The Manlius Formation

Well, if it’s the end of the triathlon season, that means a few things:

1) I get to sleep in later and train lighter to give my body a break until the serious off-season training starts. The problem is that the sleeping in and light workouts started a month ago. Oops.

2) I usually gain a few pounds since I don’t change my eating habits, and all my shorts start to get a little snug.

3) The end-of-season CNY TRI Club picnic takes place at Jamesville Beach^[1], sponsored and catered this year by Bella Domani, which is owned and operated by one of our own club members, Brian Lang. Thanks, Brian, for the awesome catering!

My favorite part about the picnic is the kids’ triathlon. Daniel and Thomas both participated, along with about 15 other kids, and everyone did great. Way to go kids!

More photos in the gallery.

1. Site of next year’s inaugural Ironman 70.3 Syracuse. Woo-hoo! [back]

Yesterday was the big day for The Manlius Formation (the triathlon relay team, not the website). It was an absolutely beautiful day, although a little hot for the run, and we had great fun.

It was a little tight with well over 600 people^[1] entering the water, but it went pretty smoothly.

Here we are, all smiles after the race. Check out the Skinnyman 2009 gallery for more photos.

OK, so you may recall that I challenged my teammates to better their times by 10% over last year’s times. Well, the results are in, and they’re mixed.

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1. 615 individual participants and 20 relay team swimmers [back]

During the not-short drive home from the North Bay tri Dan remarked that he wanted to work on his swimming so he could improve his swim time. I’ve known from doing tri’s for a few years that it’s better to spend training time improving the run or the bike, but I wanted to do some math to show why. As I often do, I started with the complicated approach and then got more simple.

I wanted to see if an athlete’s swim, bike, or run place could be used as a predictor for his/her overall finish place. In other words: If an athlete comes out of the water in Xth place and finishes in Yth place, how close are X and Y?

Here’s what the data looks like for the North Bay results:

This is a plot of each athlete’s actual swim, bike, and run ranking (the vertical axis) vs. his/her actual finish place. As an example, the lowest reddish box off by itself near the lower left is an athlete who had the third-fastest swim time, but who finished 33rd overall. As such, her swim finish was not a good indicator of her overall finish place. ^[1]

Note that in the middle of the pack there appears to be more scatter for the swim results than for the run and bike. The run and bike seem to follow a similar trend to each other.

I only had 115 points from this small race so I wanted to look at a bigger race. I had the results from the Tupper Lake Tinman 2007 handy, so I looked at that data:

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1. Incidentally, she had the 39th fastest bike time and the 57th fastest run. The bike was a much better predictor of her final position, with the run a little poorer as a predictor. [back]

And Canada won. Big time.

So my friend, Dan, hadn’t been back to his hometown of North Bay, Ontario, since his family left the area about 25 years ago. Recently he discovered that the lakeside town of 50,000 souls hosts a triathlon every year. Our wives were kind enough to let us head north for a weekend so Dan could check out his old digs and we could test our mettle against our northern neighbors. With spousal permission and passports in hand, we headed north last Friday to take on Canada.

The race was a 1 km (0.6 mile) swim, 34 km (21 mile) bike, and an 8.4 km (5.2 mile) run. What you don’t see in these numbers is that the bike course and run course are both out-and-back routes that are uphill on the way out and downhill on the way back.

Due to the twisty, turny nature of the bike course, and my aversion to dislocated hips caused by running downhill in an uncontrolled, failing mass of arms and legs, the benefit I get from going downhill does not cancel out the penalty I incur going uphill. In other words, I anticipated being slowed down on the uphills more than I could make up for on the downhills.

Coupling this with the fact that I can count on two hands the number of good, solid bike training days I managed to fit in so far this year, and that the longest I’ve run is 5 miles, I went into the race thinking I’d approach it as a tough training day and finish in about 2 hours and 10 minutes. Dan’s expectations were similar since he’s biked and run about the same amount this spring and summer.

As you can see in the results, I met my goal – to the second: 2 hours, 10 minutes, and zero seconds. Hey, I’m a Capricorn - that’s what we do. Dan was right behind me, beating his goal by almost 7 minutes. Not bad.^[1]

When all was said and done I finished 48th overall out of 115 competitors, and 6th out of 8 in my age group. While I’d like to finish closer to the middle of the pack of my age group, I’m pleased with this result since I was WAY underprepared for the bike and run. Unsurprisingly, my bike was weak (70th overall and last in my age group), but my run was decent (8 minute miles).

What was nice to see was that all the swim training I’ve been doing seems to be working. I swam an average of about 1:40 per 100 yards, which was in the top 30 swim times, and just happens to be the goal I need to reach for the Skaneateles Skinnyman triathlon with my TMF comrades. Chris and Kathleen, I hope you’re taking the challenge seriously!

Dan was just a little behind me on the swim, faster than me on the bike (you’ll pay for that, Dan) and darn close on the run, finishing 57th overall. Not bad for a guy who bought his bike, like, 2 months ago and just started swimming. I have to start doing secret workouts and find a way to hold him back.

So how about the winner? The winner of the race was Len Gushe from Ontario. I know exactly when he finished, because we were right next to each other on the run course about 50 yards away from the finish line. In fact, we were facing directly at each other. This is because I was just starting the 5.2 mile out-and-back run and he was just finishing the 5.2 mile out-and-back run. That’s right, folks. I was starting the “out” and he was finishing the “back.”

He beat me by almost 40 minutes in a race that took me 130 minutes. I would have had to go about 30% faster in each event to finish with him. In my defence^[2], this is a man who won his age group and finished 60th overall at the 2000 Ironman world championships in Kona, Hawaii. ^[3]

And talk about your coincidences: check out this photo of me, Dan and “the Gushe” (I don’t know if they call him that, but Dan and I do). Len is the one with all the muscles. I’m the peon in the blue shirt near the car in the upper right corner running away from the camera. Dan is the cyclist at left getting ready to enter the transition area on the right of the photo. Check out the gallery for a few of the photos I took at the race.

So, to recap: Fun road trip, I got to see Canada for the first time, Dan and I did a longer race than we were prepared for and lived to tell the story. Not a bad weekend.

1. A note on the results: the two transition times - T1 (swim to bike) and T2 (bike to run) - are usually broken out separately, but based on where the timing mats were located, they seemed to have combined T1 with the bike time and T2 with the run time. I am notoriously slow in T1 – I dry my feet, take in some nutrition, look around, paint a watercolor, write a poem, and then get on the bike – but it’s still no more than 3 minutes. All in all, it shouldn’t affect the bike time too much. However, a 1:40 T2 time translates into about 20 seconds per mile for a 5 mile run. Bottom line though: the first one to cross the finish line wins regardless of how many splits you get. [back]
2. Do you like the Canadian spelling, eh? [back]
3. So how do the distances in the North Bay Triathlon translate into Ironman distances, you ask? Good question. All you need to do is repeat the North Bay swim 3 more times, do the bike 4.3 more times, and then do the run 4 more times. That will give you the Ironman distances of a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and 26.2 mile run. Not for the faint of heart. [back]

And swims again!

And runs again!

What, pray tell, am I talking about? Well, before the Manlius Formation was a widely read^[1] and critically acclaimed^[2] website, it was the name for the geological structure upon which my town sits.

However, before the website, there was the triathlon relay team composed of yours truly on the swim leg, “Crankin’” Chris Kopf on the bike, and Kathleen “Kath-me-if-you-can” Sokolovic on the run.

TMF roared onto the triathlon scene in the Skinnyman triathlon on Labor Day weekend 2008. Out of 16 relay teams, we finished in a solid 14th place, which the sharp-eyed reader will note is NOT last place. Note that one of the teams we beat was called “The Old Farts” and we were roundly bested by a team called “Just for Fun.”

This year’s challenge to my teammates is to finish in the TOP HALF of the co-ed teams. That’s right. The TOP HALF. Our finish time last year of 1:42:38 would need to have been 10 minutes and 20 seconds faster to meet that goal. If my math is correct, that means we each need to improve by at least 10% (including the transition times) over last year’s times.

Kathleen is already running her target time on a regular basis, which points towards a likely scenario where she blows that time out of the water. I think she can do it.

Chris is a powerhouse who I know can add at least 3/4 of a MPH to his average bike pace.

I’m not drowning when I swim (always a good sign) and I think with a little focus I can shave 10 seconds or so off my 100yd average pace on the swim.

Can we do it? I think so.

1. Average readers per post = 2.8 with a standard deviation of 1.7 [back]
2. Will Kopf raves, “i dont like manlius formation” [back]