Thoughts before my 1st Duathlon

My 1st duathlon is 3 days away. I have to say that I'm very excited and anxious at the same time. The sport of duathlon is something very new to me, even if I've watched videos and read articles on duathlons and triathlons for quite a while now. Just the concept of checking-in your bike or planning your transition strategy excites me. It would be interesting to see how I'll fare on Sunday's race. I'll probably be goofing it up during transitions, and staying much on the side of the road during the bike leg to let others pass. Of course, I'm first and foremost a runner so I'm counting on the 2 runs that will sandwich the bike leg to improve my race time. Overall, or probably on run1 and the bike leg, I'll take the pace just on the upper end of my comfort zone then give it my all on run2. No pressure as any finish time on this race will be a PR. Definitely that'll be a good starting point for improvement in future duathlons. We endurance junkies are only meant to go faster anyway, right?

As expected, after my stint with biking in the late 1990s, hitting the pedals is sweeter the second time around. My training partner, @lingerboy, was right: cycling gives you that different high as you glide through pavement or asphalt with S-P-E-E-D. The intricacies of bike handling and maintenance adds to the thrill as well ---not to mention the ever tempting thought of upgrading this or that part, hehe.

Biking has been grand that I've been looking forward to it on training mornings instead of the runs. Don't worry, I'm not leaving running for good (there's still a sub-5 hour 42k to deal with). It's just that I love the way how biking has spiced up my daily cardio workout needs.

Last August to mid October I started gaining weight again, probably due to my laziness in updating my MyFitnessPal calorie counter and the additional 2 slices of toast with Nutella every morning (yummeh!). As a result, I gained 5lbs on my birthday week. "This has got to stop," I told myself. So I reluctantly started calorie counting again. The first 3 days were the same as when I started it last January: just put in all food that you take and don't worry about going beyond the limit. The important thing is that I was building the habit of keying my food intake again to that tool.

After several weeks, I'm happy to say that I've lost 4lbs since then.  Hooray for calorie-counting! That means that I'm 1lb away from my July racing weight. My knees will be thankful for it once they pound the Subic pavement in Sunday's race.

I'm hopeful for a good race on Sunday. I believe proper pacing based on keen observation of my current effort and nutrition intake during the race will be key.

This is gonna be fun.