Hello all,

I may be about to ask the dumbest questions in the history of CR, but here I go....

After doing the Noosa HM, I'm looking for something to aim for. I find I train a lot better if I have a sport or an event as motivation. Problem is, we live about 200km from Rockhampton in a small community with no sports facilities or teams of any description. The nearest public pool is 120km away. There's a tri club in Rockhampton where we often go for our days off (we normally get every second weekend off) and this club has 375m/10k/2k and 750m/10k/5k tri events very regularly over summer.

The running part would be easy as I'm still doing 30ks or so most weeks. I have a decent mountain bike that I could train on (racer isn't an option on the roads here) and an old crappy racer I could use. But with zero swim training I'm a bit uncertain! I can swim ok - having not done any swimming for ages I did a 1k in about 22min as recovery after the HM which I realise is crap, but I don't quickly drown, and have weights at home.

My long winded questions are - for such short distances would a decent MTB be a better option than a crappy old racer? And, would the whole thing be entirely pointless without a pool to train in?

Not dumb questions, very interesting questions.

With the bike, assuming that the race is on the road, it would have to be a very nice mtb and a very, very crappy racer for the mtb to be faster than the racer. The resistance of the tyres makes the biggest difference and an mtb will usually have much fatter and softer tyres. The only provisio is if you are literally never going to train on the racer, it makes it a bit tricky. For a 20k ride you do want a bike you know is comfortable and you can run after riding.

With the swim, it sounds like you would have no trouble making the distance, even without any training. Also the swim is a relatively small component of both events. You probably won't have the fastest swim split of the day, but so what?

In summary, go for it!

I remember meeting CR ironpo (trout) from Bright at Walhalla the year before last (50k course record holder), and from memory I think lives at least 100kms away from a pool and he has represented Aust in triathlon.

Might be worthwhile sending him a pm.

If you can swim 22 minutes for a km in the pool, you probably won't be the slowest either. Certainly nothing too crap about 22 minutes. Just try to have a training swim when you do have the opportunity.

I'm with MissZ, go for it.

As for which bike is the fastest, next time you can try them out on the sealed road, ride the same 5km course on each bike and find out. Time will tell, so to speak.

Best of luck with it, Melruns, I'm sure you will have a lot of fun.

I did 22:57 for 1k on Sunday, that split was good for 211th out of 300.
I was quite happy with that

I think that technique is really important in swimming, (of course including fitness and strength) its made heaps of difference to my speed in the pool. So unless you have great technique when ever you do get near a pool, see if you can book a coach. What I do is study heaps of you-tube clips, just enter hacket or thorpe or I can post some.

For strength try working on muscles needed for swimming like triceps and lats.

This swimming site has lots of good tips, but you will need to do a lot of searching as some threads go back a while, you can spend a lot of time there, a bit like here really.

http://forums.usms.org/

Entirely possible even if you rarely get near a pool, just that the fresher you are getting out of the pool, or ocean, means the better you are for the bike and run overall. I found that I spent a lot of time thinking about my technique or checking technique in a mirror, don't need to be in a pool for that!

At the pool I see the same people with the same poor technique going at the same pace, I would like to say to them they are wasting so much of their training time, but you can't.

And just keep in mind that triathlons are not held in a pool, and ocean/open water swimming is quite different to laps of a pool.

Good luck!

Hi Melruns
i'm also of the belief that the lack of access to swimming is a non issue for you - unless you are wanting to win a big triathlon. I don't do any swim training, maybe 5-6 times in the last couple of week sif i get the chance. I did the gold coast half IM as my first tri in '06 (1.9k) and i hadn't been near a pool for 5 years before that. I did 39 mins and was still only 2/3rds of the way back in the field.
I've done about 10 tris now and the most i did for swimming was 6 session before Mooloolaba this year. I did 30:01 for the 1500m and was about half way in the field. For me, the race starts after i get out of the water. i would like to train more for the swim of coorse but i don't especially enjoy it, seem to find it hard to fit in and thus prefer to focus on running.
i would focus a lot more on the cycling as i notice the people in front of me have 2-3 mins faster swimming, often similar or slower runs times, but they are 5 to 20 mins faster on the bike, even for an Oly distance (40k).
very doable in short - go for it!!
PH

No. Not even close.

You'll have to come up with something a lot thicker than that!

Thanks for all the encouragement everyone!

I think the swim is done in a pool but the website doesn't specifically say. I'm giggling at the idea of looking at my swim style in a mirror. I'm pretty sure I don't actually have a swim style! I guess I can try to replicate the upper body fatigue with doing some bike training straight after weights. It will be interesting to compare the 5ks at the end of a 750m swim and 10k bike to the last 5 ks of a HM. Or maybe I should just do the short course to start with.

This winter I've been focussed on Melb Mara so haven't done any swimming since my last tri in March. Last week I went for a swim and swam 1km with do drama. I still had technique, and from all the running certainly had a reasonable fitness level. The only thing I lacked was upper body strength so had sore muscles the following day. Based on that I'd say up to sprint distance (750m swim) you'd be fine.

One word of warning though. Don't use the gym and weight training as an alternative to swimming. I did this one winter and when I got back into the pool the muscles I'd built up totally destroyed my technique.

Hi there,

I agree with mizz Z - mountain bikes are much slower than racers - mostly because of the width of the wheel and it's resistance on the road.

That being said, I've only been riding my mountain bike so far, and used it in a Tri - I just changed my MTB tires to slick ones - made a hell of a difference to my times - much faster than knobblys.

If you can swim a 22 minute km and a run a half marathon, you will be able to complete 750/10/5 quite comfortably.

I would even go as far as suggesting that you would be able to complete a with an ODT (1.5/40/10) with a just a few more bike miles in your legs.

Geez, it would be a slow 1.5 swim, and the idea of a 40k ride !!!!!

I'll keep the weight training thing in mind Dave.

My MTB is an Avanti Ventura and the racer is a very old Apollo Vitesse, any thoughts?

Hi Melruns

Your sign off could be...

"Instant swimmer, just add water!"


(Sorry, couldn't help it)

I WISH I could swim 1k in 20 mins - try 500m in 20 mins

Seriouly though, I wouldn't worry. I only learnt to swim last year, hadn't swum in about 7 months and went to the pool last night - still just as crap as when I last went but at least I wasn't any crapper

I reckon you'll be fine, with your running and cycling you'll have a good base of aerobic fitness, OK, it's not swim-fitness but it still counts for something.

Crapper, heehee! I've been doing a few rides around here on the MTB, but it was dark when I finished work last night so I did about half an hour on the windtrainer. I would much rather run, what an evil device that thing is!

Oh, and the 22 min only came about because there were 2 old ladies in the lanes next to me swimming pretty fast, making me feel very slow indeed. Maybe I should qualify my assessment of the crappiness of 22 min - I used to swim quite regularly with much better swimmers so kind of got the idea that it was crap.

In one of the recent mens health magazines there was an article with a full workout on how to work your swimming specific muscles when you can't make it to the pool.

I've just done a search around the house but can't find which one it's in.

Perhaps email the magazine and ask. Could be a good start. Maybe try make a squad session once a month just to help with any stroke deficiencies.

Conor