The week before

We made it to Nice in about 18 hours of driving, mostly overnight. It wasn't too bad. I found out along the way that smoking alleviates my coughing, so I figured what the hell, I might as well. So lets take the inventory. It's a week before race, I have a cold, runny nose, cough, the bike frame has potential for dumping me at 40 mph zipping down the mountain and I started smoking. Perhaps I should start drinking, too. So yeah, we had a bottle of wine or two. To my credit I extinguished the smoking habit pretty quickly and didn't touch any alcohol for at least 4 days before the race.

What I did instead was to go and check out the run course and did a nice, easy 9 mile run on Monday, just to get a feel for it. It actually felt good, I kept 8'40" pace and clocked the heart at 162 average. A bit faster on both counts but I figured I should be able to do 9'09" at about 155 beats. Which, of course never happens after you ride 112 miles on a devil's instrument.

I figured I need to do something with the bike gears. Either take the chance and keep on the nice, light, Titanium 11/23 and hope I can make the hills or put on the hefty, solid steel 13/26 and bitch and moan later on. Decisions, decisions.

So on Tuesday I glued on my training tubulars, kept on the 11/23 and went to test the bike route on Wednesday late morning (getting up early was not one of my habits at the time).

The countryside and the views are just phenomenal, it was worth the trip just to see this stuff because I sure as hell won't have time during the race. My Motorola phone isn't exactly the perfect picture taking tool but it did relatively decent job here.





Somewhere down there is Nice


And here is the holy grail I came to see. I just climbed 1120 meters.




I felt good enough so I came to a conclusion that the hills aren't anything I haven't seen before and decided that I'll just keep the 11/23 for the race. I do have the legs to push through this and this year I trained a bit more than 70 miles total.

So I rode back, this time mostly downhill, listening for the carbon croaking sound. It didn't happen, the frame held well and at the end of the day I found out that I rode for about 6 hours and put in 140k. Probably not very smart, considering the race is on Sunday. Oh well, I am still not 100% so it really doesn't matter. At this time I adjusted my goals to survive the swim and just do better time than before, on the bike front I wanted to pass at least one French and one Italian in my age group and it would be really nice to run the whole marathon if I make it that far.

Nothing exciting happened since then, I got my usual chocolate craving but this time it didn't last a whole week before the race, it kicked in sometime on Thursday. With 3 days left, I went to swim part of the course a couple of times and in general spent time with my family. We went to the beach just about every day and interestingly enough, myself and the little kid were the only ones spared sunburn.

I packed my bike and run bags, nothing unusual, although I did change my nutrition a little bit. Some time ago I ran across Ruth's Hemp Bars (search Amazon) and realized they are about as good of a nutrition as I can lay my hands on. Small, tasty, about 200 calories, mostly from fat. It doesn't get much better.

I also bought a huge Profile Design aerobars mounted bottle - this one has 2 compartments, one for water, the other for the sports drinks. I am done with frame or seat mounted bottles, this stuff is really nice.

I checked in my bags and the bike on Saturday afternoon, let the air out of tires since it was quite hot. I had nice diner (I was eating a lot of carbohydrates this time, not as much meat as in previous races, it just felt right for some reason. Listen to your body is still my guiding principle), drank adequately but not too much and went to bed early.