Given to Tri

I was pretty bummed out when I had to pull out of the Hole Half Marathon at the last minute last year. It’s a fun fall race and a great way to close out my season before winter sets in, so I look forward to it every year, but with last year’s Fish Creek Fire sending the AQI into the stratosphere—235 on race day—I really had no choice but to skip it.

We’ve been much more fortunate this year with a low-key fire season and good air quality most of the summer. I was once again looking forward to completing this race—not just to close out my season properly this time, but because it’s also the first time I would finish all three of my local half marathons. It feels like a neat little personal milestone.

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Last year I surprised myself on the run at Ironman 70.3 Coeur d’Alene—I came out of T2 like a bat out of hell and it ended up being my fastest run split in a 70.3 to date. There were probably multiple reasons for that, including the shortened swim, but I think one factor was the Grand Teton Half Marathon, which I had raced two weeks prior. That was also my fastest half marathon to date, and I suspect that strong run kicked my running fitness up a notch or two just in time for the race.

This season, I’m putting that hypothesis to the test by racing not one, but two half marathons before this year’s edition of Ironman 70.3 Coeur d’Alene. The first one was the Jackson Hole Half Marathon two weeks ago, so without further ado, here’s a quick race report about the Grand Teton Half Marathon, my last running race before heading back to Idaho later this month.

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This will be a short one: I just raced this year’s edition of the Jackson Hole Half Marathon, the first of the three half marathons organized in Jackson Hole every year (the other two being the Grand Teton Half Marathon in June and the Hole Half in September).

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Runna acquired by Strava. Disappointing news. I like Runna—it’s the most TrainerRoad-like running app I’ve used, and Strava is, well… they forbid their customers from disagreeing with their “business decisions” in their community forum, which probably tells you how much they care about their customers’ opinions. In the announcement post on Reddit, Runna’s CEO says they’ll continue to operate independently both as a team and as a product, but nothing in the history of corporate acquisitions makes me think that is anything but temporary. I hope I’m wrong. (Via The Verge.)

Send Runna workouts to Zwift using Intervals.icu. I’ve been using Runna since last fall for all my run training, and so far it’s been great, except for the fact that it doesn’t sync its workouts to Zwift, which is where I do all my treadmill running in the winter. I’ve been told that’s coming soon, but in the meantime, I’ve been using Intervals.icu as a middleman to send Runna workouts to Zwift. The trick is to rewrite Runna’s workouts into Interval.icu’s workout builder plain text format. It’s a bit laborious, so to make that easier, I created a custom GPT that can do that—just paste the workout description from Runna (or just upload a screenshot of it), paste the output into a new workout in Intervals.icu, and presto, it should sync to Zwift.

Automatic treadmill incline control may be coming soon to Zwift. According to Zwift Insider, it’s been in testing for a few months now for a small set of Zwift subscribers using the Wahoo Kickr Run treadmill, and now there’s a support article about it. Will they support other smart treadmills, like the Technogym MyRun? Who knows, but Zwift’s response, quoted in Zwift Insider’s article, makes me hopeful that they will. (If anyone at Zwift is reading this, I’d love to beta test that when the time comes.)

Kate and I visited Mexico City for the first time in 2015. We were here for the holidays and to visit family, but one of the things I remember from that trip was standing in the middle of Paseo de la Reforma on New Year’s Eve during some kind of race, photographing the runners. I had no idea what race that was and didn’t particularly care—I just thought it was a cool thing to photograph, since many of the runners were in costume, such as this guy dressed as El Chapulín Colorado.

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One last race this year. I’m spending Christmas and New Year’s in Mexico City, so what better way to close out the year than a chill 12 km race around Chapultepec? It’s just what I need after a couple of months of exclusively indoor training. I only regret not arriving there in time for this Sonic the Hedgehog 10K on Sunday—I need that medal.

Well, I had to skip the Hole Half. I look forward to this race every year—a chill fall half marathon at the base of the Tetons is usually a great way to close out my season before winter sets in, but at this moment the AQI in Jackson Hole is 235, firmly in the “very unhealthy” range. Instead, I’m reading a study on the impact of air pollution on running performance to reassure myself I made the right decision.

An update on my ankle. It’s been a little over a week since my ankle injury at the Wild 15K and I just came back from my ortho appointment. Everything looks better than I feared last week, X-rays look clean and my examination went well. It’s still a little swollen with some pain, so I’ve been told to schedule some PT, wear compression socks to help with the swelling, and maybe tape my ankle for additional stability while running. The biggest question on my mind was “will I make things worse if I go for a run?” and the answer is no; I’ve been given the all-clear to start running again. Which is great, because I threw caution into the wind and ran 11 km on the treadmill on Sunday with no issues. We’re so back.

Last summer I learned about the Rendezvous Mountain Hill Climb, a trail running race in Jackson Hole that’s considered “the most demanding hill climb running event in the West.” It looked like a fascinating challenge, with 1,250 m of elevation gain over 9.8 km, and until last year, it had never been done in under an hour.

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A couple weeks ago I raced the Grand Teton Half Marathon, the first of the three local half marathons in Jackson Hole this year. I wasn’t planning on writing a race report for it because it was a quick and uneventful race, but since I didn’t get to write one for Ironman 70.3 Boulder, which I had to skip due to COVID, I might as well do it.

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This year’s race season didn’t go the way I hoped at all. After a strong start at Ironman 70.3 St. George in June, I failed to finish Ironman Coeur d’Alene and had to drop out of the Echo Triathlon in July to deal with my knee pain. My make-up race, Ironman Canada, was canceled at the last minute due to the wildfires in British Columbia. After all that, I was looking forward to this year’s Hole Half Marathon, so I could at least get one more race in the books this year and finish the season on a high note. It went pretty well, so without further ado, here’s my last race report of the year.

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Recently, I’ve been debating if it’s worth it to keep writing race reports for running races because I’ve done a few now, running is not my specialty, and I simply treat them as part of my triathlon training. But this one is a little special because I podiumed for the first time in my life, so here it goes.

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Last fall I started shopping for a treadmill so I could continue training over the winter for the races I have scheduled this year (Ironman 70.3 St. George in May, Ironman Coeur d’Alene in June, and Echo Triathlon in July), and after much consideration, I settled on the $3,750 Technogym MyRun. I don’t usually write reviews of things I buy, but while researching treadmills, I didn’t see many reviews of this particular model, so I thought it’d be worthwhile to share my experience with it, if nothing else as a cautionary tale for others who might be considering buying one.

TL;DR: It’s an awesome treadmill backed by an excellent iPad app, but unfortunately marred by Technogym’s abysmal customer support, which makes it hard to recommend.

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This will likely be a short one: Today I raced the somewhat confusingly-named Hole Half Marathon, which is entirely unrelated to the Jackson Hole Half Marathon I did earlier in the summer. It went fine.

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Today I raced in my second B race this year, the Jackson Hole Half Marathon, as part of my prep for Ironman 70.3 Arizona in October. I went in with a few goals:

• Test my nutrition strategy.
• Test how the pace suggested by Stryd felt.
• See if I could actually pace myself properly.

Timewise, I didn’t have any specific goals. Anything under two hours would have been fine, with 1:45 as a stretch goal.

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