Endurance Corner Camp Tucson Day 1

The first day of camp was mild, which was good. It gave everyone an oppurtunity to get their bikes sorted, the mechanic to take a look and get everyone warmed up for the "road" ahead. Started out with a 8AM swim at Oro Valley which is a pretty nice pool. Had 7 lanes to ourselves.

Notice the flags, super windy

For today's swim, Justin had implanted a 1K time trial for time. I ended up helping with timing and then afterwards, JD and I did ours together...kinda together....well, we started at the same time anyways. I have spent most of the winter and the last 2 months keeping my swim consistency high, swimming most weeks 6 times/week, nothing less than 5. That being said, I haven't worked on any high end fitness and it showed today. I swam 12:28 for the 1,000yd TT. I would have liked to swim a bit faster, however I am happy with it for now. Its early season. My mid season best last year was 11:45.

After the swim, we had a small snack and headed out on a nice, quick 7.2K run with Heath and Justin. It was pretty uneventful, but always good to get to socialize with other campers.

Headed back to hotel and took a 2 hour nap, well that would probably be considered a "sleep." After a little lunch, got our kits on, were briefed and out the door for our ride.

On the docket, was a 2 hour ride with a 5.5 mile individual time trial half way out. The course is a false flat up the entire way, probably 1-2% grade the whole way.

Today, the wind was quite mighty and was "whippin" pretty good. Justin said he was about 3-4 minutes slower than normal. IT-WAS-WINDY!!! All in all, its always good to test and this was going to be a perfect CP20(all out effort for 20 minutes measuring avg power over that time to calculate functional threshold power FTP) test to see where my fitness CURRENTLY is. I ended sliding in a bit under 24 minutes, averaging 290 watts. Again, considering its early season and I haven't done much high end training, not too shabby, was hoping to average over 300. One of the campers Tom, had the fastest time of 21:30. Tom is from Salt Lake City and quite a good triathlete.

So overall, a good day at EC Tucson Camp.

Day 3 Totals
Swim: 45 min
Run: 35 min
Bike: 2 hrs

After dinner, Alan Couzens gave a brief talk on intepreting training test and how to use them functionally in your current training. If you ever get a chance to read Alan's blog, you will learn alot. Super intelligent guy with a lot of good information on how to guide your training and understanding "the numbers."

Tomorrow is the first big ride. We are riding to Madera Canyon which I think will be around 80 miles round trip. Madera Canyon is a 10 mile climb, should be a good one. 2600 feet of climbing in the last 10 miles. But before that, we are heading out for a nice 10K run. I'll try and swim after our ride to keep my swimming streak alive, but no promises.

Still bronzin'
Crazy J