All done, bar the shouting

Six days to go.  Starting to get keyed up, excited and a little nervous. My taper’s been a bit strange. Sunday week was my last long one, with the club’s Kingston to Worthing tt and I rode it pretty much at IM intensity. The 4 odd hours that I was out was the 4 miserable, rainy hours of the last month. It was a tired me who was cranking home, back up the A24 without company, while most of my club mates headed into Worthing for a Knickerbocker glory. I had more High5 energy drink.  That evening I went for a very lack-lustre swim; I was just absolutely shattered and after 30 minutes called it a day.

This week was my first taper week, but I actually ended up doing 10 hours. The big difference was that I had broken up for work so spent a good deal of the week on the sofa, asleep, trying to stay awake while watching the tour. I usually found myself waking up as the yellow jersey mounted to podium, such has been the fatigue that I have felt. And the 10 hours was all very low intensity and easy work, for example 3 hours riding at 13mph with a friend from work, gently spinning out my legs on a couple of Surrey hills. I had got to a point about 7 days ago where I had had enough and Improperly needed to lower the intensity of the work that I had been doing and it’s been great to get into the final fortnight.

Now my attention shifts to the logistics of getting myself,  my wife and all my triathlon gear across to Switzerland. I’ve had a fun afternoon trying to get my head around a bikeboxalan. Even with an engineering degree and over 20 years’ DT teaching, it took a while. More than all that though, there is one constant in the forefront of my mind; heat. The current forecast for Zurich on Sunday is 32 degrees in the afternoon. It is what it is, so I’ve got a few things l’m going to do,to try to make things as cool as possible.

1. I’m going to wear my standard road helmet.  My bambino’s pretty good despite not having vents but with my road helmet I can put water directly on my head as well as the vents giving improved air cooling. It just makes more sense and I’m happy to sacrifice the aero advantage. It won’t be an advantage if my head is boiling like a jacket potato in a microwave.

2. I’m not going to wear a tri suit. The plan is for me to wear my favourite bike shorts and calf guards under my wetsuit (it’s currently still a wetsuit swim).  In T1 strip off my wettie, bike top on, short socks on, and out onto the course.  In T2, I will do a full strip and put on my favourite running shorts and a baggy run vest, with a visor.  My reason for this is that I want to get as much airflow and cooling water directly onto my skin. I find that I get quite hot in my tri suit so I am hoping that this will help with cooling. That’s the plan, anyway.