San Diego a blast; Looking toward Deuces Wild and Idaho

For the last week I've been in San Diego.  Got in some great training with James Walsh and Trevor Glavin.  With James, I got in a nice hilly 1:40 trail run and a sweet road bike ride with 7,000ft of climbing.  The route had some Tour of California climbs like Palomar and Cole Grade.  Nothing like hitting some of the epic climbs.  Palomar took a little over an hour and lived up to it's reputation having over 4,000ft of climbing.  The grade was steeper than Mt Lemmon in Tucson, but is was much shorter.  Not that a 12 mile climb is short, but Lemmon takes over 2hrs and is 26 miles long.  My power meter is man down, but working backwards from James' power stats, I am pretty sure I surpassed all prior sustained power readings.  For reference, on Palomar I held an avg wattage for over an hour that was higher than my 20min max from last season.  Nice!  Trevor hit a couple Mission Bay open water swims with me.  He is a better swimmer than me and always teaches me a lot.  We worked on swimming on the hip.  Feet suck.  I'll say it again.  Feet suck.  Practice swimming on the hip and it'll change your life....or just your swim time.  I did some other solo workouts while in San Diego.  Nice place.  Not as convenient to train as my little slice of training paradise in Mesa, but not bad.

 

Now back in Phoenix, I have a couple of workouts tonight (swim) and tomorrow (3hr zone 2 ride) prior to heading up to Show Low in the afternoon.  I will get a short swim at the race venue (6,500ft elevation) and then head to a buddy's cabin just up the road from the race course.  Sunday is the race.  Super looking forward to it.  Then on Wednesday, I head of to Idaho for the Xterra Northwest Championship race where I have some Vegas make-up to take care of.  I checked out the course profile today (http://www.adventuresportsweek.com/userfiles//XTERRA%20Bike%20Profile(1).jpg) and I have to say I am a bit disappointed.  I was hoping for a lot more climbing...like 2x-3x as much.  I know climbs do exist there, but for whatever reason the route just doesn't hit them.  I am certain the course will have plenty of challenges, but there's big time to be had on big climbs!  The run looks like it might have some steep stuff on it, so that's good.  I'll be pre-riding etc in a couple of days, so the truth will be known.