Triathlon | Applied Agnieszkology

The Championship

6. June 20196. June 2019
by Agnieszka

First triathlon this year – and a big one: The Championship, a world middle distance championship of the Challenge series in Šamorin, Slovakia. I surprisingly qualified for this race with my 5th place at Challenge Herning in Denmark – the first time in my life that I qualified for something in sports at all 😀

We decided to combine it with a short vacation, stopping to visit beautiful cities on the way there and back. The first thing I did waking up every day was checking the weather forecast for the race day – and it was getting hotter and hotter.
We arrived the day before the race – registration was organized in a very efficient way, not so the bike check-in… But the worst information came during the race briefing: water is expected to be about 14 degrees Celsius so it’s not clear which distance are we going to swim. What was clear, was that it definitely will be a wetsuit-legal or even wetsuit-obligatory swim.

Swim

On the race day, the official water temperature was announced: 14,4 degrees in the Danube river, we’re swimming the full 1900m distance. Given the 25 degrees air temperature at 9:30 in the morning getting into the water felt like the ice bucket challenge… I start to swim, or at least I’m trying to, but I’m not really moving forward. The current is so strong, that I have the impression to invest all the energy into not being drifted away. The water is so cold and there marking buoys don’t seem to come any closer, I’m having a brief thought about giving up. Instead I focus on stabilising my breath and my stroke and start to slowly move forward. 1900 meters have never been so long. I don’t even dare to look at my watch. When I finally manage to get out of the water I see the degree of the disaster: 45 minutes (I swam both 70,3 distances last year in 38 minutes, was expecting 36-37 this year). But given that I was by far not the last one to get out of the water, it was pretty clear, it’s not me it’s the current. Still, just look at the mix of disbelief and disgust on my face :joy:

T1

T1 went well, without loosing any time, this time I grabbed the right bag (last year I had the wrong one and had to go back) and ran towards the bike. Still, I needed 5 minutes for the transition, as the ways were quite long there and included tricky stairs.

Cycling

It was pretty clear that it will rather be a fast course – almost no elevation and not very windy conditions. The surface was mostly good as well. I reduced the nutrition frequency in comparison to the last year and it was a good decision – no digestive problems this time and a very consistent ride with constant 32km/h and a 2:47 bike split time (almost 10 minutes faster than last year). The course was not exactly spectacular, but yeah, the most spectacular bike courses are usually very hilly, and I’m unfortunately terrible when it comes to hills…

T2

I managed to jump off the shoes at the dismount line very easily for the first time (last year at the IronMan Hamburg I just managed one, the other clicked out, so I had to keep it on my foot and run with one cycling shoe through the transition…) and ran – barefoot on a very hot asphalt, as the carpet didn’t start immediately. Again – a long way to run, more than 500 meters. I had the impression of being quite fast, but the watch was showing more than 4 minutes for the whole transition

Run

There is only one word that comes to my mind when I think of the run – hot! The air temperature reaching about 30 degrees and almost no wind and no shade. Pretty exposed to the sun for the whole course. We were running 3 rounds on quite a strange course: while a short part of the course went along the river, the major part was happening in a horse race course, on grass and sand surface. The heat and humidity made it difficult at the beginning, I needed few minutes to stabilize my breath. I had just two gels and decided to fuel on coke during the majority of the run – which was a blessing to my stomach – no issues at all and also no feeling of being hungry. I finished the run in 1:59, finally under 2 hours

My total time 5:43:03 – not quite the time I expected, as I was aiming in about 5:30, but with the swim disaster – no wonder 😉 Now the most important thing is to keep training for the Ironman Frankfurt in 3 weeks

Triathlete on business trip

27. January 201927. January 2019
by Agnieszka

There are times in my job requiring significant amount of travel. While I generally don’t mind, especially when I travel to beautiful cities like Zürich or Hamburg, it always requires little more effort to keep up with the training routine.

Packing

The difficulties usually start with packing. I try to travel with cabin bag only whenever possible. It means that I have to fit running and swimming gear along some decent semi-business cloths. In winter the difficulty is the need of warm cloths that usually take space, in summer I usually get some space issues when I want to swim open water and have the wetsuit with me. Luckily for me, my job doesn’t require wearing formal suits, so for 4 nights I just take 4 blouses, 4 underwear changes and 4 pairs of socks and that’s basically it 😉 I still have plenty of space for my sports gear and some healthy snacks.

Food

Eating properly can also be tricky on a trip. One problem are the business lunches and dinners, but the bigger one might actually be the unstructured days with no proper food with a lot of temptations to eat fast food or unhealthy snacks. Why I don’t stick to any particular dietary “religion”, I still try to eat reasonably healthy. That’s why to avoid temptation I try to always have some nutritious snacks (pre-training carb snacks, post-training protein snacks, nuts etc). For people following a vegan, low carb and especially gluten free diet this might be even more essential than for a relatively relaxed flexitarian 😉

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A post shared by Agnieszka Walorska (@agamw) on Nov 15, 2017 at 4:27am PST

Training plan

I always discuss a trip (especially a longer one) with my coach and try to plan accordingly. When I’m away for a week with a quite tensed schedule, there is no point of having an strenuous training planned for this week.

When I don’t have to take a plane or a train at 6 or 7, I try to fit a training in the morning before (I usually opt for cycling, as this is the most difficult thing to to on a trip). I always plan my running routes and check opening hours of public swimming pools or a distance to the lake in advance. Running is the easiest thing to do while travelling – you can run everywhere. When travelling in winter, I book a hotel with a proper gym, whenever possible – just in case the weather is really not inviting for an outside run. When travelling in summer – especially to Zürich – I try to book a hotel close to the lake, which is both great for running and swimming 🙂

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Flight and hotel

That might not be true for everyone, but for me flying (even short-haul) and sleeping in hotels (and interacting with more people than usual) are always negatively impacting my training performance. Nothing dramatic about it – but it’s just good to know it and not to overdramatize 😉 It’s just normal. But it’s still important to keep the training routine – not only because of the progress towards the training goals, but also to neutralize the additional amount of stress that an intense business trip might cause for some of us 🙂