(Late) Adult Onset Triathlete

This is the series of posts in which I confess how naïve I was about the amount of equipment one might want (need?) to become a triathlete. And, related, how much you can spend doing this. Swim, bike, run, right? So I just need a bike, some shoes, and a swimsuit? Simple!

Ha.

I started this year with an agreed upon budget. Boy, that went fast.

The trick with this is that I love tools, toys, and gadgets so I’ve had some challenges reigning in my expenses — as Mrs. AdultOnset will no doubt agree.

To keep this brief and readable, I’ll break it up into a series of posts over the next few days.

Swimming

First you need a swimsuit. And not your comfy and baggy ol’ beach shorts style. Oh, and the smaller and tighter the suit is the more you’re paying for the privilege of that exposure it will give you [to the world]. yeesh…

What else? In no particular order (and a ‘*’ indicates I purchased this year):

• Kick fins – useful for kick drills and some swim drills
• Kick board – kick drills again. I always just borrow one from the pool where I swim
• *Hand paddles – useful for pull drills to work on form
• Goggles – Right now I have one brand/model I like that fits my big face and doesn’t leak. I need to find another that offers some tint for outdoor morning swimming though.
• Buoy – something to clench between your legs when doing pull drills to help keep the legs afloat
• Gear bag – necessary to carry all this stuff around
• Wet suit – cold open water swimming is cold. So cold. My wetsuit is sleeveless to better accommodate my shoulders and ape-length arms. No rub rashes ever, but it does leave my arms exposed to that cold water.
  
  Late last season I picked up a pair of neoprene sleeves that I will experiment with this year. Trick is I don’t have the arms of the traditional 140 lb triathlete so the sleeves are a bit challenging to get on and off in any sort of timely fashion.

To Be Continued.

I think my biggest challenge in hiring a coach and diving head first into training has been time management. There are a lot of workouts and typically more than one a day. And sometimes you really shouldn’t just stack ’em all up and do them back to back.

I am a bit blessed with my job — I work a lot of hours, but not necessarily all during traditional times and I generally have a lot of flexibility. Granted, sometimes that means I am doing server or network ops tasks at 9 or 10 at night… but there’s great balance on the whole.

My wife also has a demanding professional job. And together have fairly busy social schedules (sometimes) and we are building a house this year. Our kids aren’t home, but we usually have something going on with them as well. And that little granddaughter…! All that leads up to me having to be very diligent to ensure I’m not stressed out (or grumbling) about the workouts.

Thankfully, after a few weeks into this, we got organized. Mrs. AdultOnsetAthlete and I now have a shared Google calendar. On that calendar goes all of our things that we should both be aware of. Each of our workout schedules, social stuff, family stuff, work trips, you name it. I then pull that calendar into my work calendar to see my whole life at a glance.

This is priceless when planning out each week’s worth of workouts!

I generally sit down each Sunday and plan out the upcoming week in the calendar. Having our mutual stuff all in one place helps ensure that I can still be sensitive to family events. Also helps ensure that we can work to combine our trips to the gym which is always a bonus 🙂 Without this level of planning each week I suspect I would not be doing nearly as well at getting in all the workouts and would probably be a lot more frantic too.

Also priceless is the ability to link a calendar feed from TrainingPeaks.com into my Google calendar. When doing my weekly planning I can just look at the Google calendar and see what is planned for the week all in one spot. As you do the workouts and log them to Training Peaks, it updates the calendar entries to reflect when you actually did the workout.

The image there is just a little snapshot of today and tomorrow. The stuff in blue at the top is what was pulled in from TrainingPeaks.com so I know to block time out for those throughout the day. Today, as an example, has several activities so I will do one before work, one over lunch, and the rest after work.

Some weeks change from day to day based on rehab and health so I have to remember to keep on top of things but generally I do a quick check at the end of the day to ensure I’m properly planning for tomorrow and that minimizes surprises.

The Knee:
Hopefully almost recovered from the knee incident of 2019. Been doing a lot of what I call pool trotting these past few weeks and — don’t tell Coach — but I’m actually learning to like it. Wearing an old pair of shoes in the pool sure helps, a tip I learned from Coach after I rubbed skin off the bottoms of my feet on a long run. Ewww…

For the longer sessions I [carefully] wear some bluetooth headphones for music and run a backwards lap every 5 or so. And I count the laps. And I do weird math in my head working on converting 18 meter lengths / 36 meter laps to feet or yards or miles. Yes, it can be a little mind-numbing… but music helps a lot.

For mid to high Zone 1 work that surely is building strength you can’t beat it. I can’t really push much into Zone 2 without adding knee stress which would defeat the whole purpose. And I do it in the warmer lap pool so that’s pleasant too (our normal lap pool is cold. Plenty tolerable after a few laps but getting into it about stops my heart.)

Last week I tried some shorter runs outside and had some knee stiffness afterwards. Not a lot of pain and didn’t see any swelling, but I may have just a bit more pool trotting to do yet before I can get back to running like a normal person.

The shoulder. Eh, it is what it is. It still ain’t great, but it no longer holds me back from swimming. I can’t throw a tennis ball across the room but thankfully that’s not part of my current chosen sport(s).

Two months in:
I’ve been doing this training for about 2 months now and I am happy to say I am already seeing some results in spite of my various injuries. Swimming is progressing nicely and bike endurance is coming up. Looking forward to FTP testing on the bike soon to see where I’m at compared to where I was last year. Hope to get actually running soon but at least cardio is coming along.

I am no longer very low carb / keto and that’s been an interesting adjustment. Probably more on that in a future post.

Scheduling all the training is a bitch. Definitely more on that in a future post.

Updated Pain Cave:
I posted pictures a while back about my indoor bike training setup (aka the Pain Cave). With the new bike I had to make some changes — in particular, the TV had to be lower to be watched from that changed riding position or I’d ruin my neck. The tablet running Zwift is right in front of it. Works out great. I have a small stand to my right that I keep nutrition, TV remotes, phone, and tablet on for convenience.

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