Did I say I was hoping to finish in under 6 hours?
I meant under 7 hours, of course!
My time for 180km was 6:45.20.
That doesn’t sounds too good, but there was a brutal wind on the day - the entire up-hill leg from Cromwell up to Lake Hawea (about 65 kms) was into a gusty head wind - so in those conditions I’m actually very happy with that time.
During my training, and also on race day, I used a Garmin Forerunner 405 to track some data about how I was going.
These graphs come from the Garmin Connect website, where you can upload data from the watch and map your rides or runs, plus produce graphs of the other data.
Speed:
You can see how my speed was slowed when I turned into the wind.
Elevation:
There were some nasty climbs in the last 50kms - just when my legs were more-or-less toast - which seemed much bigger than they look on this graph!
Heart Rate:
Maybe I went a bit hard in the first couple of hours?
Cadence (number of pedals per minute):
You can see here how I coasted a bit more in the last hour, but overall I managed to keep the pedals turning pretty consistently through the whole ride.
Player:
One nice feature they have added recently is a player, which gives you an interactive replay of a ride or a run (click the image below to view):
Even if you’re not interested in the content check out the site design. I think it’s one of the best new sites I’ve seen in a while: simple navigation, very little verbiage and a crisp, clean design which gets right out of the way and lets the content make all the noise.
Our team (Mah na mah na) finished in 63rd place out of 116 teams in 11:43.47.
Challenge Wanaka is a fantastic event, which I recommend to anybody (registration for 2010 is open now).
It’s nice to have ticked it off!