Wednesday 1 May 2013

Mallorca: the maths

So the observant and regular reader amongst you will note there has been a lot of mental prep blogging from Ironplanner. Continuing in this vein is The Maths. This is particularly important for me as I am trying to learn the Spanish for "have I made the cut off?"

So here it is in black and white for me to focus on next week when I am in Mallorca and in my final days. 

The swim. She starts for the females at 08:05 with a cut off 1hr and 10 minutes after my start. Last weekend I completed 2.5km Swimathon (25m pool no wetsuit) in 59 mins. I feel confident of completing the 1.9km (1.2 miles) within the cut off allowing for tackling crowds, drift and sighting. Inshallah. 

Transition: Allow 5-7 minutes. I must leave T1 within 1:20 of my swim start. Real time: approx 9:05am

The bike: In training, it took me 56 minutes to get to the start of the climb. I'm not truncating that time to take traffic navigation etc away because I am going to use the flat start to fuel well. I then reached the top, where the next cut off is (at 13:00h), in 42 minutes. In race real time, I therefore expect to make this cut off at 10:43am. Plenty of time right...? (I've done this maths 100 times!)

I then took another 20mins to make the petrol station at Lluc / Sa Calobra turnoff and another 40 minutes to get to Inca. It then seemed to take me 2.5hrs to tackle the final 30miles in a headwind. That's a total of 5+ hours of cycling - making me the slowest women BUT back to T2 at 14:35pm. The cut off time for entry to T2 is 15:30. 

The run: on a good day I can do in sub two hours. Let's give me twenty minutes for transition and slowness and I should still make the event cut off of 1730, walking. Inshallah. 

So breathe. The idea behind writing this down is 1) to check it and 2) to give myself confidence that I can make it and so just focus on a calm and capable finish. Of course it has made me rather anxious that my swim is not strong enough. That's motivation for an unbroken 1900 at race pace tomorrow then!

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