Triathletes Jenna Shoemaker and Ben Collins train on the edge

As for my current status here in Boulder, training has been going really well. By the start of this week, almost all of my hard training was behind me, so most of the sessions have focused on race specific elements and have been a bit shorter. I’ve been working on everything from fast accelerations, sustained efforts and pace-line efforts with a group. Since the races are so unpredictable, I have to be ready for anything. I have to prepare as if I am going to have to ride a solo 40k time trial while I also have to prepare as if I am going to do a hard 40k bike circuit race. There is always the chance that I could get away, off the front, and ride the course alone, so I need to know that I am mentally and physically capable of doing so. More than likely though, I will be in a group and will have to tackle the course in either a tight pace-line or in a more conventional “start and stop” fashion, like a traditional bike race. That is one of the things that I love so much about the ITU Draft Legal style of racing — you just never know what kind of a race you are going to end up in.

So, if you can make sense out of some of the interval workouts recorded with my new Edge 705, you may notice that some of the intervals are shorter bursts of speed where some are longer sustained efforts. Sometimes I am riding alone and sometimes I have other training partners working with me for these efforts. That not only pushes me to ride harder, but also allows me to encounter a more race-like simulation in training. When you have other people around you, there is no choice but to ride at least as hard as they are because otherwise you get dropped. This is especially great practice on days when I am a bit tired going into the session because it forces me to find that something extra to stay in the mix. Hopefully, all of this preparation will express itself in the way of some great racing in Europe over the next month!

Enjoy watching the Tour. Go Team Garmin! And check back here next week to hear about Athlone, Ireland and the first race of my own “tour” in Europe. Check out one of my interval rides posted to Garmin Connect.

Ben:
Sunday was the Lake Stevens 70.3. It’s about 25 miles north of my parents’ house, and while I didn’t do the race, I did join some Colombian triathletes in their course preview the week beforehand. We were guided by another Seattle-based triathlete, Chris Tremonte, who has done the Lake Stevens race several times. I was excited because it was a two-lap course, which was a great opportunity for me to play with some of the features on my new Garmin Edge 705.

The first lap I flipped back and forth between the map view, where I could see street names and geographic features (“Oh, that’s Lake Roesiger”), and the elevation chart, which I would glance at before reporting to my companions, “this is seven percent grade and we’ve just climbed 50 meters in the last 800 meters!” Had this been on the second lap of racing a half Ironman, I may not have been so excited.

The second lap I turned on the Virtual Partner feature and we raced ourselves (okay, nobody else knew we were racing ourselves, but we went faster anyway). I did a couple of pickups and watched as we moved ahead of our younger selves by minutes and kilometers. The second lap took 85 minutes, which was five minutes faster than the first lap for an average speed of 19.1mph. We weren’t going for time, but it was fun to see the difference a good warm-up makes.

It turns out the course we rode was a bit different from this year’s race, but Chris still managed to pull out a sixth place overall, which is his top 70.3 finish. He also rode 25 minutes faster than the previous week in just under 2.5 hours, averaging 22.4mph. The coach of the Colombian triathletes, Will Vargas, was 6th in his age group. You can check out our training ride on my Garmin Connect account, and you can read more about my everyday adventures at bencollins.org.

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