Journey to Kona Day 170: What Matters

My focus for the last couple of weeks has been the upcoming Santa Rosa 70.3.  In fact, I realized today that I'm actually a little nervous about the race.  The fact that I have a goal of giving it my best effort is putting some pressure on me.  Of course it's self inflicted pressure.  While I've been on my journey to Kona, I've prioritized something else the last couple of weeks.  On a certain level, I'm already looking forward to refocusing on Kona starting on Sunday.  With 10 weeks to go, it will be time to focus my training on the rigors of ironman, and more specifically, the Ironman World Championship.  That will include things like hot yoga, more for its acclimatization affect than the benefit of yoga, though that might be a great benefit as well.

At the same time that this is going on, I'm planning to start a part time job soon.  I've always gravitated to a number of things, and I'm really going to try to focus on a select few.  That's pretty simple when it comes to my ironman training.  It's getting simple when it comes to work.  And, the focus on my family is always straightforward.  But first, I have a task at hand in three days.

I swam today for twenty minutes, focusing on my form.  Finding my most effective swim intensities is an interesting phenomenon.  Today, I swam as hard as I could for 100 yards, and my pace was 1:22.     I then swam a solid effort for 200 yards, at a pace of 1:34.  There's no question that I could have held this pace for 300 yards, and maybe for 500, but that would have been it.  Finally, I set out to swim at an effort that I felt that I could hold for 1000-2000 yards, essentially a half ironman effort.  I only swam for 300 yards, but it was comfortable, and my pace was 1:39.  My new swim coach tells me that the difference between an easy effort and a hard effort for him is about 5 seconds/100 yards.  In some ways, that appears to be similar for me when looking at my effort for 1000 yard versus 200-300 yards.

The key to my race on Saturday will be getting out on the swim at the right effort and maintaining it.  That's what matters.