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Barry-Roubaix 2023 – Race Report (and thoughts on Garmin Power Guide)

Roubaix in Barry

A week after Paris-Roubaix weekend, a bit less famous, yet way more crowded, race starts in West Michigan. Called Barry-Roubaix, and claiming to be a most popular gravel cycling event in the US, it attracts gravel cyclists from all of the Midwest region.

Held in March in previous years and infamous for its unpredictably bad weather (and gravel) conditions, it was moved to mid-April this year and attracted almost 4,000 cyclists to the town of Hastings (population 7,500), where they raced in 100, 62, 36 and 18 mile distances on the rolling hills and gravel of the Barry County.

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Adidas Super Shoe – a quick review of Adizero Adios Pro

Adidas Adizero Adios Pro

Announced and made available to a small audience in June 2020, Adidas Adizero Adios Pro was made publicly available on September 14, 2020. With five carbon rods and a carbon fiber plate under the runner’s heel, Adizero Adios Pro is Adidas’ response to high tech shoes from Nike, Hoka, and others.

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How to meet your marathon time goal?

Marathon pacers

If you did all the hard training, there still can be a lot of things that can stand in your way in reaching your race goals, like inaccurate GPS (due to tall buildings) preventing you to keep the steady pace or a simple lack of motivation at the hardest moments.

To make sure you did your best in keeping your anticipated race pace is to run with pacers (sometimes called pacemakers) – a bunch of guys and girls who will make sure you will arrive at the finish line in a certain time, given you will be able to keep up with them.

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How fast should you be in each IRONMAN® leg to finish in less than 10 hours?

Triathlete cycling

Let’s take three IRONMAN races that are considered to be the fastest and analyze the performance of athletes who manage to finish it sub-10 (times 9:55 to 9:59) in 2019.

tl;dr: you can be (relatively) slow in one discipline and still finish sub-10, so Anything is possible™ 🙂

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Sharing your Training Plan from Garmin Connect

Garmin Calendar

If you’re a busy athlete (and if you’re a triathlete, you’re busy for sure), chances are your friends are always wondering when do you have some free time for a meeting, going out or doing something that does not typically involve swimming, cycling, or running.

If you would like to give them a rough overview of your training schedule, and if you’re using Garmin Connect platform, here’s a short instruction on how to expose your training plan to anyone interested what are you doing on given Sunday afternoon (hint: you’re most probably having your long run 🙂

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Chicago Marathon 2019: Fast Race in the Windy City

Chicago marathon 2019

The Chicago Marathon usually held mid-October, is one of the six marathons from the Abbott World Marathon Majors series. It is one of the easiest to get into, with ballot chances close to 50% and generous qualifying times – to qualify for 2020, it was 3:20 for men, 3:50 for women in the 40-49 age group.

Its course is remarkably flat, and albeit it may be really windy, you can use it for your own good if applying smart racing tactics and set your Personal Best, earn a good amount of points for the AbbottWMM Wanda Age Group World Rankings, and get one star closer to the coveted Six-Star Finisher medal.

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Maintaining Running Fitness Off-Season – The Plan

recovery training plan

When the racing season comes to the very end, A-races are done and post-race beers (or Colas) are all consumed, every athlete usually asks himself a question — what to do with that all free time that is now left from training? A lucky few may have their next season plans already, but even the most determined athletes need some rest and recovery.

Generally, it’s recommended to take a week or two of complete rest (hey, even Eliud Kipchoge takes three weeks off) but then you usually start making plans for the upcoming year. If your A-race is quite far ahead (say, 30 weeks or even more) or you just want to maintain your so-hard-earned running form until thoughts of next challenge pop up, you may want to fill this gap with some running activities. And you need a plan for that.

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Generali Berliner Halbmarathon 2019: Race Recap

Berlin Half-marathon

Berlin Half, Berlin Half-marathon, Generali Berliner Halbmarathon – doesn’t matter how you call it, this 21K race is a great opportunity to start your racing season. Held in Germany’s capital and sharing a big part of the course with one of the World Marathon Majors – Berlin Marathon – it is supposed to be flat, fast, very well organized and usually in good weather, as in the middle of April spring is already in full swing in Berlin. That’s one of the reasons why it’s sold out as early as February, so better sign up well in advance, get the training plan and start preparing.

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Rowing for Runners: Winter Cross-training Specials

Concept2 Model D undergoing firmware upgrade

It’s winter for a while in the northern hemisphere, however, we still have more than one long month left. As we all know, winter is usually not the favorite time of runners. Even if you are not afraid of below-water-freezing temperatures and cold rains, there are plenty of facts that can ruin your training. Deep snow can impact your intervals and icy countryside roads or city sidewalks are very dangerous even for experienced trail runners. If you’re training for races which happen to be in spring, like Boston Marathon, Paris Marathon or even a Berlin Half (or Halb, as they call it), you don’t have many options but to do some training indoors. And if thoughts about treadmill make you sick, you should try rowing, as there are some good reasons for that. 

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