Day 1 - Camp Kia Kaha @ Challenge Roth

• Bike a lap of the Challenge Roth Course 85-90km
• Run to Rothsee (lake) ~3km, swim 30-40mins with a little race specific work, run back

After a terrible sleep, where I woke at 1am and didn’t really get back to sleep, I was excited to be riding today. Firstly, I wanted to familiarise myself with the course but also see how IM power related to speed.  The plan was roughly to alternate 30mins easy’ish / 30mins IM effort.

The team at Challenge Roth have done well placing signage out on the entire bike course which made life easier as there are quite a lot of turns. Not to my surprise speed was high today, the hills were similar to what I remembered. It will take concentration and courage to keep speed up through the many villages we pass through. What was different today was the wind. It was nothing severe but enough to kill speed especially on my second ironman effort.

When we started the IM efforts power was coming easy but HR & rpe execution were just a tickle too high. I’m putting it down to a lack of sleep and jetlag – fingers crossed. Average speed for the IM efforts was 36.93km/hr (36km/hr is 5hr pace – I need to be ~4:55 to stand a good chance at sub 9hrs).  So I can’t complain really. We had a nice group that stuck together for the duration of the ride with Murray “the holy hammer” Lapworth, Chris “Jetstream” Docherty from Lincoln (UK), Thierry “DLS” Bessede from Geveva, “Robo” Seth Bitting from Canada (the man responsible for the 12hr training rule being brought into Epic Camps) and of course Scott “the terminator” Molina.

There are two key climbs on the Roth course with the first out of Greding @40km into the course which is 5.2km in length @ 2.5% but the first 1km is @ 6.5%. The other very famous climb is the solarberg which is ~1km @ 5% - this is the climb where you see the huge crowds 10 people deep. Chris had his jetstreams on full noise going up the Greding climb when I was planning on riding easy so Murray and I dropped off. It wasn’t a bad move in hindsight as not too far over the top is a rather technical descend with some off camber hairpin corners. When I watched lsdt yesrs race Frodeno actually went off the road on one of these corners.

After the ride and some down time we ran ~3km to the Rothsee, swam ~2km with some race starts but mostly steady swimming then ran back to the hotel. This camp will be a bit different with more downtime where we can chill out and relax.

Bike file; http://tpks.ws/T3x1a