Swim

The swim starts at 7am in front of the Monona Terrace. I anticipate I’ll be walking down towards the water no later then 6:45am. So you have too choices for watching the swim. The first would be to pick a spot near the swim entrance/exit and see me walking down to the water, and then coming out of the water. The other option would be to get there really early and get a spot facing the lake up on the terrace. There is not much to see in the water during the swim, so I’m recommending the swim enter/exit view. I’m hoping to be out of the water by 8:05 am.

T1

After exiting the water we get to run up the helix (parking ramp) to the 4th floor I believe. Where we will change and then run out to get our bikes. If you decided to wait to see me exit the water, then you’ll need to run up to the 4th or 5th level to have a chance seeing me come out of transition or get on my bike. With the lake at your back, the bikes are racked according to our bib numbers with #1 (pros) on the far left and the 2000’s on the far right. We run out of a doorway on the right and then run from right to left to pick up our bike and head to the mount point at the far left, and then ride down the helix to John Nolan Drive, which is another good place to watch from. You will have to pick one transition vantage point, as I don’t think you could hit up more then one.

Bike

You can get the official course cue sheet from the Ironman Wisconsin Website, or take a look at the bike course on MapMyRide.com. The key to navigating the bike course is knowing how to avoid the bikers, as there are several intersections that will be shutdown or controlled causing traffic problems. I drove around last night and came up with 7 vantage points for checking out the bike course. Times are from seeing me come thru the last location, assume good weather and no mechanical issues. The times are also on the fast side of things to get you to the location in time to park and walk. 

Run

The run is pretty easy. We head out from the Monona terrace on Mt. Luther King Blvd and run around the square. So you can catch me heading out onto the run, and then head down to state street and wait for me to hit the mile 6 turn around point which is at State and Gillman. You can then either catch me at the half way turn around on MLK and Wilson, or wait for me to come back down State Street to turn onto Henry. After seeing me at the turn around at State and Gillman for the second time, you’ll want to make your way up to the finishing chute on MLK.

Last year I raced Pigman….in a monsoon. This year it was sunny and hot, very hot. Lets take a look at my result between this year and last year.

8/16/2009

                  Time               Overall Placing           Age-Group Placing

Swim          0:35:03             109

T1              0:07:04

Bike           2:44:12             82

T2              0:03:28

Run            1:56:16             141

Total           5:26:03             110/530 (20.75%)         15/38 (39.47%)

 

8/22/2010

                  Time               Overall Placing           Age-Group Placing

Swim          0:32:37             58

T1              0:03:16

Bike           2:32:43             48

T2              0:02:25

Run            1:56:24             53

Total           5:07:25             37/453 (8.17%)           2/33 (6.06%)

It looks like I wasn’t the only one affected by the heat. While my overall time was much slower then my previous two Half-Iron races this year, my overall place held the same, while I managed to crack the top 3 in my age group for the first time. It’s interesting to see me with a faster run last year. My slowing on the run last year was due to poor pacing on the bike, where as this year, it was the heat. A 5:07 last year would have put me around 57th overall for comparison. I was starting to wonder if I had improved on the bike at all, seeing as I haven't been feeling a whole lot faster this year. However, this race was a pretty good indication of my biking fitness.

My 2nd place age group finished (M30-34) netted me a dark blue Pigman mug. Next stop, finishing in the money ;) Given my performance in Iowa, does this change anything I wrote in my last post? Not really, I’ve always known that my performance at Ironman will depend largely on the weather.

I just noticed that I seem to be missing posts I made since March 28. I’m not sure what happened, to cause this. I’m hoping that I still have local copies of the posts in live writer.

The Wi-Fi status indicator in the systray of Windows 7 (and most operating systems) gives a limited view into the strength of the wi-fi signal. The defacto free WAP (wireless access point) sniffer, NetStumbler has not yet been updated for Windows 7 (and 64bit), so another solution was needed.

Enter the netsh command line tool. After opening a command prompt window, you can type ‘netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid’. Sample results can be seen below and were obtained by using the command line redirect operator ‘>’ (the full command would be ‘netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid > results.txt’).

As you can see each SSID name is shown, along with the different access points available for the that SSID. This makes it alot easier to troubleshoot issues related to multiple access points, and with the MAC address also displayed, you can track down specific access points, which is very useful when dealing with 3rd party IT staff.

SSID 3 : SSID_NAME_SHOWS_HERE
    Network type            : Infrastructure
    Authentication          : WPA-Enterprise
    Encryption              : TKIP
    BSSID 1                 : 00:0b:0e:20:53:44
         Signal             : 65% 
         Radio type         : 802.11g
         Channel            : 1
         Basic rates (Mbps) : 1 2 5.5 11
         Other rates (Mbps) : 6 9 12 18 24 36 48 54
    BSSID 2                 : 00:0b:0e:25:9a:c4
         Signal             : 60% 
         Radio type         : 802.11g
         Channel            : 1
         Basic rates (Mbps) : 1 2 5.5 11
         Other rates (Mbps) : 6 9 12 18 24 36 48 54
    BSSID 3                 : 00:0b:0e:18:cd:c4
         Signal             : 20% 
         Radio type         : 802.11g
         Channel            : 11
         Basic rates (Mbps) : 1 2 5.5 11
         Other rates (Mbps) : 6 9 12 18 24 36 48 54
    BSSID 4                 : 00:0b:0e:1f:63:c4
         Signal             : 29% 
         Radio type         : 802.11g
         Channel            : 11
         Basic rates (Mbps) : 1 2 5.5 11
         Other rates (Mbps) : 6 9 12 18 24 36 48 54

SSID 4 : SSID_NAME_SHOWS HERE
    Network type            : Infrastructure
    Authentication          : WPA2-Personal
    Encryption              : CCMP
    BSSID 1                 : 00:0b:0e:20:53:46
         Signal             : 65% 
         Radio type         : 802.11g
         Channel            : 1
         Basic rates (Mbps) : 1 2 5.5 11
         Other rates (Mbps) : 6 9 12 18 24 36 48 54
    BSSID 2                 : 00:0b:0e:18:cd:c6
         Signal             : 18% 
         Radio type         : 802.11g
         Channel            : 11
         Basic rates (Mbps) : 1 2 5.5 11
         Other rates (Mbps) : 6 9 12 18 24 36 48 54

Yesterday marked an important day in my Ironman Wisconsin 2010 training. It was my last long hard ride before Ironman. I have one half-ironman remaining, which is basically a long brick workout, and a few more longish rides, but nothing as intense. Effectively my training is officially over, and I’m just moving into a maintenance phase. I don’t believe in the three week taper that traditional triathlon plans stole from marathon training, which is why I am calling this a maintenance phase and not a taper.

I took a look at my power file, and I’m estimating somewhere between a 5:45 and 5:56 bike split. This assumes decent weather (light wind and hot, or windy and cool, but not both) no mechanicals and a full aero kit (aero helmet, Jet 6 front, and wheel cover on the back).

By the numbers

My current FTP based on my best 60 minute power output is 236/248 (average vs. normalized). 70% of this gives me my Ironman goal wattage values of 165/173. I sure wish those were higher, but the training doesn’t lie. I might sneak in one more power test before the race to see if I can give myself a little cushion, especially if I’m feeling good on race day, but I don’t plan on doing more then 170 average watts.

The ride consisted of 2 loops (Verona-> Mt. Horeb –> Cross Plains –> Verona), breaking the loop into 3 sections. The first time around I did hard, easy hard, and the second was easy, hard, easy. The hard sections were to get in a good sub-threshold workout, with the easy sections designed to get me used to riding the course at race pace.

While on the ride, I noticed a couple of things based on how I broke the course up. First, the section from Verona to Mt. Horeb is the most difficult. I think this is because: 1) Continuous rolling hills 2) Hwy 92 is a crappy road 3) No matter what the wind direction, it feels like there is a head wind on the 2nd half of Hwy 92.

The second thing I noticed was that the section between Verona and the bottom of Old Sauk Pass gave me the highest average speed. I was able to maintain almost 20 mph in easy mode. While the first part of this section has a couple of big hills, the second half you can take in cruise mode.

Reviewing the numbers shows that 2 of my easy efforts were well below my average power race goal, while one was slightly higher. The normalized values were right around race goal, indicating a high VI (average power / normalized power). The rule of thumb is that you want a VI of 1.05, but that’s a tough goal on a course like IMWI. I’d like to think that I can chance a slightly higher VI since I’ve been training on this course, and similar terrain for the last 6 months. The first time I went out on the loop this season I felt like I had regressed from the end of last season, even though I had 2.5 solid months of indoor riding. You just can’t simulate the course indoors on a trainer (well at least not my trainer, I don’t know how a something like a computrainer would compare). The comments I hear from first time riders of the course usually have the common theme of, “I wasn’t prepared for the hills”.

I took the times for my easy efforts and double them, then took my average speed over the easy efforts and accounted for the out and back from Madison. I came up with 18.69 mph average, and a estimated time of 5:56. The weather yesterday was warm and humid to start, and went to hot and humid by the end. The wind was nothing like it was at the start of the season, so it felt like there was no wind. I decided to set the lower end of my race day time at 5:45 based on the good weather we’ve seen the last two years, and the fact that I’ll have my full aero kit in effect. I don’t consider this to be cocky, but the best estimate I can come up with based on my training. The time estimates will also help me explain to my friends and family where they need to be on the bike course if they want to cheer me on. I plan on writing up a post in the next couple of weeks with instructions for navigating the IM course for spectators, so keep an eye out for that.

So what about the swim, run, and transitions? I just don’t have the same type of data that I get training with power on the bike to make any kind of firm estimate. I have some goals in mind, but since this is my first Ironman, I have to be pretty flexible with my expectations. Since I’m not fast enough to win the overall age group award, win my age group, or qualify for Kona, that leaves having fun, just finishing, and breaking X number of hours. If the best I can say is, well I finished, I would consider my training to be a failure this year. So I will say my bare minimum goal is to break 12 hours regardless of weather and mechanicals, with a stretch goal of breaking 11.

Well, at least this race report is being written the day after, as opposed to the month after for my last race report. Yesterday I competed in the Door County Half Ironman, finishing in 30th place overall, which includes the one female who finished in front of me. The first place male and female from High Cliff repeated their performances in Door County, so props to them.

Door County and Pre-Race

My wife and I stayed at the Door County Lighthouse Inn Bed and Breakfast, which I highly recommend. It was around $150/night and it includes an awesome home cooked breakfast (more on why this is such a great value below). The inn is a converted house I think, and has 5 rooms, plus quarters for the owners. There were three other couples there while we were there, and 2 of them were competing in the Triathlon (well the men were). In addition to breakfast, there were fresh homemade raisin cookies always available, which we took full advantage of. I felt guilty brining my bike into the room, because instead of the industrial strength, dark colored carpet you see in most hotels, this was very soft, plush off-white carpet. So I left my bike locked in the car for the first time.

Friday night we decided to go in search of a fish fry, and we didn’t have too much luck. We were pretty hungry and decided to just get a table at the second restaurant we tried. This resulted in a $40 bill and I was still hungry. So we went to get ice cream, and that was $10, and I got totally ripped off on my ice cream sunday. What a joke, we spend less then $9 at cold stone for a small and a medium and my $6 sunday consisted of 2 scoops of ice cream and some chocolate sauce. We happened to stop at a Culvers the following night to use the bathroom while we were driving the bike course and I noticed that the value baskets were $1 more then in Madison! Needless to say, Friday night, I had some of those raisin cookies.

Saturday morning we slept in until 8 and then went out to the main room for breakfast at 8:30 am. We got a generous serving of fresh fruit, a giant omelet and two home made muffins. It would have easily cost $15 a person at an area restaurant, which is why I said this place was such a good deal. After breakfast I went to work on my bike. I had rented a HED Jet 6 front wheel, which was brand new, never used. Unfortunately, the shop forgot to put rim tape on it and I blew the tube they had put in it the day before.  So on my way up I picked up some rim tape and got that all taken care of. Then I had to readjust my front brake to get the wheel to fit properly, and make some minor adjustments to get my wheel cover to turn without rubbing anything.

After the bike was good to go, we headed out to take in the sights. We stopped at Peninsula State Park and walked around a bit. My wife wanted to go check out the light houses, but the one at the state park cost $5/person for the tour, and the other 3 were in county parks you had to pay admission to get into as well. So we ended up just driving around door county a bit and ended up back at the hotel in the mid-afternoon. It was pretty warm out, and driving around made me sleepy, so I took a short nap, before we went to Murphy Park for race registration and packet pickup.

The first thing I noticed when we got to the park, was the ample, marked parking in the field across from the park. It looked very well thought out, and everything only looked more and more professional as we made our way thru packet pick up. This turned out to be the best run race I have ever attended (in my brief 2 years as a triathlete). A local bike store had a Speed Concept on display, in black, and size small, with a $500 store credit if you bought it that day. Had the owner been a little more willing to work with me on component selection, I would have bought it. But to be fair to the owner, it was at the end of a long day, he probably had a lot of “interested” people already, and I don’t look like the type who would/can buy a 9.8 speed concept on sight.

After packet pickup, we set out for dinner. During our earlier drive around door county, we found an Italian restaurant just north of Fish Creek on the right hand side (I’m forgetting the name). This turned out to be a pretty good value, and good food. Going for dinner at 5 turned out to be a good idea, because the place was packed by the time we left.

Next up was a another drive around door county, the part most people probably never see, in order to scout the bike course. We also drove up bluff pass, home to the infamous bluff I would have to run up the next day and was kind of disappointed. Given all the hype, I expected seeing this hill to give me nightmares, but it’s not the worse I’ve had to run up (well that’s what I thought the, lets see what I thought the next day). We got back to our hotel and got to bed pretty early. Even though it was a 8am start, they wanted us there by 6:30 and I thought it would be nice to get to a race early enough to warm up for a change. 

Race Morning

Woke up to a pretty dark room, but at least it didn’t sound like it was raining out. Looked out the window, ground was wet, sky was dark, but it wasn’t raining. I made my first trip outside to pack up the car and was greeted with warm and very humid air. I couldn’t decide what would be worse, rain, or sun plus high humidity. I figured it wasn’t something I could control, and after racing thru the monsoon at PigMan last year, I knew I could handle the rain.

We arrived at the park by 6:30 (or at least we were parked by 6:30) and I started to get my stuff ready. I aired up my tires, and proceeded to leave my crack-pipe adapter attached to my air pump and didn’t realize it until someone asked to borrow my adapter in transition. Thankfully the latest CO2 air adapter I have works with disc wheels (and wheel covers) without an adapter. With it looking like it was going to rain, my wife decided to just go back to sleep in the car.

I got setup in Transition and also managed to get in a little run and bike. There was a report of lightening in the area, so they delayed the start of the race until 8:30. 2 spots down from me in transition was the exact same green/white Speed Concept I tried out at Emerys in Milwaukee a few weeks ago. I wasn’t a fan of the green and white so I decided to pass on it for now. I saw a Red/White speed concept, and it looks better in person then online. It’s pretty similar to the red/white Cervelo P2C, so I might consider that color (yeah, I’m thinking about drinking the Speed Concept kool-aid if you can’t tell).

I should note that I got to setup in the rack closet to the water for a change. That was because I registered for the elite wave. The criteria for the elite wave was that you could swim 1 mile in 30 minutes or less, which I knew I could, so I thought why not? It would be a change to race starting at the front as opposed to starting in one of the middle waves for a change. It’s more fun to start a little later as you get to pass more people, but starting in the “elite” wave made me feel like I had to be more serious.

Swim and T1

Like I said, the race was delayed until 8:30 and we started pretty much at 8:30. The water was calm, clear and warm (72 I think). I tried my hand at drafting, but don’t have enough patience, so that’s something I have to work on. I noticed a couple of wetsuits at the beginning and at the end, which means I could have drafter off of them saving energy and still going just as fast. The trick is to identify those people early on next time. They had wet suit strippers, which is always nice, but I think this is where I dropped my GPS (old one I wear under my swim cap) and lost it. I do remember stopping it as I was getting out of the water with a time around 30:40 and my chip time was 30:56. This was the fasted 1.2 mile swim I’ve ever had, but it’s only been the second out of four half-iron events that has had a full 1.2 mile swim.

I had my usual slow T1. This time it was due in part to the chance of rain in the forecast. I figured it would be nice to at least start with dry shoes, so I put my stuff in a plastic bag and that slowed me down a bit. Although forgetting to put a sock on first on the right foot caused just as much of a problem. I’d go sockless but my shoes are old and the insides are starting to wear. I should probably stop drooling over a Speed Concept and buy a new pair of tri-shoes for the bike ;)

Bike

My plan on the bike was the same as High-Cliff, keep it nice and easy. My heart rate wasn’t as high, so I think I paced the swim pretty well this time. The bike was pretty uneventful, and that’s how its supposed to be these longer triathlons. A well paced bike, sets you up to be able to have a solid run (i.e. run, don’t walk the run portion).

I heard a weird sound coming from my back wheel around mile 18, but couldn’t figure it out. I stopped for a few seconds just to check things over and didn’t see anything. A few miles later the sound got louder and then I realized it was the sticker on the wheel cover that covers the value stem cutout. Stopped again and pulled it all the way off. Note to self, those things only last 2 races, not 3.

While the sky looked bad at times, we only got a couple very light showers. With the wet conditions, my drive train started to sound very rickety, but everything held together for the duration of the race.

I passed a few people, and got passed a couple of times as well. I thought I was pushing it harder by 10 watts compared to High-Cliff, but it turns out I had almost the exact same average power, work (kj) and training stress score. However, according to my last FTP test, I should have been able to push it another 10 watts, so I’ll give that a try at my next race.

T2 and Run

I got off the bike and stopped at the port-o-potties on the way to the rack. I didn’t have as bad of stomach discomfort as I did at High-Cliff, but I still had to go to the bathroom. I’m glad I did, as I was able to pass some gas which would have bothered me on the run. So once again, my T2 was slow, but I’m not going to worry about that until I can shave a few more minutes off my run and bike splits.

I saw Jessica from SBR coaching as I was leaving T2, or rather she saw me and cheered me on. I saw my wife sitting near the finishing shoot which we had to pass, and she cheered me on as well (of course). It’s nice having people that you know cheer you on.

I started out pretty fast on the run, with my pace at under 7 minutes/mile, which was a little faster then what I wanted to do. However, my heart rate was pretty low and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t slow down, so I just went with it. I was able to maintain this comfortable pace for about 3 miles, and then I started to slow down slightly while maintaining the same effort. Even thought I thought the bluff at mile 10 wasn’t the killer it was hyped to be, I was content to play it safe this year.

The run course takes you thru the main section of Egg Harbor, so there were tons of people cheering you on. Just after a turn around point near mile 6, I saw someone I knew (and that they are comparable to me time wise) coming up from behind and decided I needed to up my pace a bit. Right after the turn around we had a long up hill section and I was able to get up it pretty quick and no one was gaining on me. After the uphill we had an equally long down hill which was nice. I passed one person on the way down and then we were running back thru egg harbor.

I just ran my race for the next couple of miles, checking over my shoulder to see that no one was coming up on me. Then all of a sudden some guy appears out of no where and passes me with little effort around mile 8.5. I make the left hand turn onto Bluff Pass road around mile 9 and Jessica was there on her bike cheering people (and me) on. The hill starts at mile 9.2 and lasted until 9.6 I think. I just shortened my stride up and took my time getting to the top. I knew there was an aid station at the top and since I had a bottle with me I could grab some fluids and keep going. I think I was able to pass one person at the aid station, and then saw three more people on the long straight road in front of me. I told myself I got 2 miles to pass those three people.

I caught the first one at the aid station at mile 11, and the second shortly after. I had the third guy in my sights and was closing the gap, but it was taking a long time. I got within 10 yards by the time we hit the last aid station at mile 12 when some women ran up to him and started pacing him back towards the finish line, which did not make me happy. Thankfully she left and went back towards the aid station after a half mile or so, and I started closing in on those last 10 yards.

The last 1/4 mile, maybe a little more is all down hill. It starts gradual and then increases in steepness until it bottoms out at the intersection just before the finishing chute, and then you got 100 yards downhill to the finish line. So just as I start to feel the ground pitch down and pick up my pace and pass the 3rd guy I spotted after climbing the bluff. He stayed with me for a bit but I just started letting gravity take over, trying to just fall forward and let the hill do the rest. Just as I approached the really steep section, I caught a glimpse of another guy just in front of me. Would I be able to catch him? At this point I really try to just do a controlled fall down the hill. My pace exceeded a 5 minute/mile pace and I looked behind me to see the guy I just passed letting me go. I got to the intersection and was still picking up speed, but wouldn’t have enough distance to try to make a final pass. I crossed the line at 4:39:47.2 and the guy just in front of me was 6.9 seconds faster.

Post Race

I drank 40 oz of water and sat in a “ice-bath” for about 10 minutes immediately following the race. The water was cool, but probably could have been colder now that I think about it (anything would have felt cool after running 13 miles), but it still helped. It’s nice to see races supplying ice baths, and I hope its a trend that continues.

We hung around for a bit and talked to a few people that we knee, but then the sky started getting dark again. I figured it would be more enjoyable to load up the car before it started raining, so I headed back to transition and packed up. I don’t think it ended up raining, but it was still good to be on the road home, as it’s a decent length drive back to Madison.

Results

Swim: 30:55
T1: 2:09
Bike: 2:30:04
T2: 2:57
Run: 1:33:39
Total: 4:39:47

Male Division: 29 out of 545 (30 out of 546 with the one female placing ahead of me)
M30-34: 9 out of 83

Overall I am pleased with my results. Most of the time difference between Door County and High Cliff is due to the correct swim distance at Door County. My power meter says the bike was almost exactly the same. I’d say the run was pretty close to the same as well. Door Country might have been a little more difficult course wise, but it was a little warmer at High Cliff.

Next Up

I have five weeks until my next race, Pigman, and then three weeks until Ironman. I’m going to work my way slowly back into training this week, and then go hard for three weeks. This gives me a week off before Pigman, where I can try to atone for last year, go hard, and put everything I’ve learned into practice in order to build some confidence heading into Ironman. After Pigman, I’ll have a mix of rest and long rides (70 miles), plus one last power test to see what my goal wattage for the bike should be on race day.

I competed in the High Cliff half ironman about a month ago, but just haven't had enough time to sit down and right up a decent report. This one will be short so I have time to right up something about Door County while it’s still fresh in my mind.

The swim was short and choppy. This was the roughest open water swim that I have done to date, but was still disapointed in how short the swim was. My Garmin recorded it as being around 1500m, so not even 1 mile. Naturally all of the swim times were fast because of this, with my time being 24:41, which is pretty close to what I did the week before at Capital View. I think I had to work harder, but at least I know I can handle something other then calm water.

The bike was fairly uneventful, and it to was also a bit short (but I’m not going to fault anyone for 55.5 miles instead of 56.0). I started out a bit hot, and my heart rate was elevated from the swim I think. I went back and forth with a couple of riders, but decided to take it easy between miles 10 and 25. Around mile 25 I had enough of the back and forth and just decided to pass a couple of riders for good and stuck with that pace for the rest of the ride. The hill you have to climb coming out of the park at the start is much harder on the run then the bike in my opinion. My legs started to feel tired around mile 48 when we turned into the wind one last time, but it’s not like I was completely spent, just that for the first time my legs actually felt like they had to work. This indicates to me that I did a pretty good job pacing.

The run started out with a stop at a port-o-potty because I had to pee. It was a pretty warm day so this was a decent sign that I took in enough fluids on the bike. I had some stomach issues, which turned out to be gas, which passed (or rather I passed it) around mile 3 on the run, which made things much more enjoyable. After running up the hill out of transition, we were directed onto a series of trails thru the park. Most of the run was on trails, and a good portion was in the shade which was nice. I took it easy the first time around, and then started to pick up the pace on the second time around, knowing I got to run down that big hill at the end. I pulled away from a guy in the wave that started after me around mile 9 I think, and thought it would be cool if I could make up how ever many minutes I was down to him. I almost pulled it off, but was short by maybe 20 seconds. I was also trying to finish in front of this girl with a bib number that indicated she started several waves after me. It was a good goal that I accomplished, and it turns out she was part of a relay team anyway.

Overall it was a fun race and I enjoyed myself. With the race being on Saturday, it gave me Sunday to rest and recover.

Swim: 24:41
T1: 2:03
Bike: 2:30:46
T2: 1:36
Run: 1:34:44
Total: 4:33:52

Men: 26 out of 335 (1 woman finished ahead of me, so 27 out of 336)
M30-34: 5 out of 43

Today’s Task:

Add some Silverlight content to an existing Asp.Net MVC project. The MVC project contains the standard CRUD for the application, while the Silverlight is meant to provide rich visualization of the data.

Prerequisites:

• VS 2010
• An existing Asp.Net MVC 2.0 project
• Expression Blend 4.0 (installs Silverlight 4 and Silverlight 4 SDK)
• Silverlight 4.0 tools for Visual Studio 2010

Creating the Project:

As stated in the opening and prerequisites, I am starting with an existing Asp.Net MVC application. You should have Blend 4 installed, and have also installed the Silverlight 4 tools for Visual Studio.

1) Right click on your web project and choose add new item (ctrl+shift+a). From the add new Item window, click on Silverlight under Installed Templates and then select the Silverlight Application. Name your Silverlight application appropriately. In my example, I have named my project DataVisualization. Click Add

2) The next screen that comes up is the “Add Silverlight Application” screen. I accepted the defaults with the follow exception, I changed the location from being a sub folder of my MVC application to one level higher. The destination folder, ClientBin is still created in your MVC application. Make sure that you select Silverlight 4 for the version. Finally click Add.

3) You should now have the following in your solution.

• Your existing Asp.Net MVC application
• A new Silverlight 4 application named DataVisualization
• A DataVisualizationTestPage.aspx in your MVC application
• A DataVisualizationTestPage.html in your MVC application
• A Silverlight.js in your MVC application

We will eventually remove the test pages, but for now we will leave them so that they can serve their intended purpose.

4) Build the solution. You should see a DataVisualization.xap added to the ClientBin folder in your MVC application.

5) Right click on DataVisualization.html and choose view in browser. You should see an empty page in the browser, but get no errors. Right clicking anywhere in the browser window should bring up the Silverlight context menu.

Integrate the Silverlight Application

In this stage, we are going to make our new Silverlight application appear like it’s part of the rest of our MVC application. Right now if you browse to it, it doesn’t look like its part of anything. We also want to be able to allow our users to navigate thru our web application so we need our existing menu to show up.

1) Either create a new controller/view or re-use an existing controller/view in your MVC application to house your Silverlight application. I’m going to reuse an existing controller called Dashboard, which has one view, Index.

2) Open up your view, and the DataVisualizationTestPage.aspx file. We need to move some stuff over to our view so it displays our Silverlight application. I have some pre existing styling and layout defined, so my view is going to look differently from yours. I also store my java script files in a specific location, so I will be moving the included silverlight.js as well. The screen shot below shows what I am starting with in the view for reference.

3) If you don’t have any existing standard for your JavaScript, you can place the two script tags from the test page somewhere before the reference to the Silverlight object. For example, place the two script tags just below the second content place holder. Next, copy the form tag inclusive and paste it into your view. For me, I pasted it into my div tag that I have setup to control my formatting. In the screen shots below you can see my view, and resulting web page. We still have an empty Silverlight control, but now it looks like its actually part of our website.

4) Remove the DataVisualizationTest.aspx page, but keep the HTML page as we will need it in the next section.

Working with Blend

The final step is to begin adding content to our Silverlight application. For this we are going to switch to Blend to make sure that we are able to work in both tools.

1) Start up Blend and choose to open an existing project. Browse to the location of your DataVisualization project (folder that contains DataVisualization.csproj) and open it. You should see the content of your project listed on the left under the project tab (assuming default Blend layout) and the empty MainPage.xaml in the middle. Notice that we have a solution called DataVisualization, and that I did not open up my existing MVC application solution.

2) Go to Project in the tool bar, and click Run Project (or press F5). You will see that our empty MainPage is shown using the DataVisualizationTest.html page, and that we are using the local Asp.Net development server. This is good enough for me. I’m hoping that with this setup I can work independently of my MVC application, and more importantly, a designer would be able to work independently as well. When deploying my application to production, I can remove the DataVisualizationTest.html page.

3) TFS Integration – At this point I can’t figure out how to get Blend to work with TFS. It’s possible since I downloaded the trial version that it does not include TFS support, or I need to install Team Explorer on top of Blend. For now I can use the Explorer add-in to get by.

Conclusion

At this point we have a functioning Silverlight application, integrated with an existing Asp.Net MVC application. We are able to work independently of the web application in Blend and vice-versa. This is my first attempt at this type of solution, so I will post a follow-up in the future to report back how well it worked, and if I needed to make any changes.

Today was my first triathlon of the 2010 season, the Capital View Triathlon held in Madison, WI. This is my second year competing in this event (you can read last years race report), and the events 3rd year overall. Coming into this race, my goal was pretty much race execution and gear shake down. I had a full week of training, including a 20.5 mile run on Wednesday, and a full 112 miles on Friday, and my legs were pretty cooked. This was to be expected, and was how my training plan was setup. Next weeks 1/2 Ironman, HiCliff, held in Appleton will be my first true test.

Even with the full training week, I still improved (and was hoping to show improvement) over last year, finishing almost 10 minutes faster. I had a much better T1 and run times. My swim was a little better, and my bike was marginally better. Even though I knew my legs were pretty shot from the week of training, I was still disappointed in my bike time. What time improvement I had was probably due to all the aero gear I was sporting. I only managed to put out 224 watts (average without zeros), but I’ve put out 260 over one hour 3 weeks ago during my last down week. I’m hoping to be able to do 221 watts next week for the 56 mile bike and still be able to put in a solid run.

My age group (M30-34) was a little more competitive then last year, seeing as I shaved 10 minutes off my time, but only managed 5th in my age group (compared to last years 4th). However my overall Age Group ranking was much higher at 11th, and my overall place (accounting for elite and collegiate) 22nd, compared to 25th and 40th last year.

Results

• Official results available from Its Race Time (there website is flaky today)
• Total Olympic Distance Participants: 15 elite + 28 collegiate + 303 Age Group = 346
• My Age Group Ranking (M30-34): 5
• Overall Age Group: 11
• Overall: 22

Graph from Its Race Time, showing the relation between segment/event placement and race placement.

Last Thursday, I found out about a time-trial (TT) taking place on Sunday (today) from the UW-Cycling mailing list. Since this is my off week I figured there wouldn’t be any hurt in giving it a try. I’ve been itching to get out and compete anyway.

The L’Alpe Bl’Huez TT, described as Wisconsin’s Toughest Time Trial (I don’t know if that’s true), consists of a 10 mile course ending with 2 miles of climbing into Blue Mounds State Park. The first 7 miles is rolling hills and very fast, including a section of downhill that people hit close to 60 MPH on (I topped out at 49.5). The fun stops at mile 7 as you turn off a nice paved road, onto a crappy back road with small hills that just seem to suck the life out of you. After a short downhill to give you a bit of a break, you hit mile 8 and it’s all uphill from there.

I ended up 12th overall and 3rd in my age group with a finishing time of 31:37.2, or 4:08.3 behind the leader. I was riding my Argon 18 E-114 and wearing my aero helmet (which seemed to help), so I was in the aero category. However, the category only counted for the overall winner, but even so, the overall stock rider beat me by 45 seconds.

I was a little concerned wearing the aero helmet with the face shield given the heat, but I figured this was an excellent time to give it a try and see what happens. With the race only being 10 miles, I figured I could HTFU and make it thru even if my head was a little warm. In the end though, it didn’t turn out to be a big deal. My head didn’t feel uncomfortably warm, and I was able to push the visor up once we started climbing to get some ventilation in. 

Overall, the event was extremely well run, and with a fall version scheduled the week after IMWI, I might give it another go. I’d like to give a shout out to Pete and Jeff from Rocket Bicycle Studio who also did the event, and to Jessica from SBR Coaching who cheered me on during the final climb into the park.