AJ's Not so Everyday Blog

Over the last year I struck up a friendship with Nascar driver Josh Wise and have done a couple rides when he's in town for the Nascar races.  If you don't know who he is, I can sum it up pretty quick, he's a beast and a really strong triathlete. We met up at his condo down by Port Orange and decided to head north for 30 miles. Upon departure we both quickly realized it was going to be a fight going north due to crazy headwinds.  It was easily in the top three windiest rides I've done, other than that the weather was awesome and traffic wasn't too horrible. We did a easy 10 minute spin to get the legs warmed up then started into the wind trying to stay as aero as possible. We averaged a solid 19.5mph average to the turnaround in which was right at Marineland. On the way back he had already looked up a couple Strava segments so we figured we would try to do some Strava hunting and use the wind as much as we could. We averaged about 28.2mph on the way back to town and...

What a tough race. This was my first full on road race and what a course to make a debut on. Most people know that Florida is pretty flat for the most part until you get to Clermont. We have what I thought were some hills on one of our training routes but it was no where near the multitude of what we raced on. The local bike shop owner and the one I do most of my training rides during the week with, Tommy, thought it would be a good event to do since I'm a not so great climber. We also put more effort into lower cadence work and higher resistance trainer rides this winter to try and help me come triathlon season. The weather was really nice and in the high 60's at the start which was around 9:15am, we were the second wave and had about 110 in our wave. Since it was my first road race I had to run the Cat 5 class in which they combined the Cat 5 with the 35+ year old's. The race consisted of four 12 mile laps, it sounded like a pretty cool idea until you finish the first lap...

So after talking to a fellow triathlete over some Starbucks one evening I thought it'd be a good idea to start a blog to reflect on all the up's and down's, highlights and lowlights of everyday triathlon training and racing. Here goes nothing!