Indoor Triathlons - Surprisingly Fun!

Last Friday (Feb. 1st), I took part in my first indoor triathlon.  These are put on by a local company, Race Day Events, LLC.  I will say, for being a 40 min. Friday night workout, it was tons of fun.  Who would think swimming indoors, riding on those awful indoor spin bikes, and running on the dreadmill could be so much fun.  Not this guy...

I had been wanting to do one of these for awhile.  Since I work part time for RDE, I thought now would be as good a time as any, plus it would be a good indicator of where my fitness is currently at.

My plan for the swim was to just cruise...wait, before I get into that I should probably outline how these events are structured.  Its basically a timed leg for each discipline (swim, bike and of course run).  The person who goes the furthest distance in each leg, sets the curve and gets 100 points.  Your score is based on the highest distance with points rewarded accordingly.  The legs are broken down as follows: 10 min swim, 20 min spin, 10 min run.  You get about 10 min in between each leg to change etc...

I digress...so the swim. I started off at a steady cruise pace and built into a good rhythm.  I managed to get in 14 laps (700 yards) for the 10 minutes.  This came out to ~1:25/100, which I was happy with.  I came out of the pool feeling great.  The spin portion is another story.  If you've ever ridden one of those spin class bikes you know what I'm talking about.  The seats are huge and squishy, the adjust-ability is 'meh' at best, and everyone is stuck with the same resistance.  This means it becomes a spin fest.  Since I was hoping to set the curve for this one I knew I had to spin really fast for the 20 min, but didn't know how fast.  I hit 130-135 rpm's and held it there.  This sucked.  It was incredibly uncomfortable, mainly because the set up was so different from my actual bikes.  I also noticed that if I hit 140 the computer would shut off, so I had to keep backing off.  On a positive note, my legs felt fine from a muscular stand point and I did have the highest spin distance : )

Total distance on bike was 12.7 km, whatever that means.  Not sure how to compare that to an actual outdoor ride.

Knowing that the run was only 10 min, I planned on running it relatively hard, but not doing anything too crazy.  Once I was warmed up, I set the incline to 1% and started out at 9.5 mph (~6:20 pace).  Each minute I bumped the speed up a tad until I was around a 5:52.  This still felt pretty comfortable so by the end I was holding about a 5:07 pace for the last 2 minutes.  I ended up running 1.67 miles in the 10 min, which was also the highest run of the night.  If there was one thing I would do differently here I would just start around a pace of 5:40 and hold it for the 10 min.  

All in all it was a solid workout.  I may start doing something similar to this to get a good benchmark on a semi regular basis.  The beautiful thing is this is something anyone can do, on their schedule, at whatever effort level they feel like.  Try it out sometime!