Mallorca!

Bike is ready to go, thanks Beuk for the wheels! good for the moral.

The promised biweekly update I couldn't keep already from the beginning, but last post now was already over 2 months ago. It turned out that with training, work and some social time as well, writing this blog was the activity that suffered. Now I arrived in Mallorca, with some free time to spare, I will share some stories the coming days.

Yesterday was my first day at Mallorca, after an early flight (05:10) I arrived early at Mallorca as well. After waiting for quite some time for the special luggage (the bike) and a long queue at the car rental, I was set to go to the other side of the Island: Port d’Alcudia.

The weather is very good, around 27 degrees at the moment. Little wind in the morning, but increasing in strength during the afternoon. The forecast for the coming days is good as well, temperature will drop a little, but keeps warm enough.

The plan for this week is to rest as much as possible, to do a little cycling, swimming and running just to keep everything sharp. For me just as important as it is fun to do is cycling the race course to know get familiar with the profile and corners a little bit.

The scenery of the first half of the bike course.

Day 1, in the afternoon the first bike ride to inspect the first loop of the course. Flat is relative here and although I assumed rolling hills, going up and down a bit, it felt harder than expected. Some 6% uphill parts really hit the legs even when it is only for 200-500 meters. Maybe it was also the early flight and lack of sleep that made my heartrate be higher than I would have liked it to be. On the contrary, the second half of the loop was with more tail winds and some running downhill parts. What goes up, must come down and when cycling around 45-50 km/h without hardly any effort for 3 or 4 km’s is very rewarding of course. Strava link: https://www.strava.com/activities/397171120

This morning I started with a little walk (4km’s) from the house to the start venue. Probably this will be my warm up on Saturday as well, as I expect that roads will be very busy so going by car and to be able to park a car will be a nightmare. I did do a little swim in the salt water, just to “taste” the water over here. It is not that nice and although I’ve practiced it (once) at Kijkduin, I still didn’t like it. I will do another swim or two, just to get a bit more just to this taste in the coming days, and for the race: just keep attention to my breathing and simply deal with it. The water is sparkly clear and a lot of fish can be seen close to the cost already.

I will do a short running practice at the end of the afternoon or beginning of the evening, when temperatures have dropped a bit.

If you want to follow my race this Saturday, you can do so by looking at the live results at the Iron Man website, search for my name or startnumber (842): http://www.ironman.com/triathlon/coverage/live.aspx#axzz3m4LtNqtq

It should update every now and then when I pass a timing point (about every 30km’s on the bike course, every few km’s at the running course, and at the start and end of each part of the triathlon). There seems to be an app as well, at least in the play store, don’t know if/how it works, but you might give it a try.